Keith Putnam

Given that this thread is about "DIT and Dailies" I suppose it's relevant to mention that my hourly rate and my gear rental is far more than made up for by the money I save production by generating dailies on set. That's kind of the whole financial key to this. Having a DIT make deliverables on set is so vastly less expensive than having a post house do it, on the order of multiple tens of thousands of dollars over the course of the production, that having a dailies-generating DIT on set is far cheaper for the production than sending all the camera media off to be processed elsewhere. Now, of course, if the major post houses were to reduce their rates for this by several orders of magnitude then the game would change. As far as my services being "not a good use of time on set", I suppose all I can do is refer you to the multiple ASC DPs I have worked for, and continue to work for, who would passionately disagree with you and who continually request my presence over and over. They clearly think the time spent with me is extremely valuable. And that's not to mention the gaffers and key grips I collaborate with who feel the same way. So. Let's see… I save the production money, I facilitate far more accurate communication with the colorist than would otherwise be available given current standard production practices, DPs seem to find a huge amount of value in what I do for them… yep, DITs are clearly a pointless extravagance. But you've obviously made up your mind, and that's fine! On the tv series and movies you DP, you will likely have the power to refuse to use a DIT. Every DP should be able to work the way they want to work.

In episodic television, fewer and fewer DPs are being invited to (or have the time to go to, or aren't paid to go to) final color grades. The color work I do on set is primarily intended to communicate to the colorist, as closely as possible, what the DP wants. I feel this is invaluable (but I would, wouldn't I?). If the final colorist can pull up a LUT and a CDL which the DP has approved and use that as a base to start working from, it helps ensure that final color decisions aren't being made solely by post-producers. As a byproduct, the dailies I generate (or have a post house generate for me from my LUT and CDLs) ensure that throughout the editing process everyone watching cuts gets used to seeing at least a close approximation of the color looks that the DP wants. Basically, in an era when a lot of control over the final image is being wrested away from DPs, having a DIT doing live color on set is a great way to pull back a good chunk of that control.

I'm not clear on what you mean by "actually signals". Video color information can be encoded in various ways. One way is what we call "RGB", where the full information in all three color channels is maintained*. Another way is YCbCr (or YUV), where the color information in the Blue and Red channels is thrown away. That encoded information can be sent through a medium (like a coaxial cable or via a radio transmitter) as a signal of different types; SDI is a different signal than analog RF, for example. Or it can be stored as a digital file in various formats. So, when recording ProRes on the Alexa you can choose 4:4:4 encoding, which preserves all of the color information, or 4:2:2 which throws away half of the blue and half of the red while preserving all of the green channel. This information is a "signal" when it is moving from place to place; otherwise it's just data. *"RGB" is also used slightly differently to refer to a RAW image which has been debayered into something visible. But this doesn't refer to a difference between 4:4:4 and 4:2:2; it's just a distinction between "raw" and "not raw".

"They're also adapting the new Arri Alexa 65 to work with the new anamorphic glass, but there aren't any projection lenses being developed for digital projection." Unfortunately there's no such thing as an anamorphic DCP, so until DCI changes their spec there's little reason to develop an anamorphic projection lens for digital screenings.