American Cinematographer - February 2008 - (Page 42) Checking Dailies Far From the Lab sent to the production office to be uploaded to an Internet storage site, where the dailies colorist could access and view them with a Display Manager-calibrated monitor. (Today, all good transfer houses and labs use Kodak’s system.) Even before we started doing emulsion testing and hair-andmakeup tests, I was shooting a colorcalibrated chart that I developed with Marcelo Siqueira, ABC, a visual-effects supervisor in São Paulo, Brazil. It not only contains a blackand-white scale in 10 f-stops range, but also scales of black-and-white, RGB and CMY in 100 strips to use with scanners that use logarithm encoding instead of linear. Midnight Transfer was chosen Unfortunately, on Love in the Time of Cholera, we discovered that transmitting dailies from London to a TV channel in Cartagena would not only cost too much, but would also be too complicated. Then Greg Barrett at Midnight Transfer put me in contact with Wynn Petersen at Digital Dailies, a Los Angeles company that was already transmitting dailies over the Internet. Wynn kindly sent some samples in 720x640 resolution (DVD standard); the images were small, and on my monitor, the resolution was not acceptable to check focus. Upon my recommendation, Greg and Wynn developed an algorithm that would compress the HD original files in 1920x1080 Windows the production bought two more monitors like mine and gave one to the director and the other to the producers. We would watch dailies after work in the comfort of our local accommodations. Around the time we reached the middle of our shooting schedule, a friend called my attention to a new camera on the market, the Leica D-Lux 3. This very portable and inexpensive camera — with an f2.8 zoom lens, 10-megapixel sensor files and a brilliant 2.8" display with an aspect ratio of 16:9 — proved to be a great tool to simulate the latitude of the negative when using the exposure values used on the film camera. By the end of our shoot, five members of our crew had bought a Leica D-Lux 3. While shooting another recent project, the anamorphic feature Nights in Rodanthe, in Wilmington, North Carolina, I encountered the same challenges. To shoot our scene-reference digital stills, I trained an intern as I had done before. This time, Ricardo Figueroa, Kodak’s regional digital and hybrid director, assisted us, providing recommendations on ways we could improve our procedures. We used a Nikon D200 instead of a D100 because of its larger LCD monitor and its 10megapixel resolution RAW files. Look Manager Version 2.2 plug-ins supported this generation of files for this camera as well as the Canon 30D. A Nikon f2.8 zoom lens was used on exterior/interior day scenes, and f2.0 lenses were used on low-key shots to avoid digital noise in the shadows. We used Technicolor Los Angeles to process our negative and transfer our dailies. At that time, Technicolor was providing a service called “Dailies on Demand,” whereby HD-dailies files were downloaded to external hard drives and sent to a location via FedEx. Because we would be shooting on the Outer “The assistance of an intern is fundamental to the use of Look Manager … [and] an intern who is given the opportunity to work side-by-side with the director of photography without being involved in the hard work of the camera assistants might view it as a privilege.” to produce our dailies because of its proximity to the editing room. My challenge was how to get our dailies back in Colombia, since we were so far from the lab. My first idea was to transmit them via satellite, an approach I used while shooting God Is Brazilian (2003) on the outskirts of the Amazon jungle. The post house we were using on that production had a satellite hub, and they would use a proper receiver, a digital monitor and common TV antennas because we used a frequency band close to TV broadcast frequencies. We received sound and images in SD digital format, our technician would record them on DigiBeta tape overnight, and we would watch dailies first thing in the morning. That was great back in 2001. 42 February 2008 Media file format (.wma), so one hour of dailies that would take approximately 20GB of storage were compressed to 2GB. The images would fill my 24" monitor at a great resolution to check for focus; of course, the color space became a bit compromised, but it was very acceptable nonetheless. On location, you care more about focus details than color accuracy, a matter that can be resolved later in the DI. To minimize the download time to get the 2GB files over the Internet, we used a fiber-optic telephone line that was on the production-office building. A production assistant took care of it, and the file was downloaded to small 2GB flash drives that were then distributed. The system was a success, and soon,
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