DI Down Under

As the digital intermediate process continues to proliferate in thefeature film world, the question arises: How can DI be affordable forsmaller-budget, independent movies and the facilities that servicethem, and also allow those facilities to continue to serve their corecommercial and video clients? A small Australian indie filmThunderstruck, slated for a down under release, recently found away to get a DI done. Directed by Darren Ashton and shot by GeoffreyHall in Australia earlier this year on 4-perf, Super 35mm stock, thefilm was recently mastered via the DI process at Digital PicturesSydney in Sydney, Australia.

(Top) Colorist Siggy Ferstl at Digital Pictures Sydney used PCs torun da Vinci's Nucleas system and perform a digital intermediate onThunderstruck (bottom).

Siggy Ferstl, head of film and telecine at Digital Pictures Sydneyand the colorist on Thunderstruck, says the process wasaffordable for Thunderstruck's producers because of DigitalPictures' choice of a DI pipeline, built around da Vinci's new modularNucleas product suite. Digital Pictures acquired pre-release versionsof the Nucleas server interface and conform tools from da Vinci andplugged them into its existing network and da Vinci 2k color correctioninfrastructure to perform the DI on Thunderstruck.

Da Vinci officials say the eventual Nucleas system will consist offour different products — the server interface, conform tools,and formatting and ingest tools for facilities that need to build theirDI infrastructure from scratch, as opposed to plugging new tools intoan existing network. The Nucleas server and conform technologies arecurrently shipping, while the rest of the system is expected to shiplater in 2004.

According to Ferstl, the system permitted Digital Pictures Sydney to“perform many of the functions that are part of the DI puzzle— like dustbusting and dirt and scratch removal or concealment— in the background on [Linux-based] PCs, using off-shelfstorage” while “doing the color-correction part of theprocess with our best operator in our best suite using acolor-correction toolset we are used to using — the da Vinci 2ksystem — without learning any new interface or approach. In otherwords, Nucleas let us use our existing color-correction approach, butadded the path of other functions we needed to do full-on digitalintermediate work without requiring us to install a whole new,million-dollar editing suite.”

The tools installed at Digital Pictures Sydney allowed the companyto integrate the da Vinci system seamlessly with its Spirit DataCine toscan the film at 2k, 10-bit log resolution onto 4.5TB of storage. TheNucleas approach then permitted Ferstl to load an EDL into his da Vinci2k color corrector to conform the 2k data scans into six film spools.The 2k system plugs into a Snell & Wilcox MetaShare data server toperform the conform and automatically render dissolves, speed changes,and freezes — all controlled through a da Vinci interface.

“Once the conform was done, we then played back the materialoff our disc drives as data,” Ferstl explains. “It wasextremely important for us to work in log film color space, so we usedda Vinci's monitor calibration software to accurately view the imageson our [20in. Sony graphics] monitor. The great thing about this systemis the fact that it permits us to access the entire film in a nonlinearway, in context, and then performing our color-grading functions with atoolset we are used to, which is always operating in realtime. Once theconform and grade was complete, the entire movie was recorded out tofilm using an Arri Laser Recorder.”