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Digital intermediate

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Digital intermediate (often abbreviated as DI) describes the process of digitizing a motion picture and manipulating color and other image characteristics to change the look, and is usually the final creative adjustment to a movie before distribution in theaters. It is distinguished from the telecine process in which film is scanned and color is manipulated but only intended for video and television distribution. A digital intermediate is also customarily done at higher resolution and with greater color fidelity than telecine transfers and utilizes only digital tools (no analog video devices).

Although originally used to describe a process that started with film scanning and ended with film recording, digital intermediate is also used to describe color grading and final mastering even when a digital camera is used as the image source and/or when the final movie is not output to film. This is due to recent advances in digital cinematography and digital projection technologies that strive to match or exceed the quality of film origination and film projection.

In traditional photochemical film finishing, an intermediate is produced by exposing film to the original camera negative. The intermediate is then used to mass-produce the films that get distributed to theaters. Color grading is done by varying the amount of red, green, and blue light used to expose it.

The digital intermediate process uses digital tools to color grade, which allows for much finer control of individual colors and areas of the image, and allows for the adjustment of image structure (grain, sharpness, etc). The intermediate for film reproduction is then produced by means of a film recorder. The physical intermediate film that is a result of the recoding process is sometimes also called a digital intermediate.

History

Telecine tools to electronically capture film images are nearly as old as broadcast television, but the resulting images were widely considered unsuitable for exposing back onto film for theatrical distribution. Film scanners and recorders with quality sufficient to produce images that could be inter-cut with regular film began appearing in the 1970s, with significant improvements in the late 1980s and early 1990s. During this time digitally processing an entire feature-length film was impractical because the scanners and recorders were extremely slow and the image files were very large compared to computing power at the time. Instead, individual shots or short sequences were processed for special visual effects. The first Hollywood film to utilize a digital intermediate process from beginning to end was O Brother, Where Art Thou? in 2000. The process rapidly caught on and it is anticipated that more than 90% of Hollywood films will go through a digital intermediate in 2006. This is due not only to the extra creative options the process affords film makers but also the need for high-quality scanning and color adjustments to produce movies for digital cinema.

Milestones

  • 1993 – Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs – First film to be entirely scanned to digital files, manipulated, and recorded back to film. The restoration project was done entirely at 4K resolution and 10-bit color depth using the new Cineon system to digitally remove dirt and scratches and restore faded colors.
  • 1998 – Pleasantville – The first time the majority of a new feature film was scanned, processed, and recorded digitally. The black-and-white meets color world portrayed in the movie was filmed entirely in color and selectively desaturated and contrast adjusted digitally.
  • 2000 - O Brother, Where Art Thou? – The first time a digital intermediate was used on the entirety of a first-run Hollywood film which otherwise had very few visual effects. The work was done in Los Angeles by Cinesite utilizing a Spirit Datacine for scanning at 2K resolution, a Pandora MegaDef to adjust the color and a Kodak Lightning II recorder to output to film.
  • 2004 – Spider-Man 2 – The first digital intermediate on a new Hollywood film to be done entirely at 4K resolution. Although scanning, recording, and color-correction was done at 4K by EFilm, most of the visual effects were created at 2K and were uprezed to 4K.
  • 2006 - All 20 of the official James Bond movies are released on DVD as Ultimate Editions, both individually and all together in 'monster box' boxset form. As can be seen in the documentary on the Dr. No Ultimate Edition bonus disc, Lowry restored all the films by digitally scanning the original reels through 4K scanners, then, having restored the images with their suite of proprietary tools and adjusting the colour, the soundtrack for each film was also remastered in 5.1 (Dolby EX and DTS ES). The documentary also features a 'side-by-side' comparison of an original copy of Dr. No, with the restored version played alongside it, and the difference is immediately noticeable. The project took over two and a half years to complete, much longer than their 30-day project to restore the original Star Wars trilogy of movies for their boxset re-release. In one interview [1], John Lowry states that they required 'over 600 Apple computers with a combined storage capacity of 700 Terabytes', scanning over 42 miles of film at 4000x3000 pixels of resolution.

Service companies

Software and hardware manufacturers

References

  • Bob Fisher (October 2000). "Escaping from chains". American Cinematographer.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: year (link)
  • Holusha, John (June 30, 1993). "'Snow White' is made over frame by frame and byte by byte". New York Times. p. 5.
  • Bob Fisher (November 1998). "Black & white in color". American Cinematographer.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: year (link)

See also

  • Digital Praxis - information on Digital Intermediate, Digital Cinematography and Digital Film.
  • digital intermediates .org - news and articles related to the digital intermediate process
  • DIstudio - electronic newsletter dedicated to news about digital intermediates
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