By Robert Allen

Digital mastering has become a metaphor for a new kind of magic. The idea is that entire feature films can be converted to digital files and manipulated in ways that aren't possible or practical with optical techniques. At its best, digital mastering can be an extension of the role of the cinematographer. Cinematographers can create unique "looks" for shots, scenes or entire films, not unlike using ENR and other bleach bypass techniques.

The list of features that have been mastered digitally in their entirety is still relatively sparse. It includes Pleasantville, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Josie and the Pussycats, Hart's War, We Were Soldiers, Amelie, Panic Room and Stuart Little 2. Part of the allure is that you can create a universal master, which ensures the integrity of the cinematographer's vision for the look of a movie on cinema, TV and computer screens, or any other release format.

The digital mastering concept has its roots in the invention of the Rank-Cintel telecine, which arrived at postproduction houses in North America during the late 1970s. The telecine combined advanced CRT technology and a gentle drive that made producers more comfortable with the idea of converting the negative to video rather than using an interpositive or a print, which was common practice with optical film chains.

That resulted in a quantum leap in the quality of film images displayed on television screens. More of the subtleties in colors, contrast and textures on the negatives could be translated to video for display on TV screens.

It didn't take long for cinematographers to begin experimenting. Daniel Pearl was shooting low-budget horror films in 1982 when an Australian director named Russell Mulcahey asked if he was interested in collaborating on a music video called It's Raining Again.

"Russ said he needed 65 setups of Supertramp's performance," Pearl remembers. "He told me to light and photograph the performances as well as I could, but not to worry because I could fix any problems in telecine."

That was a radical concept 20 years ago, but by the mid-1980s Pearl was inventing new ways of thinking about film. He photographed the unphotographable. Pearl cites the use of Day-Glo paint makeup combined with black light, which had a very low intensity. He also experimented with the use of Argon Laser light that was practically invisible to most film stocks, with the idea of manipulating images in telecine.

Two gateways linking the film and digital worlds were opened at the beginning of the 1990s. Kodak introduced the Cineon digital film system, including the Lightning 4K scanner and recorder, along with software for compositing and manipulating digital picture files. The initial applications were digital effects and film restoration, but a few visionaries were already predicting that it was a first step toward a digital intermediate process for entire feature films. Around the same time, the Spirit DataCine (then owned by Philips) was introduced for TV applications.

By the early to mid-1990s, almost all narrative films and commercials made for television were being timed and postproduced in telecine suites. Cinematographers were exploring new possibilities with the invention of vastly improved telecines coupled with digital color correctors and windows software.

In 1998, Aaron Schneider, ASC, was shooting a TV pilot called Buddy Faro. The story was about a 1970s private detective who resumed his career in contemporary times. Schneider designed a "retro" look with the texture and patina of an old movie. A big part of the look came from his decision to render images onto Eastman Ektachrome color reversal film.

Schneider also manipulated the quality of the images in a telecine suite at LaserPacific Media. In one scene, Buddy Faro was in a bar recalling a long ago encounter with a lady who was wearing a red coat. Schneider also explored the possibilities of Power Windows to isolate and alter parts of images within frames. He instructed the colorist to desaturate all hues but red. The result was an overall sepia tone reminiscent of movies from an earlier time. The woman's red coat made a powerful statement about her presence in Faro's memories. Another scene was filmed in a boat during a transition from night to sunrise.

Pleasantville was one of the first feature films to explore the possibilities of digital film mastering. The story opens with two contemporary teenagers watching a 1950s black-and-white TV show. They are magically zapped into that story and are suddenly living in a black-and-white world accentuated with touches of color. The concept was perceived in the fertile imagination of writer-director Gary Ross, who chose John Lindley, ASC to shoot his film. Ross also brought visual effects supervisor Chris Watts and color effects designer Michael Southard onboard. They established an in-house visual effects capability. The idea was that they would convert the film to digital format, manipulate and time the images in a computer, and record them back out to film.

The biggest hurdle at the time was that scanning and recording the film at its full 4K-plus resolution would have been prohibitively time-consuming and costly. Watts conjured up a practical alternative. He had Cinesite scan some of the film at 2K resolution with a Spirit DataCine. Kodak scientists developed software that enabled him to preview and color time the scanned frames on a monitor before they were recorded onto digital tape.

Lindley orchestrated lighting, composition and camera movement to provide the 1950s look that Ross envisioned. He also advised Southard on how to desaturate the images and add touches of color "without taking all of the oxygen out of the film."

Lindley offered this prescient observation: "There is a new player in our universe. In some movies, the visual effects supervisor is just the person who does stuff with the monster and tries to make it look real. But on movies like Pleasantville, they can have an effect on contrast, brightness and all the things that the cinematographer normally controls. I was very lucky that Chris and his team were blessed with a creative aesthetic and respected my work. This is something for every cinematographer to be aware of--who knows what will happen with people who don't have that feeling or talent?"

The following year, Jon Shear, an actor turned writer-director, made Urbania on a minimalist budget in Super 16 format. The film was photographed by Shane Kelly. The initial plan was to cut the negative and make an optical blowup. Instead, Shear decided to convert the cut negative to digital files at Cinesite. That enabled him to create dissolves and opticals in digital post. He also manipulated colors, altered frame rates to slow down action, and timed the film. The digital files were recorded on 35mm color intermediate film used as a master for printing.

Kelly observes, "Digital intermediate technology is a great tool. We didn't have to worry about how many cuts, dissolves or speed changes we made in post. They were essentially free, because we did it in the computer and there is no generational loss of quality. That made it a different movie."

Chances are that historians will look back on O Brother, Where Art Thou? as a milestone. It marked the fifth collaboration for Roger Deakins, ASC, with the writer-director-producer team of Joel and Ethan Coen. The story is set in rural Mississippi during the 1930s. Deakins characterized it as a fable in a real world setting.

"Ethan and Joel favored a dry, dusty Delta look with golden sunsets," Deakins says. "They wanted it to look like an old, hand-tinted picture with the intensity of colors dictated by the scene, and natural skin tones that were all shades of the rainbow."

They were slated to shoot in Mississippi at a time of year when Deakins knew that the foliage, grass, trees and bushes would be lush green. After shooting tests, including film by-pack and bleach bypass techniques, Deakins suggested digital mastering. The cinematographer subsequently spent some eight weeks at Cinesite fine tuning the look, mainly desaturating green and timing the digital files.

It was a learning process for Deakins and the technical staff at Cinesite. They were exploring a new frontier. In one scene Deakins noticed that an extra wearing an orange dress stood out too much from the crowd when the greens in the background were desaturated. He toned down the color of her dress until it blended into the background. But Deakins also noted that there were digital boundaries imposed by working at 2K resolution. If he tried to do too much, the images got noisy.

Deakins cautioned, "You can't take a cavalier approach and change everything, because it doesn't always work the way you want."

Deakins was recognized with both Oscar and ASC Outstanding Achievement Award nominations for his work on the film. However, there was also much talk after O Brother about the need for affordable tools for scanning and recording images at 4K resolution. It was also evident that Lindley was right. Anyone could change anything during digital timing. Just ask Matthew Libatique, who was off on another project while Josie and the Pussycats was being digitally mastered in Los Angeles. "The result was that some of my intentions for colors and contrast were altered," says Libatique.

On the other hand, HBO gave Stephen Goldblatt, ASC, license to shepherd Conspiracy through a digital mastering process from beginning to end, and he used that opportunity as an extension of his cinematography. The story was an authentic recreation of a 1942 meeting between Nazi bureaucrats in a mansion on the outskirts of Berlin.

The cinematographer suggested shooting in Super 16 format, mainly handheld, to replicate the sensibilities of period newsreel footage. During the digital mastering process, Goldblatt collaborated with Cinesite colorist Mike Bellamy in an interactive environment. For example, there was a red rose in a vase in the room where the Nazi bureaucrats were talking. Goldblatt decided to make it redder, because a beautiful flower in that horrific setting silently punctuated a dramatic moment. Bellamy put a window around the flower and ratcheted up the red tone until Goldblatt was satisfied.

"It was an interactive extension of his artistry," says Bellamy. "He watched what I was doing on a monitor and told me exactly what he wanted. I believe this capability is going to change the collaborative process. The control this gives cinematographers will fuel their creativity. We timed the digital file for shot-to-shot and scene-to scene continuity. The files were recorded onto 35mm color intermediate film."

In another sequence, two Nazis are in an argument while standing in the golden glow of sunlight pouring through a window. One of them realizes he is disagreeing with the wrong person. You can see it in his expression. Goldblatt asked Bellamy to show him what it would look like if a cloud passed in front of the sun and cast a shadow on the actor's face. Bellamy showed him a few options and Goldblatt fine tuned the look.

Conspiracy aired on HBO in HD and standard formats, and it has been presented in 35mm format at Holocaust museums. Goldblatt and Bellamy did it again this year on Path to War, another period HBO film (see ICG Magazine, May 2002). This project was produced in 35mm format. One of the goals was seamlessly matching colors and contrast in new and stock footage. This time, however, the cinematographer was in New York working on another HBO project during timing.

"Mike and I had a comfortable relationship," Goldblatt says. "We went through my DVD dailies. He understood what I wanted to do with skin tones, colors and blacks."

Bellamy says it was a matter of tuning his eye for the contrast values Goldblatt wanted, where he wanted the light to break on faces and what he liked and didn't like.

"It's difficult timing a film when you are 3,000 miles apart," he says. "It's not like timing a feature film, where you can talk in printer points. I took a pass at the whole movie and went to New York and showed it to him. We sorted some issues out, and I made those changes. It helped that this was our second project. I had a sense of his taste."

Virgil Mirano recently helped to guide Coastlines, another Super 16 project, through a digital film mastering process at Technique, the new Technicolor postproduction facilities in Los Angeles. The independent feature was written and directed by Victor Nunez and shot with a vintage Aaton Plus 16mm camera retrofitted for Super 16. "Victor is a visual purist," says Mirano. "He used a handheld camera about 95 percent of the time to create intimate relationships between the characters and audience. The small handheld camera never got between the audience and the actors."

Mirano says that he lit "as naturally as possible" motivated by practical sources, including mercury and sodium vapor lamps to emulate street lamps. Technique used a Thomson Spirit DataCine to convert the images to 2K digital files, and a Pandora color correction system for timing.

"There is a tremendous range of options in timing that goes far beyond traditional photochemical processes," Mirano says. "It is interactive. We could tell the colorist to use a window to isolate people or objects, and make something lighter or darker or alter colors. It's like retouching a photo. We transferred the images onto intermediate film with the ARRI laser recorder. People are startled when they see the image quality. This opens a whole new world of possibilities for independent filmmakers."

Technique Vice President Peter Sternlicht points out that film labs in Copenhagen, Paris and several other Western European countries have been providing digital intermediate services for three to four years. He notes that one of the advantages is that you can skip an optical step in the lab, which enhances image quality.

"Another advantage is that once you go through this process you never have to go to telecine again," Sternlicht observes. "We are building a very large hard disk facility where we can store data files that will serve as a master for all current and future film and digital release formats. We are not claiming that 2K resolution is good enough for every film. It is not a panacea. It is what is practical today and works for many films."

It worked for Alar Kivilo during the making of Hart's War, an MGM feature set in a prisoner of war camp in Germany during the waning days of World War II. Much of the story occurs in the open yard of the camp with hundreds and sometimes thousands of extras. They were shooting near Prague in January, when the days were very short and generally dark. Director Greg Hoblit and Kivilo agreed that a wide-screen (2.4:1) aspect ratio was needed to capture the scope of the prison yard. The cinematographer opted for the Super 35 format because he preferred using spherical lenses in the comparatively dark environments. The studio decided to take the film through a digital mastering process at Cinesite.

Like many cinematographers, Kivilo has been timing TV movies in telecine for at least ten years, so it wasn't a mystery. He shot some "broad stroke" tests on a soundstage in Los Angeles. Basically, Kivilo put an actor in front of painted backdrops and lit a few daylight interior and exterior shots and a few night interiors. The film was scanned onto digital files, and Kivilo and Cinesite colorist Jill Bogdanowicz experimented.

"Most of the period look is defined by costume design and art direction," says Kivilo. "We didn't want to do anything that smacked of a contemporary visual style, like bleach bypass. We just planned to give the look a little nudge. You can also fix things that you weren't able to do on location because of lack of time or other circumstances. During production, we used a lot of silk to maintain an overcast look, but there was a wide-angle shot where we couldn't avoid some bright blue sky and fluffy white clouds. We knew we could replace that portion of the sky during digital timing."

Kivilo cautions that digital mastering can't turn bad camerawork into artful cinematography. He adds that if you push it too far you start getting electronic artifacts and pick up grain, and the audience will sense that something doesn't feel right.

"We wanted to capture the reality of the POW camp, but pushing it too far would get in the way of the story," he says. "One of the big advantages is that it is an interactive process. I could ask Jill to isolate a face and make adjustments. We were able to match skin tones for continuity without affecting the white snow in the background. We also used Power Windows to create negative light in much the same way I'd use a flag on a set. There might be a half-stop shift in density from the beginning of a shot until the end. In photochemical timing, you find some kind of a mean. With digital timing you can find a perfect balance and make subtle adjustments, like crushing a bright blue sky down a bit to make a shot feel more dramatic."

Kivilo also notes that he could compare images side-by-side on a split screen and store still frames from shots for reference. He points out that colors look more saturated on the HD monitor than on film. Kivilo found that yellows and golds displayed on the monitor had to be pushed hard to reproduce the same tones as on a cinema screen. He also learned that film reads a bit deeper into the shadows, which had to be taken into account.

Bruno Delbonnel, AFC earned both Oscar and ASC Outstanding Achievement Award nominations for his artful cinematography in Amelie. Many nuances in colors and contrast were fine-tuned in a digital mastering suite at DuboiColor in Paris. It was Debonnel's first feature film project with director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, though they have collaborated on many commercials that were finished in telecine suites.

"He (Jeunet) told me this is a happy movie in our first conversation," Delbonnel says. "He said he wanted the audience to feel good while they were watching the film, so they leave the theater with smiles on their faces. He described a kind of fairy tale look. Jean-Pierre knew exactly what he wanted the images to achieve."

They discussed the possibilities of timing Amelie digitally very early in preproduction. The director wanted to make selective use of dark blacks and deeply saturated colors without affecting other parts of images within the frame.

"Jean-Pierre heard that Duboi was going to offer a new service that would allow us to do the same things that we had done with telecines on commercials," Delbonnel says. "Jean-Pierre said he wanted real blues and greens and golden yellows."

Delbonnel describes a scene filmed on a Paris street on a rainy day. The sky was almost white and the wall of a building in the background was very dark. He guided the colorist through the use of four or five Power Windows in that one shot. He fine tuned the colors of the sky and a building wall, enhanced drops of rain falling on the ground and deepened the greenish and reddish colors on the front of a grocery store.

"There are billions of possibilities," he says. "You can change colors; turn it into a black and white film; you can change the density. You have to know exactly what you want, and be very specific, otherwise it can become a very long and tedious process."

It took Delbonnel five weeks to time Amelie, but he believes that with experience and advances in technology it will more typically become a two to three week commitment.

We asked Cinesite Vice President Randy Starr how he envisions the technology evolving. He explains that one bottleneck today is the time it takes to record digital files onto film. Even with the most advanced laser film recorders, it still takes up to 24 hours to record 1,000 feet of film. In order to meet demanding postproduction schedules, Cinesite and other companies use multiple film recorders to complete the "film out" of an entire feature film. Starr contends that a faster film recorder is needed to shorten the film out time and thus lower cost.

"There is a lot of speculation about whether 2K resolution is sufficient," he says. "I can't disagree that a 4K image is better than a 2K image. A 4K digital image certainly results in better sharpness and color fidelity. We are making progress towards 4K. In the meantime we are striving to make 2K as rich as possible. Given today's technology the standard is a true 2K image scanned in red, green and blue (RGB) color. Since the current color correctors in use today cannot process more than 2K, one option would be to scan the image at 4K and resolve the digital file to 2K. The result will be a better looking 2K image since the computer will do a better job of averaging the digital information. Of course, when the color correctors can handle more than 2K information, we will begin to use 3K, 4K and beyond. These are the options we have to investigate.

"Regarding digital mastering of feature films, we're definitely much further along today than we were six months ago," continues Starr. "My estimation is that during the next five years we will see a significant number of films being digitally mastered. Will it be a majority? No one has that answer today."

Starr says that most digitally mastered projects today are being driven by cinematographers and sometimes directors, who are using it as a tool to create unique images. He notes that some studios have embraced the hybrid technology more quickly than others, because some postproduction managers still have questions about costs and concerns about how long it takes to time films digitally and record the masters onto film.

One of the purported benefits is that digital mastering is a way of ensuring that the cinematographer's vision for the look will be consistent in all release formats. Starr explains, "One significant advantage to digital mastering is that you only have to scan the film into digital format once. The scene-to-scene work they've done for the feature film is generally consistent, but you do have to fine-tune the overall look in each new color space, including television, digital cinema and DVD. The digital color timing is done concurrently instead of having to return to the telecine bay several weeks later. If the cinematographer is involved in the digital color timing, they will be assured the DVD looks the way they intended."

Starr believes it is very important for cinematographers to be in the telecine bay with the colorists while creative decisions are being made, because they are usually the only ones who have the overall visual concept in their mind's eye. He also notes that digital mastering of feature films is creating a need for a new breed of colorists. "I suspect that we are going to be training traditional film lab timers to work in digital suites, because their eyes are already finely tuned to the emotions evoked by the nuances recorded on film," he says. "It's just a matter of mastering new skills." o

(Editor's note: Steven Poster, ASC discusses the use of advanced digital mastering technology in the companion article about the making of Stuart Little 2.)