American Cinematographer - March 2010 - 78

Post Focus I Cinemascan Streamlines Shutter Island By Patricia Thomson The problem is a familiar one: How do you edit without becoming too attached to the look of your dailies? If a film has a customized color palette, like Shutter Island, and your director has a year-long editorial process, like Martin Scorsese, the ideal would be to introduce color-accurate footage at the very beginning of the process, so the director and the editor can cut, live with and fine-tune that material. Scorsese’s post team has been chasing this goal for years. With Shutter Island they finally attained it, thanks to EFilm’s new Cinemascan system. “With Cinemascan, we digitally capture dailies in 3K, down-rez them to 2K and then keep them in the same film color space we use for the final digital grade, so everything stays true, and all the color changes and iterations that you use from dailies to final delivery apply to that finished film delivery,” says Michael Cooper, EFilm’s vice president of business development. Shutter Island was the first feature film to utilize Cinemascan, and for Scorsese’s team, it was the culmination of an evolution that began with The Aviator, when they switched from print dailies to high-definition-video dailies. “That changed the ballgame,” says Rob Legato, Scorsese’s visual-effects supervisor on The Aviator, The Departed and Shutter Island. “With HD dailies, you’re no longer doing test screenings on film; you’re previewing on HD.” With Cinemascan, an Arri-scanned 2K file is stored in EFilm’s tape robot, a near-line storage system, and it remains pristine. Everything the colorist subsequently does is stored as a separate file of metadata; this metadata rides along with each shot and eventually accompanies the EDL. “Metadata is very robust,” says Cooper. “It’s not one bit of data, but any number of changes that can happen in the DI suite, including contrast and color, the tracking of information, all the intra-frame changes and all the matting.” When the colorist makes changes, the Cinemascan system does not overwrite the earlier data — it saves both iterations. “The cinematographer might call and say, ‘Can you print that up a quarter point?’” says Cooper. “We’ll make that change and send it back, but we maintain the original metadata, too. That way, if that cinematographer comes in to do the DI and says, ‘Yeah, I did have you print that up, but we like the darker one better,’ we can access the earlier version instead.” The raw file and the metadata are connected by a “marrygrade,” a flag that allows one to find the other (i.e., marries the two). “When we make changes to the images, or the editor makes changes editorially, it instantaneously flows through — no one has to move that metadata around,” says Cooper. Shutter Island’s post path began at DuArt Film and Video, which processed the negative. The neg then went to EFilm, where 78 March 2010 rushes were scanned at 3K and then down-sampled to 2K. An HDCam-SR master (for the color-correction) and a standard-definition version (for editor Thelma Schoonmaker, who cuts on a Lightworks system) were output. Scorsese, cinematographer Robert Richardson, ASC and EFilm colorist Yvan Lucas did the color-correction in New York, and the conform and master filmout were done in Los Angeles. Communication between New York and Los Angeles jumped to a new level with Cinemascan technology. Legato notes, “The metadata is a text file, not an image file, so if Marty changed his mind about something, I could remaster a reel in 30 minutes.” When changes needed to be relayed via a secure server, “we’d send a text file containing the new metadata instead of a high-res image file,” says Legato. “It’s such a small file you can literally send it over a dial-up connection. It re-grades the whole thing, and the other party can see the results immediately.” “With Cinemascan, clients in our New York DI suite and clients in our Hollywood DI suite can look at the same images projected and see the exact same changes being made to the 2K files in real time,” says Cooper. “That’s pretty convenient.” Lightiron Commits to File-Based Post Lightiron Digital has opened its doors in Los Angeles, offering a complete range of file-based postproduction services for film, television, Web and advertising media. The new facility currently houses a digital-intermediate grading theater with Quantel 4K Stereoscopic Pablo and Assimilate Scratch color-grading systems, as well as 2K and 4K cinema projectors for both 2-D and 3-D postproduction. The company has already begun expanding the facility to include film scanning and digital cinema packaging services. Founded by brothers Michael and Peter Cioni, the company comprises two divisions: Ironwork provides such services as dailies The Lightiron Digital team (from left): Michael Cioni, Peter Cioni, Chris Peariso, Katie Fellion, Paul Geffre, Matthew Blackshear and Oscar Velasquez. American Cinematographer

American Cinematographer - March 2010

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