Creative DI is an approach to digital intermediate that includes many types of imaging enhancements and fixes live in the DI suite, allowing filmmakers to achieve their vision and solve imaging problems to a degree much more flexible than budgets and time has allowed in the past.  Local Hero and colorist Leandro Marini use a boutique approach to the DI process to give filmmakers the tools they need to put the best images possible on screen.

Assimilate's Scratch software has the flexibility and power to take on these challenges, without major time and cost overruns.   

Creative DI with SCRATCH from ASSIMILATE on Vimeo.

Check out the article :

Local Hero Post Production Aiming For 'Filmmaker Friendly' Efficiencies - The Hollywood Reporter

Click on any still for high rez version.

This is first in a would-be series of informatl conversations about the industry, we hope to do more in the future as technology changes the business of filmmaking.

LH QUICKTAKE - A Conversation about HFR and The Hobbit from Local Hero Post on Vimeo.

What are your thoughts on HFR movies?  Comments welcome below.

Earlier this fall, the Association of Independent Creative Editors (AICE) released a short“recommended practices” document about digital dailies, which represents an important milestone that isn’t often discussed in the digital post landscape.  Now that digital cinema cameras have begun to dominate film production, it is time for the digital dailies process to step out of adolescence into the adult world.

AICE describes itself as an “international association which represents the interests of independent creative editorial companies and their editors.”  Here at Local Hero, we pitch to everyone that today’s DI is far more than color, and creative editing is the same, going far beyond cuts and dissolves.  Long before any of those creative image-manipulation happens, however, there are very practical decisions to be made about digital dailies.

Many standard procedures have been overturned with the digital cinema revolution, but we shouldn’t think of them as gone, only as reinvented.  One of the most dangerous perceptions is that all of the big-ticket expenses that were traditionally handled by a post house can now be done by a tech-savvy PA with a MacBook Pro.

We’ve seen this perception affect every area of filmmaking:  first with introduction of Final Cut Pro, putting expensive film cutters out of business.  The visual effects industry saw low-cost tools such as After Effects get more and more powerful, moving much of their business to the garage, and the same has happened with same with audio, as Pro Tools systems get simpler and cheaper.  DI is newly struggling with this mentality with the introduction of a free version of DaVinci Resolve, one of the industry’s most popular color correctors.

High-end digital cinema cameras promise a world free of film labs, photochemical processing and telecine sessions.  And while it is true that with many cameras you can pull a card out of the camera and walk it over to your editing system, that’s a drastic oversimplification of the needs of a feature film post production process.

The new face of camera negative: hard drives (Photo courtesy Local Hero)

The creation of digital film dailies needs to be executed with the same care as with film rushes.  A post professional needs to oversee all aspects of dailies creation and archiving camera digital negative so that the editing and finishing process can be accomplished in an efficient way.  Mistakes made in the dailies have far-reaching, expensive consequences down the line.

The most important part of the AICE recommendations is this:  “Whether the digital dailies are created by the post facility, a laboratory, on set by a DIT or by another competent vendor, the agency or client must be informed that the cost to prepare digital dailies—a necessary part of the post production process—must be included in either the production company’s or the post facility’s budget. AICE recommends that this responsibility for creating dailies must be assigned and agreed upon during pre-production so that all parties know who is responsible for the work before the first image is recorded.”

There is significant time and technical expertise required in proper digital dailies.  It is a line-item to be budgeted and scheduled properly.  While the marketing campaigns from the camera manufacturers make the process sound easy, consider these challenges below, all of which we deal with constantly as a DI company.

Many films don’t stick with one digital camera format.  Most feature productions require several different cameras to accomplish their shooting goals.  Each camera format has a specific way that it should be handled properly in post.

We’ve seen attempts to edit directly from the raw camera source in the NLE, which lead to numerous headaches and slowdowns in the editing, even with expensive systems.  Today, the most practical way to achieve reliable, efficient performance in an editing system is to have transcoded proxy files with matching codec, frame rate and resolution.

A high-quality Digital Intermediate (DI) finishing process includes an extensive process of conforming an edit back to the original camera files in order to use the full resolution and color depth of the digital negative.  In practicality this means rebuilding the entire edit of the film a second time, this time for the high-end color and VFX process.

Processing dailies and archiving digital negatives can be burdensome for a single DIT to handle, unless you hire a mobile digital lab such as Radar One (Photos Courtesy Local Hero)

“Raw” format dailies such as Red or Alexa, even on a fairly decent system, can take 20 hours of transcoding for every 1 hour of footage, unless expensive graphics cards and Raid arrays are installed.  This is not always practical for a DIT that needs to remain mobile as the company moves locations.  Add on top of that the web-friendly versions to be uploaded to secure websites, and you have a pile of work to do.

One film used several vendors to create dailies from their various camera sources.  The result was that inside their Avid, the dailies metadata had at least 6 different flavors of “Reel ID,” the most common identifier to link back to the original camera file names.  Each one of these had to be handled differently when conforming back to the camera original, losing several days to fixing the conform by hand.

Flavors of dailies metadata from a recent feature (Photos Courtesy Local Hero) 

Popular smaller format cameras such as GoPro and DSLRs often end up using the same file name a few times over the course of a long shoot, and often start time code at zero for each shot.  This can lead to much confusion and hand-fixing shots in the final conform process, unless the formats are properly renamed and timecoded to prepare for dailies.

Most digital footage is captured in a Raw or Log color space, which looks flat and low-contrast to the naked eye. In order for a Director of Photography’s intention to be shown in the edit suite, (where producers and financiers are often seeing footage for the first time), a proper color grade or LUT needs to be applied to the footage. This also is not a one-size-fits-all proposition.

Red Epic footage, graded vs. Raw color space (Photos Courtesy Local Hero)

One DP using the Alexa camera will not want the same color transform as a different DP using that same Alexa.  It may depend on the lighting scenario on set, or the intended final color space.  The filmmakers may also want to provide the DI colorist with those same LUT color transformations that they decided to use on set and for dailies, and making sure these get handed-off properly can also be tricky.

And last, maintaining at least three reliable copies of your original camera media is essential.  On one project it was discovered that of the three (supposedly) identical archives of original files, two of them had an entire day’s shots either missing or unreadable, a near disaster for the film.  One day of camera dailies can take 2 to 4 hours for each copy, depending on the external drive and connections used.  Dailies should also be archived to LTO tape for long-term protection, as hard drives can fail.

Challenges aside, digital camera acquisition is certainly one of the most game-changing and democratizing forces in filmmaking today.  Working with experienced professionals should always be the first way to go, but I wouldn’t dismiss those tech-savvy PA’s with their laptops.  Their work on the bleeding edge will continue to keep the industry on its toes.

Anna Kendrick stars as an alt-girl out of her element when she joins a prissy college a cappella group obsessed with winning the finals in the film, Pitch Perfect.  The film, which also starts Brittany Snow, Anna Camp and Rebel Wilson, has been an indie hit for Universal Pictures and Gold Circle Films.

Colorist Leandro Marini walked director Jason Moore (the Broadway smash Avenue Q) and DP  Julio Macat through the brave new world of DCI-targeted color workflow using the Scratch system.  The film was shot digitally on the Arri Alexa camera to LogC Prores 444 Quicktimes.

For a peek at Pitch Perfect, check out the trailer.

Targeting the DCI-P3 color spec, which is the native colorspace for digital cinema projection, allows for a much wider contrast and color gamut than a traditional film-targeted workflow, and we took full advantage of that for this film.  The highlights of the film take place on a colorful stage with moving lights and flashy performances.  With all the saturated blues and reds, film prints can’t always handle that kind of rich color detail.

This a good moment to pause and talk about colorspace.  People use the term in various ways, but to understand colorspace you have to understand an image’s function in the world.  Colorspace, at its core, concerns itself with the display device that is showing your image.

The first rule: grade your film to natively match your primary distribution format.  These days, that is digital projection and DCPs (Digital Cinema Package).  It is now estimated that 80% of the world’s screens will be digital by the year’s end.  A wide domestic release now only prints a couple hundred film prints for US theaters, in contrast to a couple thousand DCP’s.

A digital image on a hard drive doesn’t technically have a colorspace until it is displayed on a screen.  How that image data looks when it is output to that screen defines its colorspace.  Therefore, on a disk, the digital data that defines color is only an abstract mathematical concept.

The basic colorspaces used in post production are these:  High Definition monitors (Rec.709), Standard Definition monitors (Rec.601), Digital Cinema Projectors (DCI-P3) and Cineon Log for film prints.  If your image “looks good” on an HD monitor and reflects the creative intent of the film, then that image is in the Rec.709 HD colorspace.  Same with P3, if your image looks great, as the creatives intended on a DCI projector, then your image is in the P3 colorspace. On the other hand, if you look at a P3 colorspace image on an HD monitor, it will look too bright, and colors that are heavily saturated will start to bleed out and lose definition.  If you look at an HD colorspace image in P3 mode on a DCI projector, it will look too flat & dark and not take advantage of the richly saturated colors available to you.

There often isn’t metadata in the image files to tell you what colorspace was intended in the grading suite, so be sure to label everything properly.

The second way that the term colorspace is used, I think is a misnomer.  If someone were to describe colorspace as 4:2:2, 4:4:4, RGB, YCbCr (aka YUV) or XYZ, then what these refer to is different ways to numerically represent color data in an image file.  They don’t inherently describe the color properties of a display device, but simply the data format that the signal is in.

You can have a digital image intended for HD monitors (Rec.709) that can be encoded in any of the above formats and there aren’t any significant color value differences.  Each of those formats are designed for different uses:  4:2:2 YCbCr for HDTV, RGB 4:4:4 for color critical monitoring, and XYZ for digital cinema.  The technical differences between them we’ll save for a more detailed article.

To further understand the distinct physical differences, below are a few stills.  Keep in mind that your computer monitor is in the sRGB colorspace, so none of these images will look as the creatives intended, but you get the idea.

Here is the final grade in DCI-P3 RGB:

P3 uses a native gamma encoding of 2.6, a perceptually brighter image, in order to show more detail in the blacks. It also has a white point that is perceived as green when viewed on an HD monitor.  Overall it has the ability to show more saturated colors in the spectrum, as demonstrated by this graph below comparing HD to P3:

 
Here is the transformation of that image to Rec.709 HD (RGB):

In order to remain in “legal” HD color levels for the home video version, some saturation has to be dialed out of the P3 image, and an overall shift toward magenta to make the white’s not so green.  HD has a native gamma of 2.2 (or 2.35), which leads to a darker image.

Here is what a “cineon log” curve encoded image looks like, with its color and contrast transformed to look good when printed to a release print film stock:

Here is what an XYZ translation looks like, but still in DCI-P3:

 XYZ is a different mathematical color plotting all together, representing axis on a color gamut chart (see above), rather than actual colors themselves.  Your monitor is showing the X value as “R” the Y value as “G” and the Z value as “B,” so there’s no way it’ll look anywhere close to a correct image in your browser.  This, however, is the highest standard of color representation, thus the choice for digital cinema projectors worldwide.

In addition to the color, we at Local Hero had fun using extra VFX style tools available in Scratch, for beauty work, clean-up and enhancing reality.  For example, not all those lens flares and glowing stage lights were real, just a little added movie magic.

The movie fires on all cylinders, laugh out loud jokes, and is a fun ride through cutthroat college competitiveness.  The music lover in you will jump up and cheer at some of the numbers.  Catch Pitch Perfect on Bluray and DVD starting Dec 18th.

Photos Property of Universal Pictures

Geared towards the independent filmmaker, THE POST LAB’s mission is to become a repository of extremely helpful information — case studies, workflow diagrams, interviews with filmmakers about their creative and technical processes in post-production — that will demystify some of the technical aspects of post-production, and inspire creative solutions.

Future blog postings about our work in the DI space will appear over at The Post Lab, and this blog will remain dormant. 

Visit the Local Hero category on The Post Lab to keep up with the news.

You can read the nicely designed PDF here at this link.

Pitch Perfect, a Universal Pictures release, was captured on the Arri Alexa camera and graded in DCI-P3 color space on the Scratch system by Local Hero colorist/owner Leandro Marini.

Shot entirely on the Arri Alexa camera, the film used the "direct to edit" Prores 4444 LogC capture, edited in Avid, and graded on Assimilate Scratch.

If you haven't caught the trailer, check it out here at this link.

Here at Local Hero we exclusively grade our films in an environment that targets the DCI-P3 spec, which is the native color space for digital projection in theaters.  This allows for a much wider color and contrast gamut than a traditional film targeted workflow, and we took full advantage of that for this film.  The diverse cast of uncannily good singers is featured throughout the film singing and dancing on stage with exaggerated colors and flares from the tricked-out stage lighting design.  Be sure to watch it in a digital cinema (which these days will be hard not to do) to take full advantage of that.  

The director and cinematographer worked at length with colorist Leandro Marini to bring out the colorful energy of the film without sacrificing a natural feel.  On top of the grade, we used every trick available to liven it it up, including more lense flares, glowing and glistening lights.  

The buzz on the film has been full throttle lately.  Here is a promo (not footage of the movie) shot exclusively for MTV's site HollywoodCrush:  

And a scene from the film:

If you see the film in theatres in a couple weeks, be sure to stop back and let us know how you thought it looked on screen.

Director Travis Fine debuted his 2010 feature The Space Between at the Tribeca Film Festival, and is now back with his second feature, Any Day Now, which plays at Tribeca April 26, 27, and 28th.  

Click here for information on the screenings.

Click here for an interview with director Travis Fine.

Any Day Now stars Alan Cumming and Garret Dillahunt as a couple who take on the foster care of a neglected down-syndrome boy from the building.  When it's revealed that they are in a relationship, the court system rips the boy from them, which leads to a legal battle for their right as a loving household to care for this child that they love.

Local Hero Post was proud to have done the DI for The Space Between, and was thrilled to be back for the DI of Any Day Now.  Local Hero put Assimilate's Scratch system through its paces to handle all of the needs of the film, at a budget the production could afford.  Both films were shot with the Red Camera, though Any Day Now used the MX sensor and Local Hero took advantage of updated colorimitry settings from Red to work with the footage in linear space.    

Local Hero also put together the minor visual effects for the project, which are invisible to the story.  They involve realistic manipulation of the footage in order to achieve the perfect performance.  Editor Tom Cross has a keen eye for how to match the timing of elements within the shot to smooth out a scene-- splitting the screen between two characters and combining two sides into one seamless handheld shot.  Other clean-ups were done during the DI sessions, where Marini can composite pieces on the fly to cover visual distractions in the footage.

Projects come and go through a post production facility, but occasionally a film will inspire us with its quality and powerful story-telling.  Any Day Now is certainly one of those.  We recommend you get out to see it.