Roger Returns
Nov 1, 2003 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman
Sidebars
Digital Coens
Deakins and the Coens Go Back to DI
 Joel Coen (left) and Ethan Coen (center) direct Catherine Zeta-Jones and George Clooney during production of Intolerable Cruelty. |
After a black-and-white, photochemical detour with The Man Who Wasn't There in 2001, cinematographer Roger Deakins steered the Coen brothers back into the digital intermediate suite at EFilm, Hollywood, for consecutive feature films — their recent Universal release Intolerable Cruelty and the upcoming The Ladykillers (a Buena Vista 2004 release). Deakins and the Coens thus renewed their acquaintance with a rapidly proliferating process they 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 the process since O Brother in just three years? A whole lot, he says.
“The big difference is the projection and monitoring of the images during the process,” says Deakins, who shot Intolerable 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 a monitor. It was the best available at the time, but the colors did not always accurately reflect how the images would look on a filmout. Therefore, during that job, we had to do a number of filmouts to check and see what we were getting, and we did have to go back and re-do several 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 see straightaway if there are any anomalies, if you are getting noise into the images. You can even blow up a full section of the image and examine individual pixels to see if, and how, they are being altered while you are working. That capability has made the process more straightforward and comfortable than it was 2 to 3 years ago.”
The Intolerable DI process was also a lot quicker this time around — about a week, compared to over 10 weeks for O Brother. “To be fair, we were not doing as many complicated things to the images as we did with O Brother,” Deakins explains. “But the point is, if we were doing that film's digital intermediate today, it would be a faster and more efficient process than it was back then.”
As a result, Deakins concedes he has become a permanent convert to the DI approach. “Cost permitting, I now favor doing a digital intermediate for all my films,” he says. The cost issue, obviously, plays a central role and is the main reason why his newest release, Vadim Perelman's DreamWorks' film, House of Sand and Fog, did not go through the DI process. “I now find myself wishing we could have done a DI on that film,” he adds.
Ironically, according to Deakins, the Coen brothers were not particularly interested in doing a DI on Intolerable Cruelty. They had pegged Ladykillers for the process, however, due to extensive visual effects, and so they relented when Deakins suggested midway through the production of Intolerable Cruelty that they go forward with a DI on that film, as well. (At press time, the movie Deakins was shooting for M. Night Shyamalan, The Village, was also slated for an upcoming DI at EFilm.)
“I suggested the DI on Intolerable,” says Deakins. “The brothers hadn't really considered it until then. But we were doing all these tests with EFilm for Ladykillers at the time, and I said, let's do it for this movie also. I figured it would give me a chance to be better prepared for Ladykillers and would also let me saturate the colors and give Intolerable more of 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, so everyone agreed we might as well go ahead and give it a try.”
Scanning Advantage
According to Deakins and Dave Diliberto, the associate film editor on Intolerable Cruelty and postproduction supervisor for the Coen brothers, the choice of EFilm, an eight-year-old facility dedicated to scanning, recording, and now, digital intermediate work, was largely because EFilm has adopted a 4k, pin-registered scanning approach.
 The digital intermediate process was strategically used to add a saturated, more glossy look to characters and locations. |
“The main reason we felt comfortable going there was the fact that they use the Imagica [Imager XE] scanner, and I believe they are the only ones using that scanner in the United States for feature films,” says Diliberto. “It's what I call a virtual 4k scan. [EFilm calls it a double, over-sampled scan, meaning the image is scanned at 4k resolution, and then held in memory at 4k temporarily before being saved as a 2k file.] This gives us access to more of the information from the negative to work with during the color-timing process than an image scanned at 2k.
“The other big thing, of course, was that we could output hundreds of release prints from an [extremely durable, polyester-based Kodak] Estar negative — all from the same print negative, meaning we have less generation loss on the release prints. [Four identical Estar-based negatives were struck at EFilm to create the release prints, and a single acetate print was also created for archival purposes.] And the pin-registration means the image is much more stable, without the slightest trace of movement from frame-to-frame. It takes a bit longer, but we found it was worth it. All of this was cost-prohibitive back when we did O Brother, but now, the process they developed is practical for what we were trying to do on Intolerable,” he says.
This scanning approach was a big deal, according to EFilm's colorist on the film, Steve Scott.
“This is the only way to get true dynamic bandwidth, the full range of information, as opposed to scanning at 2k or less and blowing it up somewhat,” says Scott. “We found we can find more information on slight details, like on a screen or a very thin line in the shot. There might be slight aliasing in such frames, but you can't do much about it if you can't find it. When working with a DP on the level of Roger Deakins, you don't want to make any sacrifices, and with this scanning approach, you don't have to.”
And what was Deakins' creative goal during Intolerable's DI process?
“We wanted to make a glossy picture,” says Deakins. “The film is about high-society, rich people, and we wanted the people and the locations to look rich, classy, more glossy than what we usually do on [Coen brothers'] features. To this end, I saturated images more this way than I could have done photochemically. This is especially true of the Las Vegas scenes in the film. There is also a scene where two characters are lying by a swimming pool, and I had them intensify the blue in the pool and color in other places — like the color of their drinks, for instance. I also lowered contrast on the two women, so that their flesh is a little flatter than it would have normally appeared in that kind of light. There were a few places where I also lowered contrast on Catherine [Zeta-Jones'] face.”
 DP Roger Deakins, shown during production of Intolerable Cruelty, says exteriors and "subtleties" particularly benefitted from the film’s DI process. Intolerable Cruelty was the first trip back to the DI suite for Deakins and the Coen brothers since they helped pioneer the process with O Brother. |
To color-time the film, Scott used EFilm's proprietary color correction system, built on a Colorfront hardware foundation (from Colorfront, Budapest, Hungary), upgraded with a suite of proprietary software tools and look-up tables (LUTs). After the images were scanned through the Imagica scanner to the company's huge, SGI-based SAN network, filmmakers monitored Scott's progress on a cinema-size Stewart Filmscreen, projected by a Barco D-Cine Premiere DP50 DLP projector, which operates with customized optics and more proprietary EFilm software, according to company officials. During periodic filmout tests, filmmakers could also compare digital and film images in the same suite, since the room also features a Kinoton FP 30ECII film projector. ArriLaser recorders were used for the filmouts.
Subtle Changes
Deakins stresses that the main advantage provided by the DI on a piece like Intolerable Cruelty is subtle in nature, but particular sequences wouldn't look the same without the process. He points 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 the wedding is a perfect example,” says Deakins. “I did a few shots during the sequence to vignette the characters so that your eye focuses more directly on that person. There is one shot in particular of Catherine in her wedding dress, surrounded by bridesmaids. I did a vignette around her in the DI so that she was more prominent against this background. It's a type of effect that I maybe could have done with careful lighting during production, but on our schedule, that would have been very complicated, and I knew exactly how we could achieve that highlight during the DI process. We did the same thing on another shot of Billy Bob, where he is eating wedding cake. It's just a case of freeing the character up from the background a little bit more.”
 The DI was used to subtly vignette lead characters occasionally, to extend the glossy, high-society feel of the visuals. |
Scott credits, in particular, advanced noise-reduction filtering technology that is part of the EFilm color correction system for making many of these manipulations possible. Scott points out that dozens of tiny things were impacted in the movie using such tools.
“For one scene, Roger wanted to take green out of all foliage in the background, seen through windows from inside a house, to create a very cool feel because it is a scene in which George Clooney's character is running through a house, trying to thwart an assassination plot he started,” says Scott. “In the past, this would have had to be done with compositing, but here, with our filters, we can target just the green leaves visible through the window, and take down saturation just in those leaves without impacting skin tones in the people. Even the opening scene in the film, in which Geoffrey Rush's character is driving his car and listening to music, we were able to accentuate the greens in the passing foliage and make the sky a little bluer. To target just the leaves — and there were lots of leaves as he drives through this residential neighborhood — requires advanced filtering. To be able to do noise reduction only to portions of the sky, to bring out the blues more, all that takes advantage of capabilities of the process to make very subtle corrections to specific parts of the frame, while leaving other parts of the frame alone.”
These kinds of subtleties, as Deakins calls such DI tweaks, are crucial, but the DP insists at the end of the day, the real reason that the digital intermediate approach will proliferate throughout the film world is the release print issue. “If your release print comes from a single, original negative, then what the audience sees in the cinema will be of better quality than any traditional print done from an IP/IN process,” Deakins says.
 Roger Deakins says the DI process was used to saturate images more than 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 digital intermediate, the DI approach in getting to the release print is a superior one.
“That's the way it will go in the next two to three years,” he says. “It's still quite expensive, but even those who aren't doing it already are thinking about doing it. Produce a single negative from your digital intermediate, and then use that for all release prints. With Estar-base negative, it's now possible to strike hundreds of prints from one negative, and with scanning and storage costs down dramatically in the last couple years, there really isn'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 in full 4k space all the way through the process. Now that we are scanning at 4k, at EFilm at least, I don't think it will be more than another year or two before a couple of projects are working in a 4k situation all the way through. At that point, there will be no more questions about which way to go.”
Sidebar
Digital Coens
When Joel and Ethan Coen decided to edit Intolerable Cruelty on Final Cut Pro, they didn't face the usual adjustments that most Avid users experience. That's because the Coen Brothers had never edited digitally using any interface, instead using a combination of Moviola and Kem flatbeds.
 Ethan Coen (left) and Joel Coen (right), with producer Brian Grazer, on the set of Intolerable Cruelty—the first film they edited digitally, using Final Cut Pro. |
What changed with Intolerable Cruelty? Postproduction supervisor/associate film editor Dave Diliberto had finally had enough of linear, analog editing. In the past, Diliberto had arranged for the brothers to test Avid technology several times. But, according to Diliberto, the Coens were not able to mimic their preferred method of working. That method: Ethan examines each reel and marks cut points in each take on a Moviola, and then passes the reels off to Joel, who assembles the cuts on a Kem.
“When we started on Intolerable Cruelty, I pointed out that this picture, unlike some of their previous work, was a romantic comedy without complicated effects or music sequences, requiring fairly straightforward editing, and they would not have to shoot a huge amount of film (just 175,000 feet of film was shot during production),” Diliberto says. “We contacted Apple, and they sent a representative to teach us the system and help figure out a method of working mirroring the way they worked when cutting film. The basic notion was exactly the same: set up two CPUs side-by-side connected by an Ethernet cable, so that Ethan could mark tapes and find alternates and dialogue cuts, and send those elements to Joel to assemble on his machine.” (The brothers edited Intolerable on Final Cut 3.0, and at press time, were in the middle of editing their next film, The Ladykillers, using version 4.0.)
The only other important requirement was that the system fit into the Coen's small Manhattan office. The configuration worked largely because the entire movie could be stored inside about 370GB of memory on three Apple G4 workstations — one for each Coen brother and one to allow assistants to make tapes for sound editing and other uses. In other words, no fancy SAN infrastructure. For the more effects-intensive Ladykillers, the Coens have switched to a more advanced storage approach, using Apple's new Xserve RAID fiber-channel system.
LaserPacific, Hollywood, performed an HD transfer of all selected dailies, dubbed those tapes to DVCAM, and then recorded those images to external firewire drives, which the Coens then simply attached to their computers. Using Final Cut's Cinema Tools' reverse telecine capability, Diliberto then supervised a conversion of those video frames to a 24fps format, and the Coen Brothers got to work.
For audio, he says they delivered OMF files, an EDL, and 24fps Quicktimes of each sequence to the sound department to mix to. Following their EDL, the Coens then cut the negative and delivered it to EFilm, Hollywood, to finish the film as a digital intermediate (see “Roger Returns,” page 60).
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