1 The Director of Photography – an overview

The laboratory 91
Telecine grading is, for me at least, one of the more enjoyable parts
of the film-making process. It is akin to being a cabinet maker who,
having spent weeks or months making a beautiful piece of furniture, in
one day puts the final polish on their work and all is finished.
More often than not, you sit in a room with subdued lighting, all is
clean and comfortable and usually a telecine machine sits quietly
behind a glass door in an air-conditioned environment. Before you is
a large desk, above which are some high-grade television monitors. On
the desk are the controls, which will modify your picture in almost any
way you wish.
While the rule, if it’s not on the negative there is nothing you can do
to get it on to the print, still applies in all other respects, you can do
just as much to the image as you could in a still photography darkroom,
if not more, and you can do it instantly!
A first-class modern telecine grading suite can not only change the
colours, as at the chemical laboratory, but can modify the gamma of
the overall image or just modify the gamma of one colour. It might be
possible to select one area of colour, a pure blue sky say, and work on
the density, colour and gamma of that area alone. This gives the DP
many more tools if you know that the finished picture will be
delivered only on tape. For instance, day-for-night, always a daunting
prospect, becomes much more achievable via a good telecine suite
than when you only have a pure photographic process at your
disposal.
Do heed the warning, though: it is only wise to use all these tricks if
you are never going to produce a print as well. If you are, and you go
to telecine first, many important people might be very disappointed
with the print if they have already seen your highly modified telecine
transfer.
The telecine process has come a long way.When I first became a DP
at the BBC, film was transmitted live as it went through the telecine
machine and only for a major drama production would the DP be
allowed to attend a telecine rehearsal. Now it is often in our contract
to telecine grade our work if that is what is required. For some years
now, it has been popular to transfer the master negative directly to
tape. Early telecine machines were really lined up for the response of
positive film and, although the image could be inverted from a negative
to a positive, many DPs and producers thought the image more
filmic if the transfer was made from a print, and in those days they
were probably right.
Things have come a long way. A recent film I transferred was from
the negative via a C-Reality telecine scanning at 2000 lines working in
a digital domain. This resolution was maintained right through the
transfer desk, the latest Da Vinci, and only down-converted to
625 lines just before display on the monitor and recording on a digital
tape machine. The quality was stunning. It would be a huge achievement
if it were possible, at an economical price, to grade a film for theatrical
release this way and make a print from that grade.This can now
be achieved via digital intermediates, often referred to as DI.