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Reader SurveyNew DI Pipeline
May 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman
Spider-Man 3 marks Technicolor's 4K debut.
The 4K DI for Spider-Man 3 was brought to Technicolor Digital Intermediates' new facility on the Sony lot in Culver City, Calif., largely to take advantage of the facility's physical proximity to Sony Pictures Imageworks, where the visual effects were created, and Sony's mixing stages.
Spider-Man 3 was, of course, a huge digital effects project (for a detailed account of the film's visual effects process, click here). Significantly, it was also Technicolor Digital Intermediates (TDI)'s first 4K DI project, executed at its new facility on the Sony lot in Culver City, Calif. Because the facility is physically close to Sony Pictures Imageworks and Sony's sound mixing stages, the job was brought there to complete a unified Sony-based pipeline. (The DI for the first two films was done at EFilm, Hollywood. EFilm did a 4K DI on Spider-Man 2, and still handled the filmout for Spider-Man 3.)
The big difference in the new TDI pipeline was the fact that colorist Stephen Nakamura relied exclusively on Da Vinci's new Resolve 4K, the software-based color correction system chosen as one of the pillars of the new Sony-based facility. (At press time, TDI had two Resolve-based DI suites and one Autodesk Lustre suite.) That marked a change for TDI, Nakamura, and the Spider-Man franchise. According to Nakamura, the change was both seamless and to the project's benefit.
Taking a break from his next DI at the facility — this time on another superhero epic, Fantastic Four: The Rise of the Silver Surfer — Nakamura sat down to chat with millimeter about his latest Spider-Man experience.
millimeter: What was it like working inside the new facility, in such close proximity to the studio where the movie and the visual effects were created?
Colorist Stephen Nakamura says the Sandman character was the most challenging to color correct because the mid-tone color of sand can easily become warm, cold, or green. He used a Da Vinci Resolve 4K software-based system to ensure the sand remained consistent throughout the movie.
Nakamura: It was great. Imageworks is right there; the mix stage is in an adjacent building. For filmmakers working 16 to 18 hours a day, it's a nice thing to have their cutting room, their DI facility, and their effects stage all in walking distance of each other. That saved hours on the project, and I'm sure everybody got more sleep. And we have a dark-fiber connection to Imageworks, which allowed them to simply drop their work onto our SAN.
Is the setup in your DI room similar to the one you have used for years at Technicolor in Burbank?
For the most part, we've replicated my setup here — except, of course, for the fact that we are using the Da Vinci Resolve 4K color corrector. Mainly, that means I have more tools now. We use the same color science as at our two L.A. locations, and have the benefit of having the best projection calibration, overseen by Josh Pines and Chris Kutcka.
Please explain those new tools, and how they helped on this project.
Resolve has much more powerful color correction tools than the [Da Vinci 2K]. For the opening title sequence of the movie, for instance, where they show scenes from previous Spider-Man films, it worked to great benefit. I had 11 defocus channels working at the same time, which used to be a difficult thing to do. I was doing chromakeys with defocus on 11 different windows in the opening title sequence — about a minute-and-a-half sequence. That wasn't really possible before. I could even have used more [defocus channels] if I needed it. [Director Sam Raimi] wanted to color correct each individual scene from the old Spider-Man movies as a card from the scene comes flying by. As each went by, I put a color correction over them and had the titles running through, so I had to do careful chromakeys to separate them from the titles, and I had to use a lot of defocus, which made it a cleaner signal. So that's pretty new.
What was the learning curve like for you, using a software-based system for the first time?
It was very similar, for the most part. The slight learning curve involved the fact that it was software, and we were dealing with [2K] proxies. The difference involved working with nodes, almost like a layering-type system. The node approach for color correction is a bit different from how we worked with the 2K system. So, in your mind, you have to spend some time understanding how that works. It can be a bit confusing, at first, to keep track of multiple corrections that you are doing with windows for a particular shot, but you get used to it, and it's that way because it is such a powerful tool. For the most part, I worked just as I always have. And if I had questions about something, the guys from Da Vinci were always there for me.
With this being such a massive visual-effects project, requiring numerous re-conforms along the way, how does Resolve approach the problem of maintaining and tracking your grades from session to session?
Over half the shots were coming in from different vendors, and we also had my initial pass on the principal photography for the director. Once the shots came in, we had to massage the whole thing to get it to fall into place — the principal photography and the effects combined together. Along the way, they have what we call “CBBs,” for “could be better,” and lots of different versions coming in and going out. Sometimes, it was dozens of versions at a time. So the [Resolve] ColorTrace system was important. That's how we made sure all EDLs matched up, or if there was a re-conform, and there were a lot of them, it was great to know for sure that we would not lose those corrections, because we had a color trace to drag the corrections over to all new cuts.
How did you collaborate with Imageworks on the effects shots?
We made sure that what they were seeing at Imageworks was the same thing we were seeing over here during the DI. Our two companies calibrated our projectors so we matched their screen to our screen. [Josh Pines and Chris Kutcka] customized look-up tables to match the two facilities, so when we filmed out something for [Raimi], it looked the same as what he saw at Imageworks. He might then want to make changes, but it gives him one-to-one confidence that what he signed off on [at Imageworks] is still there when it gets over here. It also helped the visual effects guys, because it let them see what we were doing over here to begin with.
What was the biggest challenge color grading that many effects shots?
All the shots were really well done by the time they got here, so there wasn't much done to most of them. I had to massage density and a little bit of color here or there, but we didn't have to do tremendous work to fit the photography. What needed the most work was the Sandman character, just because of the fact that sand is a mid-tone, gamma-type color, devoid of saturation. To keep it all consistent, I had to do a bit of work, because when you don't have a lot of color and it is sort of a mid-tone value, it can swing warm or cold or green pretty easily. So I had to do some work on Sandman to make sure his sand was consistent, depending on the overall color correction of the scene. But overall, the shots came in very close to what was intended to begin with.
