Steven Poster reflects on decades of technological change, from film chains to digital intermediates and the ongoing quest to perfect colour representation.
One of the greatest pleasures of becoming an elder in our craft is the opportunity to re-master some of our past movies. There is a tremendous market for some of these classics. And as technology marches forward into newer and more in-depth system improvements, sometimes we even get to improve on our previous work.
Consider taking an older negative, shot on film that you might have transferred to a VHS SDR tape in REC 709 NTSC colour space. This older technology afforded an analogue system that we didn’t even know at the time could be improved on.
My first experience with turning film into video was the simplest method used before video tape and was called the “Film Chain”. It was a simple method of shining a film projector into a TV camera to broadcast those movies to the television audience. Over the summer between my freshman and sophomore year, I was hired at the school’s TV station to run the 16mm B&W film chain system and show late night movies to our audiences. The quality was not great. But I got to watch many classic movies and get paid for it.
Looking back
In the late 1950s, video tape recording was beginning to be developed and used for broadcasting and eventually scanning motion picture films. Since this isn’t a history lesson, I won’t go into the details of the incredible Telecine technologies developed over the last 60 years to give us the tools we take for granted now and the amazing high-quality imagery available through the development of the systems we have at our disposal.
I can say that I have been fortunate to experience the steps along the way that have taken us to the amazing quality imagery at our fingertips in today’s world. And we are nowhere near finished improving the methods of creating images for every form of visual display available to us today and coming in the near future.
The scientists, engineers and even the manufacturers have gone about as far as they can go with resolution and luminance. What’s left are vast improvements in colour representation.
One of the contributions I am very proud of happened when I was president of the American Society of Cinematographers in 2002. Because of my interest in technology, I realised that digital was on the way. As President, I was able to form the Technology Council, now called The Motion Imaging Technology Council, and bring in some of the smartest people from all the major companies and tech savvy cinematographers to have open discussions of where we were headed as an art and a craft medium. I wanted to make the industry aware that as image creators we needed a voice in the development of the tools we would have to use.
One of our first accomplishments was to make a set of images to demonstrate what each new system for projection looked like by seeing the same images shown on each new system demonstrated to us. I believe I had a hand in naming this Standardized Testing and Evaluation Material or STEM as it is still called through several new iterations.
The ASC Motion Imaging Technology Council (MITeC) has also had a hand in development of several other standard system developments. For instance, the ASC CDL (American Society of Cinematographers Colour Decision List) is the industry-standard format for exchanging primary colour grading information between different software applications and post-production houses. This system follows the images from the set to the digital intermediate (DI) and is a way to guarantee that our original intent is carried through the final colour grading as we intended it.
I also was able to convince Sony that we needed to finish Stuart Little 2 as a DI. I had heard that getting a good film print from marrying the production material and the CG material was very difficult on Stuart Little with standard wet lab methodology. I had also been fortunate to visit the lab in Paris while cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel ASC AFC and director Jean-Pierre Jeunet were finishing Amélie as one of the first two DIs, and I got to watch Sir Roger Deakins CBE ASC BSC finishing part of O Brother, Where Art Thou? as a DI at Cinesite at Kodak. After those two encounters I knew it was possible to finish a whole movie with that technology. And then I had to convince Sony. Not an easy task that took almost a year in post. But when George Joblove, chief technical officer for Sony Imageworks, agreed to build a 4K pipeline from the old HD Center in the Capra Building on the lot to Sony Imageworks, the studio gave us permission to do a proof of concept to go ahead.
At the time there was only one DI colour corrector in Hollywood. It was the Colossus by a British company called 5D, and after they went out of business, we hired a colourist who had done years of commercials with me, Michael Eaves. The software was from ColourFront Software, but Mike and Imageworks had to figure it out on their own. After three weeks, we had finished our proof of concept, and the studio gave us the go ahead to finish it as the third DI ever done.
And from that DI, studios were able to accept that this new process was a viable way to finish films. At first, Sony was very sceptical, but soon it was very hard to convince them to not finish a movie with a DI.
