Technicolor’s 4K Spider-Man DI Pipeline on the Sony Studio Lot
Putting Color-Grading Next Door to Sound Mixing and Other Post Services
By Debra Kaufman

When Technicolor Creative Services announced it would open a digital intermediate facility on the Sony lot, the idea was that the proximity of DI to sound mixing and other studio services would create massive efficiencies. That was just proven true with the 4K DI of Spider-Man 3, which was mixed at Sony’s adjacent sound-mixing stages.

The new TCS Digital Intermediate facility features three 2K/4K color suites, Sony 4K projectors, Technicolor color management and Thomson digital scanners. Housed on the lot’s Stage 6, the TCS facility is steps away from Sony’s own audio mixing suites, which lets time-pressed directors easily move between a feature film’s two last creative steps.

“It was a tremendous advantage, a beyond-belief advantage,” said TCS DI artist Stephen Nakamura. “In a movie of this size, you have thousands of visual effects coming in, and the director has to supervise them and sign off and them at the same time he also has to mix and supervise editing. Driving an hour or three hours out of his day would take a tremendous toll. The fact that he could come in here at 8 a.m. and color-correct until 9:30 a.m. and then go to his mix in the same building is a tremendous advantage for everyone. They can work an extra few hours a day, every single day, and get more accomplished without physically leaving the lot.”

Though TCS had used the DI suite for a small job, Spider-Man 3 was its first 4K feature film, which meant the first test of its 4K pipeline. “We needed enough storage so that we could color-correct off of 2K proxies of the 4K material, because you can’t run 4K real time,” explains Nakamura, who reports that his room relies on the Da Vinci Resolve 4K corrector. (The facility also has a Lustre system.) “For speed and expedience, we made 2K proxies and color-corrected those, and then those corrections work back to the 4K files that sit on the SAN.” Software programmers at Da Vinci rewrote some code for the TCS pipeline. “Nothing big,” says Nakamura. “But some workflow aspects were adjusted to make it faster for the way I work. They were simple things, like having an icon showing up for auto-save when it’s auto-backing up, which can take awhile. They fixed all those small things so we could manage it better.”

The main VFX house, Sony Imageworks, was also close by—and connected to the TCS DI facility via a fiber link. One of the first things TCS engineers did was calibrate their monitors with those at Imageworks. When director Raimi signed off on some VFX shots at Imageworks, he could be confident that the shots would look the same on in the DI suite. “He’d know we weren’t out in left field,” says Nakamura, who is currently digitally timing Fantastic Four: The Rise of the Silver Surfer. “That happens very easily when you have a major VFX picture with multiple effects houses working on it. Imageworks spearheaded the whole thing, so it was very important for us to be calibrated.”

Working on a feature with so many visual effects posed another challenge for Nakamura. “What happens is that in the last minute, there’ll be dozens of shots—if not hundreds of shots—coming in on the last couple of days, at all times of night and day,” he says. “You think you’re finished color-correcting, but then a bunch of CBB [could be better] replacement shots come in, and sometimes they’re very huge shots. If they come in and need a lot of massaging, at that point we don’t have a lot of time. There’s no room for down time because we’re at the end of the chain.” The new TCS DI suite proved rock solid, with no down time, enabling Nakamura to bring in all the shots on time, even those dozens of last-minute replacement shots.

The visual effects were created in 2K and up-resed to 4K, says Nakamura, and he was happy with how they looked. (See related story.) “4K is an archival medium,” he says. “A 4K negative shot out to film shows a very small difference to 2K. With film as an exhibition medium, it’s not that much of a difference, especially when it gets to the release print stage.” But a 4K digital projection? “Then there’s a really big difference between 2K and 4K,” he says.

Cinematographer Bill Pope initially came in to supervise color-correction of the principal photography. Director Raimi sat in to OK all the painstaking work of integrating the visual effects. “Even though Sam is a VFX director, he’s also an actor’s director,” says Nakamura. “He’s very sensitive to actors’ expressions. So those were things I needed to keep aware of. Some scenes may have a been a little dark, and I learned that he likes to see the details.”

Nakamura has now color corrected numerous super-hero movies, including X2, The Chronicles of Riddick, Fantastic Four, and Superman Returns. “They don’t have the same look, but they’re all the same in that the process in a DI is much longer than for a traditional movie,” he says. “You keep waiting for the VFX shots to come in, and they’re coming in from so many vendors, it takes a lot of time to do.”

For Spider-Man 3, says Nakamura, all the VFX came to TCS from Imageworks, which streamlined the process. But Nakamura points out that just because Raimi signed off on effects at Imageworks doesn’t mean that there were no further changes. “There is a misconception that once it’s signed off by the director, the shot will go into a DI suite and not get touched,” says Nakamura. “Sam would change his mind in the bay. There’s almost no shot that’s not going to be touched, because once you stick an individual shot into the show, there’s some tweaking to do, because it’s being seen in context.”

The success of the new 4K pipeline at TCS’s Culver City DI facility has been a heartening step forward, and Nakamura points out that, in general, working with filmmakers on DIs has gotten easier. “As they’ve gotten more experienced doing DIs, they trust the colorist they’re working with,” says Nakamura. “It’s the same trust they have with their lab timer or telecine colorist. One of the things about being an experienced DI artist, which is different from a regular colorist, is that DI artists are really experienced about how electronic color-correction will translate to film. A director may want a very specific color-correction, and the experienced DI artist can let the director know that going a certain direction will hurt when it comes to the printing stage. Some colors don’t reproduce on film, plus the prints are always going to be slightly different because it’s a photochemical process.”

“Directors are pushing the DI father than they used to,” he continues. “You can push it any way you want as long as you know the consequences in the back end. Film, being a photochemical process, isn’t like the digital world. That’s where it takes the experience of a good DI artist to say, ‘You might want to pull back or you can’t push things a certain way.’”