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Reader SurveyTrue Colors
Jun 9, 2007 1:00 PM, By Michael Goldman
A look at color grading and cinematography on Ratatouille, Shrek the Third, and Surf's Up.
Developing subtleties of different shades of yellow for the upcoming Bee Movie is among the many challenges Technicolor Digital Intermediates' digital colorist Tim Peeler is working on.
© 2007 DreamWorks Animation LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Grading Bees, Handling 3D
Technicolor Digital Intermediates colorist Tim Peeler is extremely immersed these days in the world of animated films. After finishing Shrek the Third, he is now working on (among other projects) Bee Movie.
Peeler has already done tests and trailer work for Bee Movie, and he told millimeter that process convinced filmmakers that the movie would require a digital intermediate to successfully grapple with extremely subtle color issues.
“The yellow on the bee himself is a big thing, and [for trailers], they were having a lot of trouble getting that just right, so I've been tweaking that for them,” Peeler says. “There are essentially different yellows on his body — his rear end compared to his main body is subtly different. Plus, the movie has some complicated visual effects with shadows and shading, and the animators wanted to drop background luminance or brightness levels to focus attention on the characters. So, to make their deadlines, they felt it made sense to skip some of those effects [and do them during the DI process instead]. So, already, just having the availability of the DI process has made their pipeline much faster, and they can avoid rendering certain things right now, and still feel comfortable about how it will turn out in the end. [The DI suite] has become a powerful workstation for filmmakers in that sense. You can really experiment, and they are doing a lot of that in Bee Movie.”
Peeler is also excited about the industry's march into 3D. He says he has, in recent years, developed improved methods for color-grading 3D releases. “[That whole 3D paradigm] has come a long way from where we were when we did Chicken Little [2005],” Peeler says. “Then, the directors didn't realize how dark the 3D would look compared to their 2D version, and it was a bit of a shock for them at first. We then learned how to compensate for the contrast difference in various ways, but at the time, it was all new.
“Plus, at the time, we found out that people in the field were all over the place about how to set up 3D correctly. We had to go to the El Capitan Theater [in Hollywood] and others at 6 a.m. to check out the projectors for ourselves before they opened for business — it was all so new. The thing to remember is, when you are watching 3D with polarized [3D] glasses, everything looks green. So, in 3D, your yellows will not be regular yellow. They will be green-yellow, so we have to compensate for that in the color correction suite. It's still not as transparent a process as we'd like, but it's getting there. You just have to do lots of specialized work on the yellows and other colors to get them more accurate.”
Peeler says the process Technicolor uses for 3D is to basically follow the same one-pass approach initially for converting the imagery from film color space to digital color space, using proprietary LUTs, as with any other digital cinema release. Then, he color corrects the left-eye imagery to emulate the 2D process, applies those settings to the right-eye files, and then views the whole thing with glasses on a Real D 3D silver screen in his Da Vinci 2K Plus suite, applying selected tweaks as needed. But there are other issues to consider.
“There is the battle over how bright you can go before you break the image and get clipping and so forth,” he says. “We've done a lot of image testing in theaters. When you go to 3D, there is a change in screen brightness. For a film release, we work based on an average of 16ft. lamberts for a typical film screen. The digital cinema spec is 14ft. lamberts. But for current 3D projection, the system we used dropped the light levels all the way down to 3.5ft. lamberts. You are basically throwing away over two-thirds of the brightness.
“Then, we had to figure out how far to push aspects of the color correction to get it right for particular theaters, since some of them have a very long throw. With light rays bouncing off the [Real D] silver screen at a direct angle versus a standard screen, which disburses light — that can impact things. What seating do you give away in the theater? What's best for the customer? We have to think about all those things when we color grade a 3D release.”
— M.G.
