Scorsese Does DI With a Dash of HD

Digital Content Producer has a lovely story on Scorsese's process in The Departed. For The Departed, Scorsese built off the workflow he used on The Aviator, also covered by Digital Content Producer HERE. But for this post I will concentrate on the former article.

Background:

The Departed weaves through a contemporary film, tones harking back to classic Noir tradition. Scorsese is at home in the past having made exclusively period films for the past 20 years. Utilising references to John Altman classics like signifies connects this film with the gangster genre that he admires so much. The most blatant signifier is lifted from the Howard Hugh original 'Scarface' in which victims are signified my an X in the screen. Some of these are hidden in the light and shadows. Scorsese fondly reflects on the film technique...

...in the most famous case, if you know the picture, when Boris Karloff, playing the gangster, is bowling, hiding out, and gets shot off camera, you just see the ball drop in the runner of the bowling alley. You never see his body. Then, you see somebody put an ‘X’ up on the scoreboard for a strike in bowling.

Scorsese recreates this reference in The Departed with the title sequence in which the main characters are X'd out highlighting their impending doom.

It is with this loving care to detail Scorsese so deftly constructs a world blending both the old and new, in this, his first non-period film in over 20 years...

The Technology:

Classic filmmakers commonly struggle with or rebuff technological advancements. John Ford was so against releasing editorial control to the cutting room, he is remember to have filmed shot for shot as he wanted it put together. I can understand the desire to maintain a wining formula and today technology can easily cloud the aim and art of storytelling. Some directors even regress. I have heard M Knight Shflksotighodsvn edits on a Steinbeck!

Scorsese is none of these...

Very willingly he has ventured into new ways of working and his collaborative nature allows those who are experts in what they do, to make his film better. Visual Effects Supervisor Rob Legato and a bi-coastal effort by Technicolor provided this film with a unique workflow using HDCam SR, DI and DaVinci grading system.

It was a process built upon extensive work done during the HD dailies process at Technicolor New York, when film shot by Ballhaus was transferred to HDCAM-SR tape and given a detailed color pass by Technicolor dailies editor Sam Daley. The HD dailies process gave filmmakers a strong template to follow in finalizing the imagery during the DI, since Scorsese and his team were able to make decisions during production by viewing 1080p 4:4:4 imagery through an NEC iS8 digital projector — almost as good as viewing 2K imagery for all intents and purposes, according to Legato.

At Legato's behest and under the direction of Nakamura's digital intermediate producer, Devin Sterling, and color scientist/Technicolor Digital Intermediate VP of research and development Josh Pines, along with support from the company's New York operation, Technicolor fashioned an exact technical replica of Nakamura's Da Vinci suite in Burbank, Calif., at Technicolor New York, leading to a bi-coastal DI process. As part of that process, Nakamura first did an initial color pass and pre-trims in Burbank, Calif., while Fire editor Ron Barr handled the digital conform and opticals. All imagery was stored as data in a DVS Clipster system.

During that period, Legato and Technicolor engineers came up with a method of transferring the entire HD preview version of the movie to Cineon color space for viewing on the big screen through the same projector as the evolving DI version. This gave Nakamura, as he prepared to bring the movie to Scorsese for final color correction, a chance to more accurately compare the HD version with the 2K version than if he continued viewing preview imagery in HD color space.

The movie was then transferred to HDCAM-SR (4:4:4 1080p) from the uncorrected original 2K data, and that imagery, along with an eight-reel segmented EDL timeline, was transported to New York.

There, in Technicolor's flagship digital color-timing theater, the HDCAM-SR reels were ingested into that room's Clipster system, converting the media back to data at 1920×1080. Viewing the movie on the NEC iS8 projector loaded with the same LUTs written by Pines and used in Burbank, Calif., (with a Christie 2K CP 2000i digital projector), Nakamura then finalized the color correction choices under the watchful eyes of Scorsese, Ballhaus, and Schoonmaker.

With so much preliminary work done during the dailies and preview processes, and with all the primary collaborators gathered in Technicolor's suite in New York, filmmakers say the final color-timing work took just 10 hours over the course of two days.

I think it is so wonderful how much opportunity we now have to gain insight into the working style of master craftsmen. Thank god for the internet.