Veteran colorist and DI pioneer Peter Doyle fears that due to lack of experience, companies are consistently creating unrealistic DI expectations with sales pitches that confuse producers and directors.

“Since the film is a period film, the brief was to try and create a look to enhance the rustic feel of the era,” Desai says. “It was our challenge to achieve the true projection of a raw and rich India in the 1850s.”

DI offered delivery as well as visual opportunities. “The Rising is a bilingual release to be released simultaneously as separate films in both English and Hindi. The two films have different edits, so effectively it was almost like two films were to be delivered concurrently,” Desai continues. “The delivery included six master negatives for a worldwide release, which included clean and subtitled negatives for both the English and Hindi film.

“The film with its logistics — having two films for simultaneous release with common shots in both the films, the vast number of visual effects shots and the fact that they needed the look to support the era of Mangal Pandey — made the DI process extremely essential for the film. Another big flexibility for the director of photography was the fact that he could shoot the film with the super 35 format, enabling him to use a lot of different lenses, and we believe sharper images in this part of the world.”

Tools of the Trade
Prime Focus has been keeping pace with the latest DI technology. “We started with the traditional telecine grading process, grading on a Spirit datacine with a Pogle Megadef color corrector,” Desai says. “Our facility has gone through several changes, and today boasts of a full-fledged state of the art facility consisting of a Spirit 4K, four Lustre Systems, two Arri lasers and one Celco fury film recorder.

“We further strengthened our position in 2004, with a strategic tie up with Adlabs, India’s biggest film processing lab,” Desai continues. “As a result of this tie-up, we have now set up our entire DI facility inside the lab premises. This further helps us in maintaining our strict quality checks by having the grading systems and the print checks in the same premises.”

Prime Focus India provided DI for Mangal Pandey — The Rising. The film’s bilingual release, the many vfx shots and the period look made the DI process essential for the film. © 2005, Yash Raj Films Pvt. Ltd. Courtesy of Prime Fo

Colorist guru Doyle confirms that DI advancements continue to be used in his work, including “more image processing, implementation of video style algorithms into software, e.g. noise reduction.” Doyle notes, “[Because of] a significant increase in the degree of image processing applied to the principal cast, some films are borderline cosmetic style posters.”

With DI, advancements include input as well as output. For instance, Panavision’s new Genesis digital imaging camera — the first of its kind boasting film-like quality — is currently being used on Superman Returns and a handful of other features.

“As far as working in this digital realm with vfx in mind, I see Genesis as an excellent instrument for recording the light in a scene,” suggests Scott E. Anderson, visual effects supervisor and president of Digital Sandbox, a consultant on Superman Returns. “While film interprets a scene, Genesis records a more neutral view of the world, leaving the ‘look’ to our interpretation in DI or vfx.”

Thus, as Peter Plantec concludes in his recent Digital Eye column, the Genesis offers “a DO or Digital Original.”

“New tools for all aspects of DI are hitting so often I’m not always sure I can keep up,” notes Post Logic Studio’s Levinson. “But we have a great engineering team here to track those developments. Because scanning and film out require heavy metal, they don’t change as quickly, but the trend for change for other tools, being software-based, can be almost weekly. As every facility has a different concept of what their internal workflow will be, what tools they use will be dependent on that outlook.”

“Creatively, DI is still in its infancy,” Levinson continues. “When we see projects that mix everything from phone cams to CGI to 65mm with a wide variety of looks, we’re getting somewhere. When it’s used as a tool for pre-visualization, for example, to render perhaps how a colorblind person sees the world, then we are truly beginning to utilize DI in all of its creative range. If you can imagine it, you can put that world on the screen.

“We are headed towards a technology that can truly encompass all the resolution, dynamic range and tonalities of our primary image capture platform, film, in a truly transparent fashion. And maybe, soon begin to replace film as a capture medium with an electronic one with all the range of film and more. However,” Levinson adds, “get it onto film if you want to see it 100 years from now.”