Deakins thinks it’s very important to work on a film as a whole when using D.I., as it’s very easy to focus on just one piece.

“For instance, we had some scans that were sort of magenta cyan, and in order to get them back to the warm brownish tones that I had originally photographed, there was quality loss. There was no doubt that there was some definition loss. So, although it is a very powerful tool, it is also one where you have to be as accurate as you would be in the lab, if not more so.”

The pin-registered 4K scans done at EFILM are actually “oversampled,” where the image is scanned at 4K, held in memory temporarily and then saved as a 2K file. Deakins says, “They immediately down-res it to 2K. It’s prohibitive to work at 4K, because of time. The rendering of each shot would take quite some time. You wouldn’t be able to work in realtime. But the 2K resolution image that you’re dealing with is not film resolution. They reckon that film resolution, if it’s a low-speed, daylight stock, is probably more like 5K or 6K. I think if we had a 4K system all the way through, there would be no question that would be a better image than we’re getting at the moment.”

Creative Controls
The trade-off of working with these scanned images, however, is that filmmakers can selectively work in precise parts of a frame; a capability that provides increased creative control. “In terms of what you can do with coloring,” says Deakins, “the windows are getting a little bit more powerful and a little easier to track if you want to alter a particular part of a frame.”

This capability has led some to suggest that the D.I. process offers cinematographers a way to “extend” their work during post. “To my mind,” offers Deakins, “it is an extension of cinematography in that you can do these very small things that maybe don’t add a great deal to the look of the film, but they’re subtle things that I think are worth doing. That could be shading the corner of a room or taking down a sky or de-saturating a shot.”

Citing as an example the planned digital intermediate on director M. Night Shaymalan’s The Village, Deakins says, “There are some sequences in which we want to maybe take the saturation down as the film progresses, which is actually very hard to do in a lab. This picture has an enormous number of day exteriors, and sequences that are meant to be happening over a short space of time. We shot it in Pennsylvania in October, November, December, so we had very short days. I really wanted the option to be able to help the light continuity of the skies. That’s something very subtle that you can have very immediate control of with a digital intermediate. When I talked to Night about doing this, he was actually quite anti-D.I. But I said I thought it would really be an advantageous thing to do, so he went with it.”

Steve Scott of EFILM has been a tremendous asset to Deakins on the last three films he’s used D.I. on.

Judgment Calls
While Deakins played with the lighting somewhat in The Ladykillers, he says, “It’s nothing that we couldn’t do in the lab, apart from bringing down a few skies and intensifying a few colors. “A key reason for doing a D.I. on this film, explains Deakins, “was because there’s quite a large sequence that takes place on a bridge in the fog at night. It’s a combination of a large set piece and computer-generated images. We didn’t want to do these effects and then go back out to film and have a loss of quality to the image.”

Knowing he’d be doing a D.I. in advance of shooting The Ladykillers didn’t really influence Deakins’ choices on set, although he notes, “Now and again, I must say, I’d be shooting an interior, and I’d think, ‘I’d love to shadow that wall a little bit up there in the corner of the frame.’ Then I’d think, I can actually do that (with a D.I.) so I won’t spend the time doing it now. But that’s very, very minor. The thing I don’t tend to do so much is use grads on skies and stuff like that. I always find that putting a grad on a camera is kind of dangerous if the camera is moving. You’ve got to be very careful you don’t actually see the grad and it doesn’t draw attention to itself. If you’re doing a D.I., quite an easy thing to do is to bring down the sky in a much more subtle way than you can actually do with filtration.”

Deakins also notes the advantage of making these creative choices within the context of the director’s cut of a film. “You can shape things selectively. You do it on a certain part of the sky, or a section at a time, which you really can’t do in camera.”