"Initially, some people were hugely behind it, people like Tony and Michael Mann and Ridley Scott, some of the legends were very supportive of and complimentary of it, because they had such flexibility," he continues. "There are some tremendous cinematographers like Dan Mindel BSC ASC, Henry Braham ASC, John Schwartzman ASC, who really loved the process too. But a lot of people were hesitant, there were some very big naysayers. And then it turned."

Secondary colour

Overall, Peter Doyle feels colourists have more creative input now than in 2002, "but the degree of involvement is very dependent on the dynamics of each production."

Sometimes the power of digital grading can leave the idea of colour correction in the dust. Sonnenfeld's work on Zack Snyder's 300 (2006, DP Larry Fong ASC), for instance.

"I think 300 is a perfect example of the extreme," says Sonnenfeld. "We'd been doing that work in music videos all the time. All of the whole look of 300 was basically created in the transfer and in the DI. Zack is an innovative guy who always pushes the boundaries of everything that he does, and DP Larry Fong as well.

"It just illustrated, if it's done well, how very effective and super-creative digital grading can be," he continues. "The whole point of our business is to push the creative envelope, to give our clients and DPs the highest level of artistry we can with the most flexibility, and to do it in a way that is compelling, technically correct, at the highest levels of resolution and security."

The concept has now come full circle with fully-digital productions being engineered through the colour process to look like they've been shot on film.

"We've honed the process," says Sonnenfeld. "At Company 3, we can replicate things mathematically, like the Technicolor look from years ago that was only able to be achieved through lab work."

Going with the flow

With the proliferation of formats for acquisition and the even greater proliferation of deliverables, an agreed workflow between all points of a production has become more essential than ever.

"The concept of workflow has always been very important to me," says Doyle. "The specifics change with each production. The benefits are fewer redo's, variables and less repeatability."

Doyle sees moves like the implementation of ACES, the Academy's digital image file interchange and colour management system, as a positive trend than gives more room for experimentation.

"For example, we know how the camera reads the light," he explains. "We know how the displays will show the light, so the DP and colourist can take control and create their own aesthetics, with the knowledge of how it will translate to theatre or home."

Such collaboration can take place during pre-production, developing looks based on camera tests.

"Back in the film days, they'd choose a negative stock, and the print stock, and that pretty much defined look of the film," says Tomkins. "As colourists we're now involved early-on, generating looks and Look-Up Tables (LUTs) so that directors and DPs can view the final intent of the image on-set. It's similar to seeing the dailies on your target print stock with the printer light values and adjusting that as you shoot. We're now doing that via LUTs."

"However, you're generally not involved all the way through shooting," says Omoshebi. "You might dip and out, look at odd shots or problems. You would probably hand over to the digital imaging technician (DIT) on-set, who then produces a colour decision list (CDL) of the changes that they make, so that when you get the final project, you can track everything that's been done on on-set grading-wise."

"There are definitely factions to this among cinematographers, but I think DPs are starting to adapt to the fact that what they are shooting is sort of an intermediate capture of the scene," Tomkins adds. "The general trend is slowly edging its way towards optimising the capture to the end result and not seeing the capture as the final result. That's a seismic shift from establishing the world of colour onto the film negative. The future of grading is about making the tools intuitive, very natural and scene-referred, as opposed to subjectively taste-referred."

Leading lights

Grading hasn't had a huge churn in applications and hardware. Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve has become one of the stalwarts, along with FilmLight BaseLight. Other systems in-play include, Autodesk Lustre (which evolved from Colorfront's original Stand Alone Colour Corrector), Assimilate Scratch, Digital Vision Nucoda and SGO Mistika. All offer a variety of cutting-edge tools to finely tune the grade, and all can handle High Dynamic Range, today's big trend in post.

"HDR with its larger colour space and dynamic range is slowly moving the industry towards the idea of one master version of the film, from which we generate the various delivery formats," says Doyle.