Finishing: Digital Finishing Is Just Getting Started

"Objects in mirror are closer than they appear," is a message Charles S. Swartz, CEO/executive director of the Entertainment Technology Center at USC, likes to apply to some of the faster-moving issues of digital cinema. The careening 18-wheeler in this case is the "wide load" of digital data generated by everything from digital cameras to digital intermediates.

While the specification for a digital transmission master is currently being finalized by Digital Cinema Initiatives (DCI), a consortium of the seven major studios, the real confusion is in the many steps leading up to the digital source master. As producers move toward a tapeless, datacentric workflow, the widely acknowledged challenge is providing for an open communication of metadata, or the bits about the bits. In a business that’s full of secret sauce, coming to an agreement on a whitebread bun isn’t going to be easy, but at NAB this year there will be many individual attempts to come to terms with big issues - variable-resolution workflows, standardized metadata, moving media for better collaboration, and calibration of color spaces.

“We’ve gone to a world in which there is absolutely no confidence in how footage will look, as every device and every post-production company works in different ways,” says Swartz. “We have no universally accepted way of describing color space and we don’t use metadata to nearly the extent that we could by creating it in pre-visualization or on set and sharing it as the content goes downstream.” The issues and new technologies of particular relevance to high-end finishing at this spring’s NAB all point to new ways of working that start at the lens. “The good news,” says Swartz, “is that we have so many choices. The bad news is that we have so many choices.”

While DCI is set to disband next fall after finishing work on the transmission spec, some feel that an organization representing the studios, rather than a group of manufacturers, could more effectively hammer out another spec for passing metadata from principal photography through post. There is no shortage of suggested formats that exist today – AAF, MXF, Cineon, DPX, Open EXR, TIFF, or UMID. The loudest voices for standardization these days are coming from cinematographers. "It’s a difficult subject and fraught with political peril," says David Stump, ASC, chairman of the camera subcommittee of the American Society of Cinematographers technical committee. "Within five years after we’ve started to use it, it’s going to be like the walkie-talkie. We’re going to look back and wonder how we ever made films without this, especially digital ones." [Stump will moderate a panel during NAB's Digital Cinema Summit, held April 16-17.]

High-end post houses are forced to dedicate a lot of brain power to plotting new data pipelines. The question is where to start. At Ascent Media’s Creative Services Group, as with other big Hollywood post houses, the starting point is dailies, according to CTO Phil Mendelson. And the people who will feel the relief first are going to be the big-time colorists. Last fall, Ascent’s Encore went online with Control Dailies, a telecine and audio-synching system co-developed with MTI. The PC-based system can sock at least a night’s worth of dailies data away on a SAN and is designed to remove some of the administration in a colorist’s job – primarily the manipulation of keycode and timecode data and the synching of sound – reassigning it to a less skilled operator who can log sync points into a database. When he starts his session, the colorist accesses the database. "The product is an encapsulation in software of some familiar workflows," says Mendelson, who refers to it as a "dailies ingest system and metadata collector. What we’ve really helped MTI do is encapsulate things like window burns and slates." The system, capable now of HD and SD outputs, will soon be handling data. "The tapeless dailies is an enabler for the transformation of the whole process," Mendelson says. "To be able to call up the metadata that you’ve already collected to do your data conform is going to be very powerful."

"The dailies-to-DI-to-previews business is exploding right now," says Loren Nielsen, partner at Entertainment Technology Consultants in Hollywood. She should know, as she’s worked on films like Ocean’s 12 to design the various custom color spaces required as the feature moved from projected high-data-rate 24p dailies to a 4K DI and to simulations of a film-out. Because LUTs like LUTher and Truelight were not yet commercially available when the film went into production, Nielsen crafted them for a number of different points in the process. Profiles or LUTs had to be juggled for the dailies timer’s monitoring environment, the DLP projector’s color space, the DI timer’s monitoring set-up, the film-out, the digital cinema output, and home video (DVD).

Color space management is critical throughout the chain. To this end, Grass Valley Group is now shipping LUTher, a color space converter with new 3D LUT design software that lets filmmakers visualize on HD monitors what the ultimate film-out will look like. This winter, GVG announced the new 3D LUT software that lets users formulate and calibrate look-up tables throughout their workflows.

At last year’s NAB, Kodak got into the business of codifying a DP’s instructions to his dailies timer with the introduction of Look Manager. (Gamma & Density staked out this territory with 3cP). This year Kodak goes one step further by pairing a package of LUTs with a new emulsion, designed for a cost-conscious DP whose 16mm work will be scanned to HD. The concept, aimed at TV producers, is that a DP can shoot a scan-only to high def simulating characteristics of Vision, Vision2 and some Eastman EXR films.

The first part of the equation is the fine-grained Vision2 HD Color Scan Film 7299, which Kodak spokesmen liken to Vision2 5218/7218 negative. The second part is the Vision2 HD Digital Processor, a set of 640 look-up tables that emulate a spate of Kodak films.

There’s yet another new player in the color correction space. This year, the British company Edifis brings its Finaliser to market in the U.S. under the experienced eye of Pete Challinger, formerly of Abekas and Grass Valley Group. Designed to replace tape-to-tape color correction, Finaliser leverages firmware-based processing, random access uncompressed storage and a Linux-based GUI.

How many Ks is okay is a conversation that stirs passionate debate, with idealists, pragmatists, engineers, studio executives and cinematographers all weighing in.

"People are working at different resolutions according to what they consider the needs of the images in their step of production or post," says ETC-USC’s Swartz. "We need to further monitor these images in order to understand what resolution is necessary for optimum results."

Expect to see many enhancements in film scanning and printing at this year’s show. A few highlights include: Imagica’s new CMOS scanner and a film recorder co-developed with Eastman-Kodak. Celco, whose Fury recorder was used to film-out Hotel Rwanda and Constantine, will add a 3D rendering to its film-recording software. Like Kodak, Cintel looks to make more headway into the TV market with the new diTTo, a scanner intended to be used offline, where a less-skilled operator would handle film and load file images through a PC interface into storage for later use by a secondary color corrector. DiTTo will be shown by appointment at NAB and is slated for delivery in Q4.

Filmlight is raising its personal best with the demo of speed enhancements of four to six times with its Northlight 2 pin-registered scanner, which sports a new CCD and software resizing. At IBC, company executives promised two-frames-per second at 2K and one-framer-per second at 4K. The company has also souped up the performance spec on its Baselight grading and finishing systems spanning SD to 4K resolutions.

Da Vinci rolls out some upgrades for its 2K Plus systems. What differentiates the three versions from regular 2K Plus is the number of image processing channels available – 10 for the Ruby, 12 for the Sapphire and 14 for the Emerald.

Nucoda, the digital finishing company recently purchased by Digital Vision, is expected to preview its Colour Timer, which the company claims "replicates the lab process."

In Las Vegas both Discreet and Quantel are rolling the dice on new ways to distribute, rev up, bill for and offer utilities for their systems.

Big changes are coming at Discreet, which effective in mid-March moved closer to its parent Autodesk by driving 3DS Max, Combustion, Cleaner, Stone and new Toxik product under the new Autodesk Media and Entertainment banner. Discreet will remain as a prefix for the "hero" boxes – Lustre, Inferno, Smoke, Fire, Flame and Flint. What’s going on in Montreal? First and most importantly, some new thinking about how to evolve product for the more collaborative aspects of the high end, initially the simpler composites that constitute a lot of work on big budget films but are traditionally done on desktop islands that have become dead ends. Autodesk is looking to unify the islands with modular functionality that can be revved quickly through the Web.

Toxik is a rethinking of a PC product shown in infant form at NAB 2002 as Mezzo (an asset server) and Strata (a compositing environment). It reappears this year as a fully beta-tested new 3D compositing environment, at first intended to streamline the repetitive motion tasks of compositing on big VFX features, the kinds of jobs that are frequently done on a spate of desktop software, cobbled together on open storage. At beta sites, Toxik is being used for matte work, simpler composites, some green screens and rotoscoping. Autodesk wades into the shallower end of the compositing pool by delivering smooth collaboration with a layer of asset management (Oracle-based) that allows easy updating and accessing of files.

Since that initial showing in 2002, aspects of the Toxik project have shown up in other Discreet offerings, such as the Linux-based versions of Smoke and Flint and the master keyer in Flame. And since then Autodesk has reality-checked the performance from "videocentric" to film resolutions and beyond. "In DI we saw 4K becoming the standard," says Maurice Patel, systems product marketing manager, "and some guys in restoration wanted to work in 8K. So one of the things we had to do was to make the system be able to work with these resolutions very interactively." Early beta testers have remarked on the local cache architecture that allows playback of 2K in real time.

Autodesk rolls out a lot on this scalable new architecture. Briefly, a new 3D compositing environment, a new touch UI featuring "The Gate," designed to be less intrusive (it also scales up with resolution), and a 32-bit HDR software renderer called Suave. Says product designer Chris Vienneau, "New users have got to learn a little about the touch UI and a bit about the new ultra-high resolution, but then all of the Discreet user’s skill sets immediately apply." Designed for situations where five seats or more will be collaborating on compositing, Toxik sports a powerful scripting engine to automate processes like file preloading.

Pricing has been structured to allow easy “laddering” up and down of creative teams on big projects. Delivery and revving of the Toxik modules will be through a Web portal. Licensing for creative seats starts at $6500 on time charge, the collaborative layer at $2500 and utilities at $500 (both annual charges).

Quantel has also rethought pricing, but for its high end, rolling out “pay-as-you-go HD” for its eQ. Acknowledging that many operations will have spotty demand for high-def in the next year, the plan allows users to get in at the SD level and then scale up to HD when they need it. Going with Quantel’s part-time HD functionality saves 40 percent off the price of a full-out HD system. A one-week password to turn on HD costs $2250.

This spring the company introduced a new release for eQ and iQ called EIGER, which builds on grading, keying and mastering capabilities. Although the company remained mum on the new DI product, broad hints have been made that there will be an introduction at NAB.