American Cinematographer - July 2009 - 60

Post Focus your previews away,” says Eitan Hakami, founder of New York post facility Mega Playground. “You spend time and money on the stock, the conforming and color-correction; you screen it twice; and then you start your DI from scratch.” In 2007, Brown joined Mega Playground as the facility’s chief technology officer. Using Bones as a starting point, he began work on what eventually became the DP Dailies service, a closed post pipeline that includes the Spirit 2K, Bones Dailies, DVS storage solutions, FilmLight’s TrueLight colormanagement tools and the Digital Vision Nucoda Film Master. Negative is scanned as 1920x1080 DPX/Cineon files. “Our Spirit 2K has a data-only interface,” notes Brown. “I don’t like to call it HD because people tend to confuse that with Rec 709, and what you’re actually getting is a 10-bit log RGB file.” He maintains that if a project is shooting 3-perf or 4-perf Super 35mm (for either 1.85:1 or 2.40:1 exhibition), 1920x1080 is only 6-percent different than a full 2K scan. “The economics and efficiency of scanning once can yield significant cost savings in post,” he says. DP Dailies’ custom look-up tables are derived from the one used for Mega Playground’s DI process. The idea is that when a cinematographer is looking at dailies, whether in Rec 709 or P3 color space, he will be seeing the same image that will appear in the DI theater and on film. “I wanted to keep standard calibrations on the post display devices,” says Brown. “That way, we’re not doing oddball calibration on our monitors. As long as you’re in D65 Rec 709 color space, what you see is what you get.” Working in an emulated film space means cinematographers can give printer-light offsets to the dailies Senior colorist Mike Smollin works in Mega Playground’s Digital Vision Nucoda Film Master DI room, part of the facility’s DP Dailies service. DP Dailies System Targets Image Control by Iain Stasukevich When Richard Crudo, ASC published “A Call for Digital Printer Lights” in the September 2006 issue of American Cinematographer, Terry Brown was one of the industry professionals who sat up and took notice. With the arrival of new electronic image-capture technologies and the growing popularity of digital intermediates, the art of cinematography was changing, and cinematographers’ control over their imagemaking process was becoming difficult to maintain. Crudo suggested the dilemma could only be solved by a new universal standard of motion-picture capture, display, post and exhibition. It was a subject with which Brown was quite familiar. At the time, Brown was spearheading the redevelopment of Technicolor’s dailies workflow. “I looked at other digital-dailies systems and noticed that while you can create compelling pictures, it doesn’t really have anything to do with the original exposure on the film and how it would look printed photochemically,” he says. The culmination of his efforts was the joint Technicolor/Grass Valley project Bones Dailies, a resolution-independent turnkey system for scanning, syncing, grading and delivering digital dailies. The integration of the ASC Color Decision List into Bones marked a further step toward standardizing the cinematographer’s vision when the image moves from dailies to the initial stages of the DI process. Even with the CDL, however, the potential exists for a disconnect between the two processes. When film dailies are transferred, it is generally accepted that the resultant media will be used for HD video masters and previews, after which the entire process is started over again for the final grade. It’s expected that once picture is locked, negative selects will be rescanned at a higher resolution for the DI, and that this may happen at a different facility than the one that did the original dailies timing. “Right now, you throw 60 July 2009 Images courtesy of Mega Playground.

American Cinematographer - July 2009

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - July 2009