Doing its part to bolster the position of film for episodic and documentary production, Kodak has commercialized another piece of R&D technology- and it has launched a low-contrast Super 16 stock optimized for scanning that will offer a film look on HD budgets.

The Vision2 HD digital processor adjusts digital files of scanned film to emulate the tone and color-imaging characteristics of 16 current and recently discontinued stocks. It comes with 640 pre-set LUTs and incorporates the Kodak Display Manager for constant monitor calibration. Meanwhile, the new Vision2 HD Color Scan Film 7299 lets you shoot at 320 or 500 ASA. Depending on how you rate it, 7299 gives you another two or three stops of dynamic range, and the reduced color density allows cleaner scans.

The digital processing box will be loaned (not sold) to a production that orders 200,000 feet of stock- a typical episodic, for example. Spot producers would be directed to a post house with the processing box, says Robert Mayson, GM of image capture and VP of Kodak’s Entertainment Imaging Division.

"The image processing is born of doing the exact same thing in the R&D lab," Mayson tells Film & Video. "It supports the Kodak Look Manager System [KLMS]. You can plug in your own looks, and put in or take away custom looks just using a memory stick."

The KLMS has been rethought after early marketing offered DPs a stripped-down version, which didn’t work out. "They couldn’t calibrate or communicate," says Mayson. A new version will have enhanced functionality and reduced cost, according to Mayson.

Kodak is doing a booming business in licensing and partnerships. Its Display Manager can be found in Assimilate’s Scratch, Chrome’s Matrix systems, the DVS Clipster, Autodesk’s Lustre, Quantel’s iQ and products from Pixel Farm, Pandora, IFX and Digital Vision’s Nucoda line.

Also looking to help filmmakers manage looks from production through to post is Gamma & Density, which recently added motion preview to its 3CP on-set color-correction software system. Although it takes a few moments to render, you can now see your color decisions applied to a moving image clip, rather than a still, before you leave the set.

3CP was recently used by director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto to set a bleach-bypass look for Babel, now shooting in Morocco, according to G&D VP Sacha Rivià©re. Applied to pre-production test footage, the G&D system was able to nail a look that wasn’t exactly right in the full-blown photochemical and digital tests run at Deluxe and Efilm, Rivià©re said.