Deakins argues that the way your eye perceives an image that’s digitally projected — as opposed to being projected on film — is different. “Your eye perceives the difference between the steady image that a digital projector gives you and the flicker of a film projector. — though I don’t know how you quantify that!”

Even though D.I. is costly, Deakins believes it saves time.

The Human Factor
While hardware and software continue to improve, Deakins stresses the importance of the human factor in the D.I. process. “The chap I worked with at EFILM on Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers, Steve Scott, has a background in painting and graphic arts. He’s very competent with the technology, but he’s not from computer science. His eye is trained to look at the quality and the color of the image in an artistic sense, more than in a purely technical sense. Sometimes I find it hard talking to people who are computer experts. In talking about an image, you may say, ‘I don’t like this. What’s happening here? Is that electronic noise up in this corner?’ For some strange reason, the people who are totally into the technology don’t actually see the same thing! It’s very hard to convince them that there is something happening that’s unexpected.

“But dealing with someone like Steve Scott, I’m going through a buffer zone,” adds Deakins. “He’s my bridge between the purely visual reference and the technical reference. I think that’s really important. I’ve been in effects houses overseeing computer effects shots at times and it’s a highly specialized world where there’s a different way of looking at things. I look at things much more instinctively and trust my eye, whereas technical people are looking at it from a scientific perspective.”

The End Results
Since few theaters use digital projection, most audiences see movies projected on film, and Deakins is naturally concerned with the crucial film-out stage of the D.I. process. “If you’re printing off a negative that’s rendered out from a 2K image, it’s not as good as an answer print straight off the original camera negative — a show print. But then how many audiences actually see a show print? In fact, the prints that the general audience sees will be better than if they’d gone through a traditional lab process. There’s no doubt about that. But there is room for things to improve, no question.”

Producing a single negative from a D.I. and using that to strike many release prints is certainly one key advantage of using this process. Another is the way the D.I. process facilitates the creation of various forms of a film —from airline versions to DVDs. Deakins remarks, “You can color time one version of the movie and then it’s just a matter of changing look-up tables in order to produce a master for different outlets. It’s a much more efficient way of going about it.”

Time and Money
The killer twins of moviemaking — time and money — loom large over the adoption of the D.I. process. Deakins notes, “Digital intermediaries are still very expensive. They’re actually more expensive now than when we did O Brother because we had a bit of a deal on that. I don’t understand why prices aren’t starting to come down, although you have to consider the amount of investment that has to be made in upgrading equipment. It’s an enormous outlay.”

“By the time I do the D.I. on The Village in May,” reveals Deakins, “EFILM will have a whole new series of 4K scanners. They’re also going to have a new 2K projection system and they’ll be able to do realtime rendering at 2K. Today, if you’re viewing a window, you usually have to watch it at slow speed. But in a few months you’ll be able to render it straight away and watch it in real time.” While these improvements in technology make the process more efficient and interactive for people like Deakins, he acknowledges the necessary investment “is a huge amount of money that’s turning over every few years.”

For thrifty filmmakers such as the Coen brothers, however, Deakins believes the D.I. process has been a money-saver. The time commitment has also shrunk noticeably. While it took Deakins 12 weeks to get the complex look for O Brother, he says, “If we were doing O Brother today, it would take about half that time. The less complicated D.I. on The Ladykillers — even including the re-scans — took about three weeks.