American Cinematographer - December 2007 - 110

Tomorrow’s Technology ASC Tech Committee Update by Douglas Bankston T he ASC Technology Committee made significant headway this year. Foremost, after two years in development in the Digital Intermediate Subcommittee, the ASC Color Decision List (CDL) version 1.0 is in the process of being published for open implementation. “Acceptance has been pretty much ubiquitous throughout the industry,” notes Curtis Clark, ASC, chair of the Technology Committee. “This truly is a cross-platform data-exchange mechanism for RGB, lift, gain and gamma primary color corrections, although we have renamed lift, gain and gamma to offset, slope and power, respectively, to better define those three functions.” The CDL is a way to move basic color-correction information between applications, meaning image “looks” can be maintained throughout the post process. Through collaboration with vendors, the selected methods of transport for CDL information are via XML, CMX comment field, ALE and Flex files. At the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Expo last April, a number of companies were already touting CDLcompliant systems. Not bad for a five-year-old group of volunteers from various sectors of the motion-picture and television industry. As the Technology Committee proactively addresses digital/film issues that arise with emerging digital technologies, other organizations have taken note. The Producers Guild of America formed its own technology group and is collaborating closely with the ASC’s Workflow Subcommittee to address that aspect of the technology revolution. “We’re not necessarily looking to optimize the infrastructure of your SAN [storage area network] or deal with those kinds of IT issues,” Clark remarks. “The ASC CDL is the linchpin of our approach because we’re looking at ways we can help facilitate maximum control over creative input from cinematographers, directors and production designers and ensure that the integrity of those image ‘look reference’ parameters are maintained throughout the workflow. The ASC CDL functionality also provides a more accessible and flexible opportunity for cinematographers to monitor and effect any look reference changes that might take place at all stages of the workflow, per creative needs and requirements.” The Technology Committee recently formed a Previsualization Subcommittee, which will work in conjunction with the Art Directors Guild. “That subcommittee is charged with the task of understanding the growing importance of previz applications and how the cinematographer should be playing a role in their use,” says Clark. The producers’ and art directors’ guilds are participating in the ASC Camera Subcommittee’s long-gestating Camera Assessment Series (CAS), a repeatable series of shots typical of motion pictures that are impartially designed to show the characteristics and performance of digital cameras available for use in cinema. The resulting library of standard footage from the cameras will be available to the members of the ASC and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences so that filmmakers can make educated choices when choosing camera systems. CAS material will be refreshed as new camera and associated technologies are developed. The series is scheduled to begin in May 2008 and will involve camera manufacturers and rental houses, and it will be a companion to the Academy Sci-Tech Council’s quantitative analyses of cameras. (The council has been taking scene-driven measurements of each camera to characterize behavior in numerically quantifiable ways.) With the issues of digital cinema identified and standards largely in place, the Technology Committee is focusing on non-theatrical displays with the newly formed — and aptly titled — Non-Theatrical Display Subcommittee. “This plays into understanding the different characteristics of non-CRT [cathode ray tube] display devices that are proliferating in the HD world,” Clark says, “and particularly what that means in reference to Blu-ray and HD-DVD, new platforms that could become the primary distribution medium for many films.” The venerable CRT is rapidly giving way to flat-screen hi-def technologies such as plasma, LCD (liquid crystal display), LED (light emitting diode), LCoS (liquid crystal on silicon) and Texas Instruments’ DLP (digital light processing). And standard-definition DVD will be bowing out as Sony’s Bluray and Toshiba’s HD-DVD formats gain traction in the marketplace. Clark notes, “With the increased emphasis on enhanced resolution and drastically improved image quality over standarddef comes certain baggage that needs to be addressed in terms of the variances between different display devices and how that impacts the creative results the filmmaker had in mind. We discovered through Don Eklund at Sony that there were some serious artifacts showing up in the process of how the down-converts were being done to HD that were not seen on CRT monitors, and certainly not seen in standard-def. They are artifacts that got into the system at some point.” The longstanding benchmark for 110 December 2007
American Cinematographer - December 2007

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - December 2007
