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HD Assist for Scorsese

Sep 26, 2006 8:00 AM, By Michael Goldman

Martin Scorsese and his longtime cinematographer, Michael Ballhaus, ASC, shot Scorsese’s new picture, The Departed, on film, as they always have, and yet, high-definition technology played a centrol role in pulling the entire project together. Spearheaded by a workflow designed by visual effects supervisor Rob Legato, the project used HD dailies for the second straight Scorsese movie (after 2004’s The Aviator), and for the first time in Ballhaus’ career. But the DI on the project, handled by Technicolor Digital Intermediates (TDI), also used HD technology, as did much of the visual effects workflow.

Scorsese, during an exclusive interview slated to appear in Millimeter’s upcoming October/November issue, said that he has become a convert to the HD dailies/preview/DI workflow approach as a method for visualizing what will be, at the end of the day, a very specifically designed film product.

“I had no problem dealing with the high-def dailies, even in terms of utilizing the high-def for rough cut screenings,” Scorsese says. “In fact, I found it easier. Not worrying about waiting for an optical version to come out of the lab has freed me up greatly. It’s all a tradeoff, and more than worth it when you consider how much creative freedom it gives me to be able to highlight things.”

For The Departed, film shot by Ballhaus was transferred to HDCAM-SR tape and given a detailed color pass at Technicolor New York. That HD material was used for dailies, and to build several HD preview versions of the movie, which Scorsese and his associates viewed as 1080p 4:4:4 imagery through an NEC iS8 digital projector while testing the movie and making crucial creative decisions about its direction.

Later, in order to satisfy Scorsese’s desire to participate in the digital intermediate from his home base in New York, Legato teamed with officials at Technicolor to build a bi-coastal DI pipeline that benefited from incorporating the HD version into the workflow.

First, Technicolor fashioned an exact replica of colorist Stephen Nakamura’s Da Vinci suite in Burbank at Technicolor New York, building identical LUTs into digital projectors in both suites. Eventually, Scorsese, Ballhaus, and editor Thelma Schoonmaker, ACE, would collaborate with Nakamura during that final phase in New York. But first, Nakamura performed an initial color pass and pre-trims in Burbank.

And during that initial phase, Legato and Technicolor officials figured out a way for Nakamura to see the HD version of the movie projected in an approximation of Cineon color space, very close to how they expected it to look on film, to use as a template for his initial color pass. That method of viewing the HD version was later used in New York so that Scorsese and his team could see both the evolving 2K version and the HD version projected on the same screen through the same projector—giving them a better understanding of the subtle differences between the two as they finalized color decisions.

“You basically do a reverse LUT,” Legato says. “If you take an RGB image and bring it into the computer, and then want to go film it out, you have to turn it into logarithmic space. So here, you just have to get a LUT that is compatible with the LUT wherever you are screening it at. It’s not that difficult to get done, but no one does it generally because they don’t think to convert one to the other. They assume it wants to live in whatever its native state is. But it was really a simple affair. It’s just that you have to go from one tape machine, through the inverse LUT, to another tape machine in real time, coverting the [HD] images.”

The movie was then transferred to HDCAM-SR tape (4:4:4 1080p) from the un-corrected original 2K data, and that imagery, along with an eight-reel segmented EDL timeline was transported to New York as data stored in a DVS Clipster system for the final phase of the DI.

Filmmakers claim the up-front work done on the HD preview version of the movie allowed the final phase of the DI to happen over the course of just 10 hours, greatly speeding up Scorsese’s decision-making process.

All that said, the question remains—will Scorsese ever take the leap into shooting with HD cameras for a feature film? Shortly after completing The Aviator a couple of years ago, the legendary filmmaker told Millimeter (digitalcontentproducer.com/di/depth/video_scorseses_color_homage) he thought he would do it “eventually.” After The Departed, he’s still not ready to commit, but he’s obviously intrigued.

“Yes, I am considering a digital camera,” he says. “The problem for me is figuring out what the tradeoff is in terms of how much it speeds us up and is cost-effective, compared to any possible loss of quality. I’m still a die-hard celluloid guy, but at a certain point, you have to say, if this is the way things are going to go, then you might have to try it. Depending on the subject matter, there are certain films it would make sense for. I recall back in the 1970s, for Taxi Driver, we talked about doing it on black-and-white [standard-def] video because of financing issues. We had some tests screened on a video projector, but the quality wasn’t very good in those days, and we pulled back on the idea. But the technology is far superior now, obviously, so I’m sure I’ll try. I just don’t want to be learning with new equipment on the set. That’s the real problem. I expect I’ll try something smaller first on high-def and we’ll see what happens.”

For more from Millimeter’s exclusive chat with Scorsese and his colleagues, and a detailed look at the workflow behind the making of The Departed, see the upcoming October/November issue of Millimeter.

© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.