Deakins admits that the biggest personal drawback with digital intermediates is that he finds himself waiting around in L.A. “I’ve turned down shooting work because I want to be available to do the D.I. for The Village in May, even though I’m finishing The Ladykillers in March. If you’re color timing a film with a lab, the timer can fly to wherever you’re shooting with a print, and you watch it together and make comments. You can safely do it that way. But if you’re doing a D.I., you’ve got to be there in the machine room with the colorist. They don’t have a monitor that they can bring with them to show you the rough color timing that they’ve done.”

Future Acceptance
Deakins believes that broader acceptance of digital intermediates will accelerate, especially once they become cheaper. But he thinks that there are still obstacles to overcome. “What’s missing right now is the capacity to work in full 4K space all the way through the process. But until most people are doing it, there isn’t quite that ‘push’ to go to a 4K system.

“I think that for a lot of people, the digital intermediate is an unknown quantity. A lot of people don’t understand it, but then a lot of people don’t understand lab work and the whole post-production side of photography.”

Until digital projection in theaters becomes more widespread, cinematographers such as Deakins will continue to grapple with the challenges of moving from film to digital and back to film. “It’s at those interfaces where it goes right or wrong,” he says, although he adds, cheerily, “It’s funny, but if you don’t get the little hiccups or glitches, somehow you don’t learn much!”

Deakins’ experience with digital intermediates has left him completely certain of one thing: “The whole digital technology wave is changing the way we make films, and we’ve just scratched the surface of how much it’s going to change.”

Ellen Wolff is a Southern California-based writer whose articles have appeared in publications such as Daily Variety, Millimeter, Animation Magazine, Video Systems and the Website CreativePlanet.com. Her areas of special interest are computer animation and digital visual effects.