Autodesk Media & Entertainment, maker of the popular DI and color grading software Lustre held the India leg of its Digital Intermediate tour in Mumbai recently. A 400 plus crowd comprising of Cinematographers, Heads of Post Production houses and directors stayed glued to their chairs late into the evening as the presentations held one spellbound.
The event had a great line up of speakers including ‘Black’ DoP Ravi Chandran, Sony Imageworks’ Jean-Francois Panisset (JFP), Stuart Little(2) DoP Steven Poster and Phillipe Renauld from Eclair Laboratories, Paris.
Discussing The Polar Express as a case study, JFP from Sony Imageworks R&D cell pointed out how DI was a useful process even when it came to a CG feature. He demonstrated how Sony Imageworks used Lustre as a design tool enabling quick changes in looks and lighting.
Speaking to Animation ‘xpress, Sony Imageworks’ Panisset said that,”At Imageworks DI is a parallel process along with Animation, coloring, lighting and rendering. Especially if you are working on fairly long productions you do not have to wait until the post to see the results. All the color and look is done in the pre pro, DI helps in maintaining scene to scene consistency. Artists usually work in isolation, DI gets the whole work together and gives a better perspective”
Ravi K Chandran who has done some brilliant cinematography for Black said that,”We never set out with a plan of doing DI at all. I actually took it to Australia to do the color correction. Then we had some trailers doen at Prime Focus in which we experimented with DI and we were stunned to see the results”
“Since we really liked the way the trailers were looking, we decided to try out DI, but I was still cautious and gave PF a single reel to work on. Somehow that reel turned out to be a disaster and we were confused since the trailers had come out very well. We analysed the case and we realised that the guy who was working on the reel was from advertising background and had crushed the blacks. Then Mr Naik (who is a very senior film grader) from Adlabs and Rohan from Prime Focus worked on the same thing again and we got the results we wanted” he added.