Bringing Film into the Digital Age:
Optimizing the DI Workflow
by Simon Cuff
Page 2

The Workflow

Traditionally, movie-making has been a linear process. Scenes were shot on set or on location, and the negative sent to the lab. The following morning those scenes were projected, checked and signed off by the director, then the next block of scenes were shot and the process repeated. At the end of shooting all the film was delivered to an editor who cut it into a finished movie, which was checked and signed off by the director. The negative was cut to match and a colour timer used light valves in the printer to match and balance colour throughout, which was checked and signed off by the director before running out the release prints and delivering them to cinemas.

That process remained a constant from the dawn of films for 80 years or more. Then offline editing came into the mix, allowing the editor to work not with strips of film but with images on a computer. That apart, nothing changed. The advent of digital visual effects had no impact on the workflow: the raw material for the effect was sent off and the production waited for the finished shot to come back for it to be fitted into the offline edit then negative cut conform.

When the first systems that we would recognise as digital intermediates emerged, around five years ago, they very much mimicked this traditional workflow:

• The edit was locked in offline and the EDL transferred to the digital intermediate system
• The EDL was conformed
• Any frames requiring clean-up or repair (“dust-busting”) were sent off to a separate suite (dust-busting was a very labour-intensive operation, so only the frames you needed were cleaned)
  The colour grade was performed, which was non-reversible
• The different delivery versions were created.
• Each of these discrete stages required a sign-off and were largely irreversible. To make changes further down the pipeline was complex and expensive. Such an architecture brings distinct digital benefits and respects the traditions of the movie industry, but needed to go much further before digital intermediate could become a compelling proposition.
  

Click on the above image for a more detailed view

In developing a new digital intermediate system from scratch, the top priority was placed on the need to move away from this linear workflow to a parallel process which allowed collaborative creativity. The architecture was defined in collaboration with some of the leading facilities in the world.

This collaboration led to the development of what the facilities saw as the missing link: an editorial process which acts as the hub of the creative process, acknowledges that some operations take longer or have different requirements than others, and allows changes to be made readily at any stage of the process up to the moment of delivery.

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