And/Or

And/Or

Future-Proof Filmmaking


Avijit Mukul Kishore, Motion Picture Photography 1996

I came across the term 'future-proof' while reading about the new Arriflex digital camera, D20. It sounded like a strange term, but it all quickly fell into place, looking at the way digital technology goes. We cameramen forever find ourselves sitting with the user manual of the newest camera in town (this season it is HD), often on set. So, the term makes complete marketing sense – we need to be reassured that a particular technology is more stable and might last longer than others. This applies to everything, be it acquisition (the new term for shooting!), sound recording or the entire post-production process. Mind you, we are still very far from a world where film is replaced totally by digital machines, and I am glad for that, as the look of material shot on film and printed well from a negative is still the best thing in the film viewing experience.

It is a confusing time. Sometimes while shooting on film, attendants ask if we are shooting for an 'album' (music video). Or, we might ask some foreign documentary film-maker who arrives with a PD 150 if he or she intends making a film print at some point. Then, the one question every cinematographer faces these days is, “Are we printing from the negative or making a DI?” Basically, this huge arranged marriage of film and the ever-changing electronic media often leaves us with strange looking offspring.

Let me rush you through this devil called the digital intermediate, or DI. We start with a camera negative fresh from the lab. We telecine it to make video rushes and take them to the editor, who assembles them on a non-linear system like Avid or Final Cut Pro and gives us a cut list at the end of it. Now, we go back to our original negative and scan it according to the cut list, using a film scanner. This is the digital equivalent of negative cutting. Our picture material, assembled in the edited order, is now on the digital platform. It is given any special effects that may be required – transitions, chroma key, title supers etc, and colour-corrected on a high-end software like Lustre. Then the film is recorded back onto 35mm intermediate film on an Arrilaser film recorder, to give us a colour-corrected master negative of the final film. This is the digital intermediate, the negative that is used for making release prints.

Theoretically, this should give us one-light prints after all that hard (and expensive) work. And of course we can do a lot of clean-ups in post to cover up for all the dust and scratches in the lab (dust-busting), as we are in the digital domain. But it doesn't really happen that way due to a variety of reasons. Apparently, dust-busting isn't a very reliable process and one does frequently need to re-correct and re-record different sequences for matching purposes (pretty much like table correction in the case of conventional printing), or to adjust for inconsistencies in the recording, printing and developing processes. Also, DI has a characteristic look, in the way, let's say, Technicolor had its own, Eastman 5248 had its look, or Fuji has its rich greens. Maybe it is something we need to get used to. But one thing is certain – DIs scanned at the current standard resolution of 2K don't look as sharp as conventional film prints. They look like the whole film has been shot through a soft diffuser on the lens and the colours can look rather electronic, with strange, over-saturated skin tones, like in digital stills. For some reason, it is becoming the industry norm for most decent-budget films, even those that don't use any special effects. It is already the norm in Hollywood and pretty much all films are graded digitally and printed using a DI.

Then of course, this process is used for reverse telecine of material originating from video formats, whether it is the high-end HD, or low-end DV. There are too many technical variables there – frame rate, progressive and interlaced video, all of which merit a deeper technical discourse, so I will skip them. People working on DIs and reverse telecine tell us that although it is a great tool, it can very easily be messed up, leaving us with muddy skin tones and artificial-looking colours. It is a long way to go with DI, and I get a bad feeling that we might be left complaining all along, just as we have about our labs. Given all these factors, good prints made directly from negatives still look far superior than those made from a DI.

So where do the new Arri D20 and Panavision's Genesis digital cameras fit in? For one, with ever-increasing amounts of post and effects work happening digitally and the imminent inevitability of digital acquisition, these giants need to stay in business. It is like Kodak going full steam into digital photography in their stills segment, introducing their own digicams and lab chains for printing. But interestingly and reassuringly, the cameras made by Arri and Panavision are way better than any video camera available to us. Let me explain this. The D20 and the Genesis are identical to film cameras, except for the fact that the film gate is replaced by a digital sensor (CMOS and CCD respectively), which gives a high definition video output that can be used for film or television production. These sensors are full frame Super 35mm size and that makes them much bigger than the conventional 2/3 inch sensors in most HD cameras, meaning they have far better resolution and colour reproduction. Then the other great advantage is that these cameras use the same prime and zoom lenses as film cameras, meaning these are identical to 35mm film in terms of depth-of-field and perspective control. This was always an issue while shooting on video as the lenses used in 2/3 inch chip cameras are closer to 16mm in terms of perspective and depth of field. Besides this, these cameras have optical viewfinders, so the cinematographer can see the image directly and not on an LCD or CRT screen that displays the image after it is processed by the sensor. Plus they give a variety of high definition outputs in terms of frame rates for film or television use, in addition to their adjustable sensor sensitivity from 300 to 1600 ASA.

These are the highest resolution digital cameras available to us at present. Films shot on the Panavision Genesis, introduced in 2004, include Bryan Singer's Superman Returns, British independent production Flyboys, Scary Movie 4, Click with Adam Sandler and Mel Gibson's Apocalypto. The Arri D20 is still too new to write about, as it is just about a year old.

While we don't expect these to be available in India for a while, our guys in the feature film circuit here have been going strong in their efforts to cut costs and the first fully digital film shot on High-definition was a recent multi-starrer Bhojpuri film, which was reverse telecined and printed at EFX Prasad, Mumbai. Must confess, I haven't seen it.

While digital cameras are pushing to surpass film resolution, the look is distinctly different. It is harder, more saturated and the colours tend to be very electronic. It is “too sharp,” as people who have seen HD material reversed onto film say. This is because the pixels (picture elements) on digital cameras are fixed, unlike film grain which is different on every frame. And the film emulsion with image information recorded on its different layers gives film its characteristic softness.

So, these technological changes in film production are clearly going through a bit of a messy transition across the film-video and analogue-digital boundaries. Also, being in the digital domain naturally means that technologies will change from time to time and there will be newer, faster, more sophisticated versions down the line. So maybe we can expect to see the look of films changing every few years. If the present DI look is in now, it might be different in as little as five years from now. So, the term 'future proof', meant to reassure, only reinforces the possible obsolescence of technologies and processes. We shall wait and watch and read user manuals while we are at it.

For more information on digital post and DI, do visit the website and blog of Neil Sadwelkar, senior editor and technical head of Pixion.

http://neilsadwelkar.blogspot.com

http://www.sadwelkar.com/FCP.htm