American Cinematographer - September 2015 - 86

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ASC

Crudo's Challenge

President Richard Crudo
clearly remembers the fateful tangent he launched into during a
friendly 2006 lunch with some
Technicolor officials. It was a conversational spark that eventually influenced
the company to make one of its most
important digital-technology leaps
during the transitional period when
movies were still captured largely on
film and processed almost exclusively
via computer. Like many cinematographers, Crudo was concerned and frustrated about the lack of a consistent
way to control and maintain his visual
intentions, from telecine through
dailies and onward into the digital
postproduction chain. Over a fine
Italian meal, he essentially demanded
that the situation be rectified.
"I felt strongly about it," Crudo
recalls. "As the digital era started to
blossom, cinematographers lost some
of the great control we had always had
over the image when we could shoot
something, expose it the right way, and
then print it exactly the way we wanted
in the lab - just by calling out printer
lights. When you did that, you got
what you exposed, the way you wanted
it, and it was consistent. And you could
do it day to day over the course of a
whole movie, with no variations. It was
beautiful. And then digital came along
and obliterated that process because
you had to depend on the skill of a
colorist, and if the cinematographer
was not there [during the grade], then
it depended solely on the colorist's
interpretation. That great element of
control was gone.
"So at lunch, I started railing
about
it,"
Crudo
continues.
"Subsequently, I wrote a white paper
about the problem - a 15-to-20-page
document explaining exactly why the
industry needed the digital equivalent
of the Hazeltine printer light. And I
knew of no one better to send it to than

September 2015

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my buddies at Technicolor. Out of that
came Technicolor's eventual development of the digital printer-light capability."
Crudo also penned a 2006
article in American Cinematographer
demanding that the industry get to
work developing such a system. "I was
hardly shy talking about this issue," he
recalls, "but Technicolor took the idea
and ran with it."
ASC associate Joshua Pines,
Technicolor's vice president of imaging
research and development, was a
central figure in developing what eventually became the DP Lights real-time
color-correction system. According to
Pines, Crudo's request "made a lot of
sense" from both a practical and
creative point of view. "We had already
done the groundwork for the digitalintermediate process - the final colorcorrection kit," he notes. "So it seemed
like a straightforward idea to transfer
that approach to dailies, and the result
was sort of like putting out a mini,
limited digital-intermediate system on
set. We wanted to [provide on-set]
production tools so the cinematographer could drive color [during production] and then say, 'Make my dailies
look like that.' At the same time, we
put in [tools] so that the color correction would not be baked in; they can
still capture full dynamic range. Then,
in dailies, the same knob settings get
transferred via metadata, which can be
applied to whatever the camera shot is,
and if everything is set up right, the
dailies come out looking exactly like
what the cinematographer saw on set.
We've since improved the system, but
the whole thing started because
Richard threw down the gauntlet."
- Michael Goldman

American Cinematographer

engineers - whether they were working with chemicals back in the lab days,
or with image-processing software.
That has been the one constant of the
company."
"The thing that is amazing to me
is the way the business was run [in the
early years] by Herbert Kalmus," says
Caleb Deschanel, ASC, an awardwinning cinematographer who also
rates as something of a Technicolor
historian. "The company could have
fallen apart at any time. There were so
many technical problems to work out.
The eventual success of the
[Technicolor] process was as much due
to the genius of Kalmus as a businessman-promoter as it was to the technical
brilliance of his partners, Comstock and
Wescott. Kalmus' genius as a businessman is often overlooked." He adds that
investors "put up a lot of money" for the
development of the various Technicolor
processes that eventually led to the
famed dye-transfer printing and the
three-strip camera in the 1930s.
Investors "saw no return for a very long
time," Deschanel says. "It was one
[misstep] after another, until they came
up with [the three-strip camera].
Kalmus' ability as a promoter is what
kept it going."
As Eastman Kodak's 35mm color
motion-picture film had rendered obsolete the need for three strips of film
negative, the three-strip cameras and
imbibition (dye transfer) printing were
gone by the time Deschanel was shooting such projects as The Black Stallion
and Being There in the late 1970s. The
unmistakable palette that authors James
Layton and David Pierce describe in the
introduction to their new book about
Technicolor's golden years - The
Dawn of Technicolor: 1915-1935
(reviewed on theasc.com) - as "a cinematic experience larger than life, a
vibrant, multihued, and highly saturated
world representing an escape from reality" had given way to new styles and
color aesthetics emanating from new
cinema movements and a variety of film
stocks and laboratory processes. Even as
times have changed, though, Deschanel

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American Cinematographer - September 2015

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - September 2015