DI Bad habits

[David Mullen ASC]

I'd hardly call this an unusual amount of warmth or yellow in the image. I can find a lot stronger examples of yellowish movies that didn't use a D.I., like some of Woody Allen's "butterscotch" colored movies.

[DavidSloan]

I guess to each his own, David.

 

I was personally disturbed by the look of these films. The odd yellow/orange skin tones were very unpleasing to me, and the all highlights were blown beyond detail, for no good reason. I understand blownout kicker when someone is being hit by a big ray of sunlight, but a completely blown out kicker from a little lamp? Definitely not my taste. To me everyone just looked a little sick in these films.

[Max Jacoby]

Personnally I am not impressed by EFilm's work at all. The only DI's that I have seen so far that I think one could call 'invisible' were done by British companies (Framestore CFC and MPC). EFilm have done some pretty horrible DIs even recently, like 'The Passion' and especially 'Big Fish' which was just a soft, mushy mess. In none of their films have they managed to make warm light on faces (the telltale sign of a DI) look acceptable to me. In 'The Passion' this was particularly obvious, since you had a lot of blue backlight hitting faces that were lit with warm frontlight. One needed just look at the point where these 2 colors touched each other to see that something was wrong. It looked flat and lifeless all the time.

[John Pytlak RIP]

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[David Mullen ASC]

To me everyone just looked a little sick in these films.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

Fine, I'm only responding to the frames you posted. If you can find some where the people look sick, not just timed warm, I might agree with you. But I could create the look of the frames you posted with standard RGB printing -- I don't need a D.I. to make a face look yellow-ish!

 

Anyway, I'm just saying that EFILM isn't going around forcing DP's to time their films warm -- if they look yellowish or orangish or overly red-saturated, those were all choices made by the people color-correcting the movie (usually the DP and colorist.) I'm sure I could find some blue-toned scenes in some movie that they've done. I really doubt someone spent $300,000 of an D.I. there -- and a month of their lives timing the movie -- and ended up with a color tone they did not want. Five weeks later, $300,000 spent: "Oh, the movie came out yellow? How did that happen? Oh, well, I guess we'll have to live with it..."

 

(It's a little different if you are a low-budget film doing a quickie D.I. especially from some digital master timed elsewhere -- then you may get some surprises with the film-out.)

 

I've seen a lot of D.I.'s lately and one of the best has been "A Life Aquatic" by EFILM -- which does have very strong oranges and reds but it clearly looks like a choice by Wes Anderson and Robert Yeoman (looks like Vision Premier prints for one thing and by printing onto regular Vision, they could have knocked that back.) I've also seen side-by-side tests of Reel One of "When We Were Soldiers" directly printed from the scope negative and from EFILM's digital negative projected onto a 70' wide screen and the differences are pretty hard to spot. At a time when most people were scanning at 2K on a Spirit, they were scanning everything at 4K on an Imagica, which has become more of the industry practice over time.

[Max Jacoby]

But in general there has been a tendency in American DIs to use noise reduction a lot, sometimes excessively, whereas in British DIs it seem much more accepted to leave the grain alone.

[David Mullen ASC]

But in general there has been a tendency in American DIs to use noise reduction a lot, sometimes excessively, whereas in British DIs it seem much more accepted to leave the grain alone.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

I think one problem is this idea of a free lunch -- "I can shoot as much high-speed stock as I want, even underexpose it, and the D.I. will make it grain-free!"

[Guest Kai.w]

Is it just me, or does it look like they're actually toasting with urine in this pic! :o

 

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

Hmm... I'd say... Yes! It is just you ;-)

 

Seriously, what's wrong with those pics? They are quite warm. So what? Could be my notebookdisplay too...

 

I don't know. There seems to be quite some weird attitude from some DOPs towards DI. Granted, everybody fears losing control over his work... not really necessary though.

And done at proper resolution and with proper bitdepth...how can you deny it's more powerful than tradional methods?

 

-k

[Phil Rhodes]

Hi,

 

You know, I was photoshopping that image so I could post it and say "I refuse to complain, because if it had been shot in the UK it would have looked like this."

 

However, while I was able to take all the warmth and saturation out of it, it is actually more or less impossible to paint in flat lighting on something like that.

 

I still refuse to complain.

 

Phil