posted 11-17-2005 11:26 AM                       

quote: Joseph L. Kleiman

---

If a film is being run through post through a digital intermediate (DI), it doesn't matter. The digital print for The Island was completed with final color timing and editing only an hour before its New York premiere.

---

quote:

---

ADDITIONAL KODAK SERVICES — THROUGH KODAK'S LASERPACIFIC SUBSIDIARY:
Complete end-to-end motion picture digital postproduction services
2K and 4K digital intermediates
LaserFilm recording services from digital intermediates
One-stop digital cinema mastering services, including:
Encoding
Encryption
Digital source master creation
Digital cinema distribution master packaging
...with full compatibility with KODAK CineServer

---

quote:

---

"The New Post Production Workflow: Today and Tomorrow by Leon Silverman, from the book Understanding Digital Cinema (PDF)": Our team has dedicated itself to creating viable, affordable and innovative options that open up the creative toolbox for the creative community. LaserPacific’s visionary and unique solutions have helped to revolutionize the industry, offering end to end post production services for the motion picture and television industry featuring Kodak image and color science.

---

posted 11-17-2005 11:38 AM                    

That's a great book for anyone wanting an understanding of the entire d-cinema process. I also enjoyed Leon's keynote at the Digital Cinema Summit at NAB last April.

As for The Island, my facts were slightly off, but I attribute that to my current hangover.

This is from The Hollywood Reporter (C) VNU Media:

quote:

---

July 25, 2005

Sea of digital firsts floated 'Island'

By Sheigh Crabtree

With myriad creative options available to directors in postproduction these days, it's no wonder that locking the final picture can come right down to the wire.

In the case of DreamWorks' "The Island," director Michael Bay had postproduction crews dropping in visual effects shots and color-correcting sequences hours before the movie debuted Friday in 3,122 theaters. The harrowing race to the finish required not only the film finishing crews to pull all-nighters but also Marty Cohen, DreamWorks' head of postproduction.

While the movie was not a home run in terms of its opening weekend, it represents the cutting edge of what can be done in digital postproduction. Advance audiences and moviegoers this weekend saw a picture processed through a digital workflow comprised of some of the latest tools available to filmmakers. "The Island's" photo finish required that a few of the preview screenings, such as the New York premiere and the Los Angeles cast and crew's, test the limits of emerging digital cinema technology.

"It was definitely down to the wire," said Company 3's (CO3) Carrie Holecek, executive producer of digital intermediate.

The Santa Monica boutique oversaw the "Island" trailers, studio screenings, high definition previews, color correction, final film recording, digital cinema masters and video deliverables. For CO3 the biggest challenge they faced was adding last minute creative requests to action packed sequences after the picture was presumably locked. Those changes had to be integrated into the digital intermediate master and then re-mastered for d-cinema projection.

"We use an iQ (Quantel's latest digital mastering tool) that allows us to import and look at the results in real time — instantaneously, there's no loading and no proxies," Holecke said. "You drop it in and it's live right in the (screening) room. A director like Michael Bay, or any demanding filmmaker, can really appreciate the instant integration of a new shot or a fix, and see it right away on a movie screen."

The workflow on the "Island" required that the film be scanned and color corrected at a high quality 2K resolution. The DI files were matched to a look-up table, a video translation of analog film color, that emulates the look of the Kodak Premiere filmstock. Then picture files were synched up to a lush 24-bit 6-track audio printmaster that came over on DVD from Sony Pictures' sound postproduction group.

The image and sound files were then transferred into a DVS Clipster for the digital cinema mastering, according to Steven B. Cohen, who oversaw the d-cinema master for CO3. "The Clipster was the only machine that could output dualstream 4:4:4 RGB (a digital approximation of the rich color of analog film) that would be convenient to load in from our (shared area network)," he said.

Via a dual fiber channel, the disc files were captured frame by frame and played out in the latest QuVis Acuity digital cinema deck, that handles the highest resolution digital color for cinema. Cohen built individual reels and scripted a playlist, then set up a quality control screening room at CO3 on a Barco digital projector. The "Island's" digital master was finished the very morning of the New York premiere. The master files were then delivered within hours to the Ziegfield in Manhattan to play on a Christie CP-2000 on a 60-foot screen. The final 2K digital picture was accompanied by verdant Dolby digital sound in the theater with the d-cinema master files totaling 250 gigs stored on two drives.

Whatever the ultimate success of "The Island," it is a leader in the future of digital postproduction.

---