Lucky for them, post-production and VFX creatives also see an opportunity to offer the poor man’s DI – although low budget is, of course, a relative term. The DI still adds dollars to the budget, and it takes a savvy filmmaker and an entrepreneurial facility to team together to make the numbers work.
Several DI stalwarts known for their work on Hollywood blockbusters are offering ways to work for the economically challenged film at the same time that a slew of smaller facilities have opened their doors to producers aiming for digital finishing on a budget. And to top it off, manufacturers are coming to the fore with technologies that feed right into the need for a low-budget DI.
Pioneer Efilm provided a partial DI for Master and Commander last year as well as a complete DI for the six-hour Angels in America, the longest single DI project thus far. VP of business development Michael Cooper notes the growth: "Two years ago, in 2002, we did eight films. Last year, we did about 22 shows. And this year we’ve already done nine shows in the first quarter. There’s explosive growth in the market."
That doesn’t mean that Efilm is uninterested in lower budget films. Most recently, the facility provided a DI for director John Sayles’ Silver City (shot by Haskell Wexler), a Super 16 project. "They knew what they wanted," says VP of Technology Bill Feightner. "That allowed them to go through the plant very quickly, and of course time is where you save money." Efilm also handled DI duties on Robert Altman’s The Company, which was acquired in HD. HD productions keep DI costs down by cutting out the need to scan the material into the digital realm.
To provide services for lower budget films, Efilm plans smaller rooms with more limited projection capabilities and a more limited array of tools. "But it will still be a definite step up from [chemical] timing," points out Cooper, who reports that Efilm pegs the low budget DI as somewhere "south of $200,000."
Modern VideoFilm is currently hard at work on the DI for I, Robot, an extravaganza of digital effects and digital timing. But VP of Feature Post Pat Repola reveals that the facility has also had a hand in numerous lower budget independent films, including big-wave surf documentary Billabong Odyssey and Blue Harvest. "We offer packages from dailies all the way through DI and video masters," he says.
"Prices are coming down," agrees Technicolor Digital Intermediates General Manager/VP Dana Ross. "The pipeline is more user friendly. The trick is managing the project properly at the facility. " Technicolor Digital Intermediates has had plenty of chance to do just that, working on such blockbusters as Panic Room, Seabiscuit, Pirates of the Caribbean, Kill Bill Vol. 1 and 2, and, most recently, SpongeBob SquarePants."
That hasn’t prevented Technicolor from providing digital finishing services for the smaller indie film, including last year’s hit Thirteen and this year’s The Barbarian Invasions from Denys Arcand. "All the big shows want to do DIs," says Ross. "The challenge is to get all the smaller shows in. We’re constantly figuring out how to do this." Ross echoes Efilm’s strategy by noting that one possible solution is to color-correct in "a smaller room on a smaller display and export the data to a bigger room for final calibration." As the digital conform process is streamlined, it helps make the entire workflow more efficient, and filmmakers are better prepared for the DI. "On the lower budget film, the filmmakers have to be in lock-step," says Ross. It’s not a process of discovery but of execution."
On the East Coast, Technicolor Creative Services is all about DI services for the indie filmmaker. Senior VP Charles Herzfeld reports the New York facility has recently worked on Roger Paradiso’s Tony‘n’ Tina’s Wedding, Tom Cairns’ Marie and Bruce, and Peter Riegert’s King of the Corner. After scanning the negative on a Spirit, TCS conforms and then color-corrects with a da Vinci 2K. Herzfeld notes that the indie filmmaker often opts to present the movie digitally to potential buyers. "This allows a filmmaker the opportunity to budget for the DI without a full film finish," he says. "It becomes far more affordable. The benefit is that you have an HD master that is high quality. If your film has a theatrical future, there might be additional costs anyway, such as re-cutting or new titles. When you make your sale, we can make a negative for you."
Other companies are entering the DI space with the smaller feature film in mind. Last year, Matchframe Video began working with start-up company Hollywood Intermediate to offer digital intermediates, both in high-res and HD. The success led to a merger of the two companies, forming Matchframe Digital Intermediate. For low budget features, Matchframe offers the HD intermediate. "The quality of the elements we’re getting back to film for the low-budget and indie movies is quite remarkable," says president Rand Gladden. "It enables a $500,000 movie or a $3 million movie, or anything in between, to take advantage of this technology and remain within budget."
To prepare for the color grading, Matchframe either transfers all the dailies to HD during production or will transfer selected takes after the cut is locked. "We’re offering a total solution to the indie filmmaker, from dailies and downconversions to offline editorial and the digital finish," notes VP/GM Michael Levy. Recent indie pictures that have taken advantage of Matchframe’s new services include Primer, which won the Sundance Film Festival Dramatic Grand Jury Prize, and the upcoming Woman Thou Art Loosed and Admissions (formerly Islands of Brilliance).
At Matchframe, the film is mastered by the Spirit to D5, and proprietary software solutions create a path through the color space loss of HD’s YUV 4:2:2 to film’s RGB 4:4:4. Color-correction with a da Vinci 2K+ is a tape-to-tape process, and Matchframe conforms on either the Discreet Smoke or Avid|DS HD. "We’ll soon be doing all the HD transfers working in RGB, through software we’re writing and the new Sony HDCAM SR decks," says Gladden. The facility also does 2K DIs, scanning on the C-Reality and using IFX’s Piranha as a dedicated color-correction station. All film-outs use the LaserGraphics box. The advantage of the HD DI is cost. "We are trying to stay under $100,000 including the film-out," says Gladden.
Emphasizing tape-to-tape color correction for a film-out isn’t the niche market it once was. Telecine artist Randy Starnes, a founding member of AIR (Amalgamated Artists in Residence) in Santa Monica, says he’s seen "huge growth" of mainly HD-acquired programming, much of it slated to record out to film. A range of original source elements are converted via the Panasonic Universal Format Converter and recorded to tape and DVS digital disc recorder. After tape-to-tape color correction with the DaVinci 2K and digital conform with the Avid|DS (through a revenue share with Wexler Video), the material is off-loaded onto an HDCAM or D5 tape. AIR sends its film-outs to FotoKem, Pacific Title, iO Films or Efilm.
"Cost effectiveness is one of the benefits," says Starnes, who notes that the price is based on a $500 /hour rate for assembly and color timing. "We bill a flat rate based on our estimate, and that’s how we work within a budget. I remain flexible and stick to my flat rate unless changes have been made."
AIR launched its DI services last summer with feature film The Real Cancun and its 400 hours of HD-originated material. Since then, the company has up-resed and provided some color correction for DiG!, the Sundance Documentary Grand Jury Prize winner, and done a full-out DI for a theatrical trailer for ABC’s Threat Matrix. With a discount for students, Starnes just finished five projects for AFI students, at least one of which is recording out to film.
At iO Film, the move to DI on a shoestring came in early 2003 with DysFunktional Family, which was shot with HD and filmed out to 35mm by iO Film. Now, with custom-written color-correction and database software as well as an Arri Laser recorder, iO Film is in the business of providing DIs to the indies. "We are making the digital services comparable in price to a traditional analog finish," says managing partner Tim Krubsack. "That’s very appealing to those clients who can’t pay a premium for digital but want to go digital." Indie projects include Girls Will Be Girls, Patient 14, Moto X Kids and a 20-minute theatrical trailer for Lion’s Gate’s Godsend.
The digital-conform piece of the finishing process has always been a stumbling block, as facilities work out processes and pipelines for keeping track of huge amounts of data. According to Craig Mumma, co-founder of The Digital Conform Group with Marc Kolbe and Dr. Raymond Yeung, "it was taking people up to two or three months to conform digitally." Kolbe adds that "currently almost half of the DI budget is for conforming the picture, averaging $150,000."
Thinking there had to be a better solution, the trio founded The Digital Conform Group in January, dedicated to untangling the conform conundrum. The trio found a solution with Data Conform and Film Master, the offerings of Nucoda, a London -based developer of advanced digital media applications for film and video. Nucoda Data Conform enables users to conform 2K 10-bit media files over a network for previsualizing on a standard computer monitor or data projector. Its Film Master is a resolution-independent film finishing solution, for grading and multi-format mastering directly from 2K 10-bit log files. " Craig and I got the same feeling as when we saw the Avid for the first time," remembers Kolbe. "Wow, this could really change everything."
After working out the pipeline and "proving the theory," The Digital Conform Group just began taking in projects, with the goal of conforming three to four films a month. Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow was brought to them by Efilm, which was doing the color grading but needed The Digital Conform Group to work on-site at the production to take charge of organizing data from the beginning. The VFX-heavy A Sound of Thunder, based on a Ray Bradbury short story and directed by Peter Hyams, is another in-house project. Though the movie wasn’t budgeted for a DI, The Digital Conform Group offered a solution that fit the budget: digital conform and grade with the Nucoda gear. Kolbe estimates an under- $300,000 price tag for scanning, conforming, color-correction and recording.
Though adopting Film Master as a tool, Yeung observes that it is really a first-pass color corrector rather than a head-on competitor to the offerings of the big boys. The goal is to make digital finishing available to more filmmakers. "This is the cheapest way to work," says Mumma. "To streamline assembly is a great cost efficiency."
Nucoda isn’t the only technology coming down the pike to offer the promise of a less expensive digital finish. MTI Film, already a supplier of software solutions for video post production, has debuted its Cortex Architecture, a format- and resolution-independent platform for affordable DIs. Products include Control Dailies, a PC-based frame-accurate calibrated telecine and audio control environment, eliminating the transfer bottleneck in film/sound synchronization; Confirm, an automatic tape-to-tape QC system; and Correct, a digital restoration system. "I think every expensive, time-consuming application will, in the next two years, be done in a generic PC platform," says CEO Bill Foulkes.
The DI revolution is here. Only a few years ago, DI signified lofty exercises in getting specific looks onto the screen, but now it’s making serious inroads in independent film. As new tools come into play and more facilities cater to the low-budget filmmaker, the low-budget DI will encourage both HD and Super 16 acquisition, a boon to both formats – and an overall boost to indie filmmakers. Can the omnipresent DI be far behind?