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Deakins and the Coens Go Back to DI

Joel Coen (left) and Ethan Coen (center) direct Catherine Zeta-Jonesand George Clooney during production of IntolerableCruelty.

After a black-and-white, photochemical detour with The Man WhoWasn't There in 2001, cinematographer Roger Deakins steered theCoen brothers back into the digital intermediate suite at EFilm,Hollywood, for consecutive feature films — their recent Universalrelease Intolerable Cruelty and the upcoming TheLadykillers (a Buena Vista 2004 release). Deakins and the Coensthus renewed their acquaintance with a rapidly proliferating processthey helped pioneer at Cinesite Hollywood in 2000 for O Brother,Where Art Thou?

And what has changed about the DI process and Deakins' view of theprocess since O Brother in just three years? A whole lot, hesays.

“The big difference is the projection and monitoring of theimages during the process,” says Deakins, who shotIntolerable primarily on Kodak 5279 and 5274 Vision stock— 5279 for high-speed work and interiors and 5274 for exteriors.“When we did O Brother, we were color-timing off amonitor. It was the best available at the time, but the colors did notalways accurately reflect how the images would look on a filmout.Therefore, during that job, we had to do a number of filmouts to checkand see what we were getting, and we did have to go back and re-doseveral things after seeing the filmout.

“Now, with digital projection on a big screen at the facility,you can see things a lot closer to what you are expecting. You can seestraightaway if there are any anomalies, if you are getting noise intothe images. You can even blow up a full section of the image andexamine individual pixels to see if, and how, they are being alteredwhile you are working. That capability has made the process morestraightforward and comfortable than it was 2 to 3 yearsago.”

The Intolerable DI process was also a lot quicker this timearound — about a week, compared to over 10 weeks for OBrother. “To be fair, we were not doing as many complicatedthings to the images as we did with O Brother,” Deakinsexplains. “But the point is, if we were doing that film's digitalintermediate today, it would be a faster and more efficient processthan it was back then.”

As a result, Deakins concedes he has become a permanent convert tothe DI approach. “Cost permitting, I now favor doing a digitalintermediate for all my films,” he says. The cost issue,obviously, plays a central role and is the main reason why his newestrelease, Vadim Perelman's DreamWorks' film, House of Sand andFog, did not go through the DI process. “I now find myselfwishing we could have done a DI on that film,” he adds.

Ironically, according to Deakins, the Coen brothers were notparticularly interested in doing a DI on Intolerable Cruelty.They had pegged Ladykillers for the process, however, due toextensive visual effects, and so they relented when Deakins suggestedmidway through the production of Intolerable Cruelty that theygo forward with a DI on that film, as well. (At press time, the movieDeakins was shooting for M. Night Shyamalan, The Village, wasalso slated for an upcoming DI at EFilm.)

“I suggested the DI on Intolerable,” saysDeakins. “The brothers hadn't really considered it until then.But we were doing all these tests with EFilm for Ladykillers atthe time, and I said, let's do it for this movie also. I figured itwould give me a chance to be better prepared for Ladykillers andwould also let me saturate the colors and give Intolerable moreof a glossy look than I would normally get in the lab. The studio[Universal] had a deal with EFilm to do several DIs there anyway, soeveryone agreed we might as well go ahead and give it a try.”

According to Deakins and Dave Diliberto, the associate film editoron Intolerable Cruelty and postproduction supervisor for theCoen brothers, the choice of EFilm, an eight-year-old facilitydedicated to scanning, recording, and now, digital intermediate work,was largely because EFilm has adopted a 4k, pin-registered scanningapproach.

The digital intermediate process was strategically used to add asaturated, more glossy look to characters and locations.

“The main reason we felt comfortable going there was the factthat they use the Imagica [Imager XE] scanner, and I believe they arethe only ones using that scanner in the United States for featurefilms,” says Diliberto. “It's what I call a virtual 4kscan. [EFilm calls it a double, over-sampled scan, meaning the image isscanned at 4k resolution, and then held in memory at 4k temporarilybefore being saved as a 2k file.] This gives us access to more of theinformation from the negative to work with during the color-timingprocess than an image scanned at 2k.

“The other big thing, of course, was that we could outputhundreds of release prints from an [extremely durable, polyester-basedKodak] Estar negative — all from the same print negative, meaningwe have less generation loss on the release prints. [Four identicalEstar-based negatives were struck at EFilm to create the releaseprints, and a single acetate print was also created for archivalpurposes.] And the pin-registration means the image is much morestable, without the slightest trace of movement from frame-to-frame. Ittakes a bit longer, but we found it was worth it. All of this wascost-prohibitive back when we did O Brother, but now, theprocess they developed is practical for what we were trying to do onIntolerable,” he says.

This scanning approach was a big deal, according to EFilm's coloriston the film, Steve Scott.

“This is the only way to get true dynamic bandwidth, the fullrange of information, as opposed to scanning at 2k or less and blowingit up somewhat,” says Scott. “We found we can find moreinformation on slight details, like on a screen or a very thin line inthe shot. There might be slight aliasing in such frames, but you can'tdo much about it if you can't find it. When working with a DP on thelevel of Roger Deakins, you don't want to make any sacrifices, and withthis scanning approach, you don't have to.”

And what was Deakins' creative goal during Intolerable's DIprocess?

“We wanted to make a glossy picture,” says Deakins.“The film is about high-society, rich people, and we wanted thepeople and the locations to look rich, classy, more glossy than what weusually do on [Coen brothers'] features. To this end, I saturatedimages more this way than I could have done photochemically. This isespecially true of the Las Vegas scenes in the film. There is also ascene where two characters are lying by a swimming pool, and I had themintensify the blue in the pool and color in other places — likethe color of their drinks, for instance. I also lowered contrast on thetwo women, so that their flesh is a little flatter than it would havenormally appeared in that kind of light. There were a few places whereI also lowered contrast on Catherine [Zeta-Jones'] face.”

DP Roger Deakins, shown during production of IntolerableCruelty, says exteriors and "subtleties" particularly benefittedfrom the film’s DI process. Intolerable Cruelty was thefirst trip back to the DI suite for Deakins and the Coen brothers sincethey helped pioneer the process with O Brother.

To color-time the film, Scott used EFilm's proprietary colorcorrection system, built on a Colorfront hardware foundation (fromColorfront, Budapest, Hungary), upgraded with a suite of proprietarysoftware tools and look-up tables (LUTs). After the images were scannedthrough the Imagica scanner to the company's huge, SGI-based SANnetwork, filmmakers monitored Scott's progress on a cinema-size StewartFilmscreen, projected by a Barco D-Cine Premiere DP50 DLP projector,which operates with customized optics and more proprietary EFilmsoftware, according to company officials. During periodic filmouttests, filmmakers could also compare digital and film images in thesame suite, since the room also features a Kinoton FP 30ECII filmprojector. ArriLaser recorders were used for the filmouts.

Deakins stresses that the main advantage provided by the DI on apiece like Intolerable Cruelty is subtle in nature, butparticular sequences wouldn't look the same without the process. Hepoints to the wedding scene in the film in which Zeta-Jones' character,Marilyn Rexroth, weds Howard Doyle, played by Billy Bob Thornton.

“The DI is most valuable when shooting exteriors, and thewedding is a perfect example,” says Deakins. “I did a fewshots during the sequence to vignette the characters so that your eyefocuses more directly on that person. There is one shot in particularof Catherine in her wedding dress, surrounded by bridesmaids. I did avignette around her in the DI so that she was more prominent againstthis background. It's a type of effect that I maybe could have donewith careful lighting during production, but on our schedule, thatwould have been very complicated, and I knew exactly how we couldachieve that highlight during the DI process. We did the same thing onanother shot of Billy Bob, where he is eating wedding cake. It's just acase of freeing the character up from the background a little bitmore.”

The DI was used to subtly vignette lead characters occasionally, toextend the glossy, high-society feel of the visuals.

Scott credits, in particular, advanced noise-reduction filteringtechnology that is part of the EFilm color correction system for makingmany of these manipulations possible. Scott points out that dozens oftiny things were impacted in the movie using such tools.

“For one scene, Roger wanted to take green out of all foliagein the background, seen through windows from inside a house, to createa very cool feel because it is a scene in which George Clooney'scharacter is running through a house, trying to thwart an assassinationplot he started,” says Scott. “In the past, this would havehad to be done with compositing, but here, with our filters, we cantarget just the green leaves visible through the window, and take downsaturation just in those leaves without impacting skin tones in thepeople. Even the opening scene in the film, in which Geoffrey Rush'scharacter is driving his car and listening to music, we were able toaccentuate the greens in the passing foliage and make the sky a littlebluer. To target just the leaves — and there were lots of leavesas he drives through this residential neighborhood — requiresadvanced filtering. To be able to do noise reduction only to portionsof the sky, to bring out the blues more, all that takes advantage ofcapabilities of the process to make very subtle corrections to specificparts of the frame, while leaving other parts of the framealone.”

These kinds of subtleties, as Deakins calls such DI tweaks, arecrucial, but the DP insists at the end of the day, the real reason thatthe digital intermediate approach will proliferate throughout the filmworld is the release print issue. “If your release print comesfrom a single, original negative, then what the audience sees in thecinema will be of better quality than any traditional print done froman IP/IN process,” Deakins says.

Roger Deakins says the DI process was used to saturate images morethan would have been possible photochemically for certain sequences,particularly the Las Vegas scenes.

In other words, the DP suggests, regardless of what filmmakers are,or are not, doing to their images creatively during a digitalintermediate, the DI approach in getting to the release print is asuperior one.

“That's the way it will go in the next two to threeyears,” he says. “It's still quite expensive, but eventhose who aren't doing it already are thinking about doing it. Producea single negative from your digital intermediate, and then use that forall release prints. With Estar-base negative, it's now possible tostrike hundreds of prints from one negative, and with scanning andstorage costs down dramatically in the last couple years, there reallyisn't a reason for most projects to avoid it other than their budget,and eventually that won't be much of a hindrance.

“The only thing missing right now is the capacity to work infull 4k space all the way through the process. Now that we are scanningat 4k, at EFilm at least, I don't think it will be more than anotheryear or two before a couple of projects are working in a 4k situationall the way through. At that point, there will be no more questionsabout which way to go.”

When Joel and Ethan Coen decided to edit Intolerable Crueltyon Final Cut Pro, they didn't face the usual adjustments that most Avidusers experience. That's because the Coen Brothers had never editeddigitally using any interface, instead using a combination of Moviolaand Kem flatbeds.

Ethan Coen (left) and Joel Coen (right), with producer Brian Grazer,on the set of Intolerable Cruelty—the first film theyedited digitally, using Final Cut Pro.

What changed with Intolerable Cruelty? Postproductionsupervisor/associate film editor Dave Diliberto had finally had enoughof linear, analog editing. In the past, Diliberto had arranged for thebrothers to test Avid technology several times. But, according toDiliberto, the Coens were not able to mimic their preferred method ofworking. That method: Ethan examines each reel and marks cut points ineach take on a Moviola, and then passes the reels off to Joel, whoassembles the cuts on a Kem.

“When we started on Intolerable Cruelty, I pointed outthat this picture, unlike some of their previous work, was a romanticcomedy without complicated effects or music sequences, requiring fairlystraightforward editing, and they would not have to shoot a huge amountof film (just 175,000 feet of film was shot during production),”Diliberto says. “We contacted Apple, and they sent arepresentative to teach us the system and help figure out a method ofworking mirroring the way they worked when cutting film. The basicnotion was exactly the same: set up two CPUs side-by-side connected byan Ethernet cable, so that Ethan could mark tapes and find alternatesand dialogue cuts, and send those elements to Joel to assemble on hismachine.” (The brothers edited Intolerable on Final Cut 3.0, andat press time, were in the middle of editing their next film, TheLadykillers, using version 4.0.)

The only other important requirement was that the system fit intothe Coen's small Manhattan office. The configuration worked largelybecause the entire movie could be stored inside about 370GB of memoryon three Apple G4 workstations — one for each Coen brother andone to allow assistants to make tapes for sound editing and other uses.In other words, no fancy SAN infrastructure. For the moreeffects-intensive Ladykillers, the Coens have switched to a moreadvanced storage approach, using Apple's new Xserve RAID fiber-channelsystem.

LaserPacific, Hollywood, performed an HD transfer of all selecteddailies, dubbed those tapes to DVCAM, and then recorded those images toexternal firewire drives, which the Coens then simply attached to theircomputers. Using Final Cut's Cinema Tools' reverse telecine capability,Diliberto then supervised a conversion of those video frames to a 24fpsformat, and the Coen Brothers got to work.

For audio, he says they delivered OMF files, an EDL, and 24fpsQuicktimes of each sequence to the sound department to mix to.Following their EDL, the Coens then cut the negative and delivered itto EFilm, Hollywood, to finish the film as a digital intermediate(see “Roger Returns,” page 60).