Jon Fauer, ASC - Imago

IN-N-OUT Burners
IN-N-OUT Burgers is my first stop when landing at Burbank
Airport from New York. We don’t have them in New York,
but we should: good burgers on freshly baked buns, with crispy
lettuce, tomato and an artery-clogging sauce, served by an
eternally cheerful staff. The easy ordering IN your car and quick
take OUT might be a tasty metaphor for the current state of our
Digital Intermediate Ins and Outs.
This year we saw intense hybrid production with pictures
like Slumdog Millionaire. It was shot using a combination
of Arricams and Arriflex 435 on 35mm film (Fujifilm Color
Negative stocks Super F64D, Eterna 500T, 250D and Reala
500D), SI-2K (raw digital data) and even a Canon still camera.
This cinematographic stew was ingested with Scanners (film
images in), combined with the digital elements, digested as data,
and then burned out by Film Recorders that “print” the image
back to film, sort of like your laser printer at home.
To record a film-out with an ARRILASER, for example, your
favorite facility will thread up to 2,000 feet of film under the
top lid. They bring your digital intermediate files up on the
Windows XP interface, and after setting up parameters, hit
“record.”
The ARRILASER exposes each frame of pin-registered film, pixel
by pixel, with short bursts, about 30 nanoseconds, of very bright
light from three lasers (red, green, blue). For a 4K image, that’s
12,746,752 (4,096 x 3,112) bursts in 3.8 seconds per frame.
As we learned from the Academy’s “Digital Dilemma” Report
(www.oscars.org/science-technology/council/projects/digitaldilemma),
it costs around $13,000 a year to store and clone digital
files, but only a few hundred dollars to store film in a vault.
The result of this lesson is that many studios are now doing color
separation film-outs of their projects onto black and white from
red, blue and green passes. Some of the films that are used for
burning film-outs on the ARRILASER include:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Fujifilm ETERNA-RDI 8511/4511 Digital Master (negative)
Fujifilm ETERNA-CI 8503/4503 Color Intermediate for
master positives and dupe negatives.
Kodak Vision Color Intermediate Film 5242/2242
EASTMAN Fine Grain Duplicating Panchromatic
Negative Film 5234/5366; Separation Material 2238
optional: Fujifilm 64D 8522
Fujifilm ETERNA Vivid 160 8543
Kodak Vision 2 100
Kodak Vision 2 50D 5201
Apr-Jul 2009
67