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The D-Cinema Horizon:
The DCI Workflow in the Real World

Sep 1, 2005 12:00 PM, By Darroch Greer

The declaration of the new DCI guidelines marks the end of a long technological journey. But the first project to use the new digital cinema standard isn’t showing at the cineplex. A Thousand Roads, produced for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, breaks fresh ground using the new specifications.

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On July 27, 2005, the Digital Cinema Initiatives group announced its final system requirements and specifications for digital cinema. Formed in March 2002, DCI is a limited liability partnership of the seven major Hollywood studios — Disney, Fox, MGM, Paramount, Sony, Universal, and Warner Bros. — formed to help theatrical projector and equipment manufacturers create uniform and compatible digital cinema equipment as a standard for theaters in the United States — and ideally the world. No mean feat.

In the midst of all this engineering and politics, a quiet gem of a film has been created, the first to be completed with the DCI standards. It is the signature film of the Smithsonian's new National Museum of the American Indian, which opened on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., one year ago. The film, called A Thousand Roads, was screened earlier this year at Sundance, and when it was digitally projected from a Christie DLP 2K projector at NMAI on April 8, 2005, it became a landmark in cinema history.

“It's unique in that it's the first film for public exhibition completed in accordance with the 2K protocol established by the Digital Cinema Initiatives,” says Barry Clark, co-chairman and executive producer for Mandalay Media Arts. “The 2K protocol is a stepping stone to the 4K protocol, or pathway, which is designed to deliver true 4,000-horizontal-line resolution images to cinema screens with digital projection. This will probably be at least six times the resolution of what people now see in 35mm prints, which we have reason to believe are under a thousand lines of resolution by the time you've actually got a release print.”

“It truly was exciting because we felt as we were doing this picture that we were literally breaking new ground,” says Leon Silverman, president of Laser Pacific and director of strategic business development for Kodak's Entertainment Imaging Services. “Many movies have been shown on digital screens before, but they were films that were made for other distribution. And many times people have done high-definition work for a digital screen, but this really was a workflow that took the digital intermediate process and the data centric process for digital release to a new place.”

Barry Clark's Mandalay Media Arts formed a partnership with the Smithsonian when it created the IMAX film Galapagos. Through the connection with the Museum of Natural History, Clark was contacted by Jim Volkert, project director with NMAI, to talk about ways the museum could use high-definition video in its displays. Clark brought writer/producer Scott Garen into the mix, and for several days they met with 20 Indians from across the Americas. The meeting was headed by Richard West, director of NMAI and a Southern Cheyenne. This brainstorming session led to a contract for three projects, the first of which was the signature film for the museum, A Thousand Roads.

The film is about 40 minutes long and is designed to help move visitors through the museum. The first-person narrative connects four empathetic stories spanning the Western hemisphere.

The voice of John Trudell, Indian poet, activist, and Santee Sioux, goes out as a sort of virtual DJ, in much the manner of local radio DJs on reservations. “This is what the Indian DJs do when they're talking to a little community in Montana,” says Clark. “They'll say, ‘Mabel, I know you got to get your income tax in. I know you don't want to do it, but you got to do it.’ And this is why they love these local Indian DJs. So we were going to evoke that.”

The group chose the stories first by geography, to capture the breadth of Indian life and to hit upon some of the iconic landscapes of native America — the Arctic, Manhattan, the Southwest, and Machu Picchu in Peru. Each story is that of an Indian individual dealing with a daily crisis to which a multicultural audience might be able to relate.

The Smithsonian is the most visited museum in the world. Not only are 99.9 percent of Smithsonian visitors non-native American, 40 percent of them are not even American. The idea was to speak to visitors' emotions in a visceral way and remind them of all they have in common with native America — all in 40 minutes.

Indian filmmakers were brought in to bring the story to life. Muskogee/Creek poet and musician Joy Harjo was co-writer, and Chris Eyre, a Southern Cheyenne/Arapaho of Smoke Signals fame was director. Together they created a moving film of unmistakable beauty and tenderness. But to Barry Clark, the responsibility of delivering an emotional, immersive experience shouldn't just fall on the actors and crew. The technical aspects of delivery play just as important a role, he says.

“Since the turn of the millennium, or before, we're in a very cluttered media landscape. It's never been more cluttered — where there's tremendous competition for the different forms of classic media, like cinema and television. People choose to do things that involve them,” Clark says. “[On the other hand] the Web involves. They are ‘hot media’ in the McLuhanesque sense. They're media that engage; media that you participate in.

“It's the death of the proscenium arch. So when you create a so-called ‘documentary,’ and we try not to use that word, but a non-fiction program, you try to make it appear like it's happening now. That it's a visceral, immersive, engaging adventure — whatever the subject is.”

The Thousand Roads team began with the design of the theater. Indeed, there is no proscenium arch. The screen is curved, a half-circle reflecting the curve of the 322 seats for the audience, making a full circle. “We filled every inch of available space with the screen,” says Clark. “It is a 34ft. screen in a 36ft. space, and it's in 2.35:1 aspect ratio. The people who sit closest to the screen, it consumes their peripheral vision. … When the lights are out, all you've got to look at is that screen. The farthest seat away, I think, is 60 feet.”

For maximum clarity, the movie was shot on Super 35 film stock. “[The goal was] to do this as a true digital intermediate and not in high-def,” explains Silverman of the choice to shoot film and eschew HD both in acquisition and post. “We wanted to follow a pathway of not transferring this film to high definition and finishing in high definition, but to finish this as data from a very high-resolution data scan.”

Clark explains further. “The 2K pathway really involves scanning from a 35 negative at 2K or better resolution — in our case 4K — and then oversampling 2K, which increases the resolution even further. First of all, you've got a 5K image or better on that Super 35 negative. You oversample when you scan that to 4K, in that each of those 4K pixels has more information from that 5 or 6K negative — you're sort of averaging the information in that pixel area.

“Then you oversample again when you downconvert to 2K, averaging the information in those 4K pixels to scrunch them into 2K. So you wind up with a 2K image that is better than if you started off with a 2K camera, like the Viper, for instance.”

Clark says he also prefers the dynamic range of the film negative, as opposed to that of a digital camera. With the exposure curve of film at the high end, there's no danger of the dread “white clip” of a signal cutting out, he says.

Once the team had a true 2K digital master scanned from the negative, it stayed in the 2K realm for color grading and the conforming of images and data — what used to be called the online. “All of the color correction for this work was done as part of a data-centric workflow and not a video workflow,” says Silverman, “and as a result I think you'll see the images on the screen are quite remarkable.”

“There have to be new pieces of hardware for each of these steps,” admits Clark. “The conforming, the color grading — and a lot of that hardware was still in beta when we did this, like Autodesk [Discreet] Lustre for the color grading. By staying in 2K, massive amounts of data have to go back and forth through servers. A huge amount of storage is involved — in the terabytes. Very few facilities are capable of doing this. Laser Pacific was the only one that we could do this at when we did it — in Los Angeles; maybe in the world.”

In Clark's mind, Laser Pacific (now owned by Kodak) is an R&D facility. Clark would never refer to it as a vendor; the company is a partner. “Leon and I got together at our favorite Pakistani restaurant. I said, ‘This is what we want to do.’ And he says, ‘Let's do it!’ We then enter into a kind of adventure together. Occasionally they have to be on the phone to Montreal to ask the people at Autodesk, ‘Why's this doing this? Why am I getting this message?’ But it all worked out, and it's really far more enjoyable than going to some kind of turnkey place where you have to wear a badge and they clock you in and clock you out. Ultimately, no one keeps track of time. It becomes a joint project.”

“One of the very interesting things about the process,” says Silverman, “is that the environment at Laser Pacific is almost a mirror image of the environment and technology that's being used for display in Washington, including the sides of the screens. It's a 33ft. screen in this theater, so when the filmmakers were making it, it was literally as if they were sitting in the theater at the Smithsonian in the way it was going to be displayed.”

Increasingly, content creators who work for non-cinema and non-broadcast understand that it is crucial to see work in progress in screening situations that mirror the technology and environment of the final display as closely as possible.

Sound, the final immersive element, also benefited from the storage capacity of the system. “Because we have no bandwidth issues in the audio area with this server,” says Clark, “you can put out audio that doesn't have to have any noise reduction in it, so we mixed the film at Sonic Magic in Culver City. It's 8-channel — 7.1 channel surround — and we added no noise reduction, no sound processing, no compression to the sound. Instead of going through a Dolby sound processor, as things tend to do in movie theaters, it goes out clean. So we're getting all the highs and lows, the full spectrum of sound.”

The 2K pathway will be rolled out over the next year or two. The 4K platform will follow in three, four, and five years from now. The 2K projection is feasible because of Texas Instruments and its 2048×1080-line imaging Black Chip, upon which 2K projectors are based. The first projector was installed in Grauman's Chinese Theatre in December 2004. In the NMAI theater there is a sign: “Theater projection system with DLP Cinema technology provided by Texas Instruments.”

Christie, DPI, and Barco are all churning out black-chip projectors as fast as they can, with some 200 projectors now around the world. The United States is lagging behind countries such as Ireland, Malaysia, China, and India, which are making huge deals, because the U.S. has such a large infrastructure to convert. The transition to digital will be complete in 10 years or so, Clark estimates.

Through all of this, Clark has watched the National Association of Theater Owners follow the parallel path of the National Association of Broadcasters from several years before. The first battle front was television, the second is cinema.

“At NAB in 1991 there was tremendous resistance to high definition,” Clark says. “A lot of people saying, ‘I'll be dragged kicking and screaming.’ These are broadcasters, small broadcasters especially, but even some of the network and cable companies said, ‘No way in the world. I'll sell my business before I'll do that.’ Then, of course, flash forward to NAB 2005, and there is no mention of standard definition anywhere. You couldn't find a standard definition set on the floor.

“The National Association of Theater Owners three years ago devoted this little panel to the subject [of digital projection], but it was under other panels, [with the attitude] ‘Don't talk to me about that. They'll bury me with my 35 projector.’ Now it's the hot button issue at NATO, so it's clear that it's totally inevitable.”

It is in some measure ironic that a film made by native peoples portraying traditional cultures should be in the vanguard of the digital revolution. But it is fitting.

The metaphor that came out of the brainstorming session with the Indian advisers was the idea of a boat, seen as a Pacific Northwestern canoe in the film, in which all of us are riding. “We're going up or down the stream paddling,” says Clark, “each of us from somewhere else, each with a few belongings — our cultural legacy or memory — and not quite sure where we're going. No map. … The narrator says, ‘We are all on this journey together, a thousand roads, all leading home.’ We don't know where our home is, but we're all heading there in one way or another.”

But now, when it comes to digital cinema at least, there is a map.

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