Ask Mike Most Anything

[paulherrin]

I'm not sure I understand the question, or if you're asking one. That picture was done at the original L.A. Cinesite, using a Pogle Megadef color corrector and an early version of the Spirit telecine for scanning, The colorist was my friend Julius Friede. What else did you want to know?

curious about the particulars of what led to somebody being suddenly comfortable doing an entire major film that way, perhaps the Spirit?

 

[Marc Wielage]

As I recall, the most common controller prior to the TLC was "3-2-1-Roll......" :laugh:

Those were bad days, weren't they?

Just remembered the Vidtronics predecessor to the TLC: the AVRS (automatic video replacement system), which a lot of places around LA used from about 1980-1986 to edit from film to tape. At Complete, we generally referred to it as "the awful video replacement system," because of its flakiness. The TLC was a huge improvement, and inventor Jim Lindelien was a genius at getting that to work.

It's interesting to reflect on the millions and millions of dollars in equipment that was necessary to do color correction and post even 10-15 years ago, vs. what you can get away with today.

curious about the particulars of what led to somebody being suddenly comfortable doing an entire major film that way, perhaps the Spirit?

We had to do what was necessary to get the job done. I did the D.I. on Queen of the Damned for Warner Bros. with the same setup: original cut camera negative on a Spirit, through a daVinci 2K, output to 2K files. It was possible to use file-based media through the VDC (Virtual Datacine), essentially a bank of hard drives that mimicked a Spirit Telecine, but at some point you run into questions of facility time and what makes sense economically, particularly when you have different rooms tied up on different projects.

Bear in mind that 10 years ago, file-based color-correction was much more primitive than it was now, and there was a long transition between color-timing directly from film vs. going from files. For example, the DVS Clipster was a good "inbetween" system, an affordable hard drive system that could interface with a lot of existing heavy-iron color-correction systems. The Clipster is still used in some situations today, particularly in quick-turnaround TV shows by facilities still using real-time equipment. As computers become faster and faster, the value of equipment like this kind of withers and dies, but it's still out there.

 

[M Most]

curious about the particulars of what led to somebody being suddenly comfortable doing an entire major film that way, perhaps the Spirit?

Roger Deakins and Joel and Ethan Coen wanted a particular look for the movie, one that could not be achieved in camera. They basically wanted a very brown landscape, with little to no green in sight, but they were shooting in the South, a part of the country that is very green by nature. They were presented with the opportunity to try using what had been video color correction methods but at an acceptable film resolution and liked what they were shown. Basically, the technology was used to achieve the artistic intent. That's the way it should always be, but these days rarely is. It did help that Cinesite was built and owned by Kodak, so there was a great deal of built in trust due to that fact.

 

[M Most]

It was possible to use file-based media through the VDC (Virtual Datacine), essentially a bank of hard drives that mimicked a Spirit Telecine, but at some point you run into questions of facility time and what makes sense economically, particularly when you have different rooms tied up on different projects.

Are you referring to the Specter? There weren't very many of those built....

 

[Marc Wielage]

Are you referring to the Specter? There weren't very many of those built....

Yes, the Spectre was the Virtual Datacine. At Cinesite, we routinely called it the "VDC." Dealing with it was a huge problem because of the proprietary file format going in and out of the machine, plus the limited storage available.

I suspect a machine like that would now sell for about $99.95 on eBay. :blink:

Roger Deakins and Joel and Ethan Coen wanted a particular look for the movie, one that could not be achieved in camera. They basically wanted a very brown landscape, with little to no green in sight, but they were shooting in the South, a part of the country that is very green by nature.

Cinesite had a beautiful demo where they did split-screens showing the O Brother material as shot, and then after it was color-timed. The "before and after" difference was pretty spectacular, using keys to pull all the green out and turn the foliage brown. Nowadays, doing this kind of thing would be relatively trivial, but it was very cutting edge in 2000.

 

[paulherrin]

Roger Deakins and Joel and Ethan Coen wanted a particular look for the movie, one that could not be achieved in camera. They basically wanted a very brown landscape, with little to no green in sight, but they were shooting in the South, a part of the country that is very green by nature. They were presented with the opportunity to try using what had been video color correction methods but at an acceptable film resolution and liked what they were shown. Basically, the technology was used to achieve the artistic intent. That's the way it should always be, but these days rarely is. It did help that Cinesite was built and owned by Kodak, so there was a great deal of built in trust due to that fact.

Cinesite had a beautiful demo where they did split-screens showing the O Brother material as shot, and then after it was color-timed. The "before and after" difference was pretty spectacular, using keys to pull all the green out and turn the foliage brown. Nowadays, doing this kind of thing would be relatively trivial, but it was very cutting edge in 2000.

very cool, thanks for sharing guys. one of my favorite films - most 'accurate', epic depiction of the deep-south ever... the coens and clooney and deakins are all masters, of course.

haha, just found this cool video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pla_pd1uatg

 

[M Most]

Lots of old friends in that video. Sarah Priestnall is now with Codex, I see her all the time. Alan Silvers is a very old friend of mine from my Lorimar days in the mid to late 1980's. The woman seen loading the Spirit and then adjusting color with Roger is Jill Bogdanowicz, who today is a leading DI colorist (she was with Technicolor for a number of years and is now at Modern Videofilm), and whose father (Mitch Bognanowicz) was with Kodak for many years and a leading authority on color science. Her sister Corinne is a DI colorist at Lightiron. At the time she was an assistant, but she was more photogenic than Julius... :001_rolleyes:

BTW, Marc, that sure looks like a Pogle that Jill is running. Not that it proves anything one way or another, but at least I wasn't completely crazy....

 

[paulherrin]

haha, so cool, glad you've got good memories

 

[Marc Wielage]

TW, Marc, that sure looks like a Pogle that Jill is running. Not that it proves anything one way or another, but at least I wasn't completely crazy....

Cinesite had two rooms -- one Pogle Pandora Platinum, and one DaVinci. That's what we had during that era and what I was told transpired during O Brother. In fact, when I was outputting Queen of the Damned, I cursed a blue streak because after I set all the power windows in HD, they shifted X number of pixels in 2048x1556 mode. My assistant at the time told me the exact same thing had happened during O Brother, and it drove Julius crazy, too. This problem added at least an hour per reel, just checking the 2K position of every tracking power window to make sure it hadn't shifted during the standard switch. I think we spent about 250 hours in a 3-week period getting that film done.

Maybe they were confused! I was not there when the 2000 session happened, but I did know Sarah Priestnall, who had many stories about the first difficult decade of Cinesite. She could write a book.

Alan Silvers was (and is) a terrific guy, and I worked with him at Compact Video in the 1980s and again at Cinesite in the early 2000s. Very bright, capable gentleman. I can think of a dozen studios that would be very lucky to have him running their technical divisions as a top executive.