I believe London is getting quite a reputation for doing exciting work with DIs. I look forward to your article.

Does Sin City's process count as DI when the film was originated in the digital realm. (ie Shot on HD). Surely with an entirely digital process the color timing is just part of the process rather than an entity of it's own. Indeed, the reason more films don't use a DI is the cost of scanning the negs into the system (although this is coming down all the time).

Hi Andrew,

Yeah, very good point: what exactly is a DI? To be honest, I think it's a bad term because it's already dated. As you say, does it count as a DI if a movie originates in the digital realm, is processed digitally and then printed to 35mm for distribution? What about a film that is distributed digitally? And how about material that'll never get into cinemas like TV ads and pop promos?

I get the impression that there is no concrete definition of "DI". For example, a lot of material destined only for broadcast is being graded on "DI" systems like Da Vinci 2k etc. I fear the term "DI" is really a poncy "film" thing. i.e. film folks want to differentiate themselves from TV folks even though they might be using similar techniques. If you're grading a film it's called a DI, if you're grading a TV programme it's called the on-line editing.

Maybe that's not quite fair. Maybe a DI is only a DI if you have enough colour depth to grade aggressively (like you can when grading from a film negative). Maybe a DI is what you do to 2k or 1920×1080 4:4:4 video where as "online editing" is what you do for lesser formats that can't be graded as aggressively? But that can't be true. Cineform talk about their "DI" software yet their codec is 4:2:2.

If I shoot something on HDV, grade it in After Effects and distribute it on the Internet - was the grading process a "DI"? There's no negative or print so can you still have an intermediate? (wouldn't that be like having a sandwich with no bread, just ham?)

Is there a concrete definition of "DI"?

I think the term 'Intermediate' is key in this discussion. It only really works when taking film into the digital realm then back out onto film. Practically long gone are the days of interpositives and internegatives and as both DIs and HD shoots are becoming more and more popular and accessible in film production, it hopefully wont be long before the process just gets called 'grading', or DG for digital and PG for photochemical.

Personally, I prefer the term "playing with colours".

I can just imagine Speilberg saying "Oh, yeah - we've locked the picture edit on my new $50M film and now we're playing with the colours".

;-)

"Only use jargon if it's impractical to express the same idea using normal language"

I would classify a Digital Intermediate as a digital version of an Intermediate. Or is that too logical of me? :)

-------------
Stephen
^{www.redcamera.net}

Hehe... well, that's certainly where the term originated. But what happens when you're dealing with a film that would never have used an "intermediate"? Perhaps more to the point there's the fact the the DI "grading" process doesn't replace the intermediate. After completing the "DI grade", you then print to an intermediate which is used as a "master" for mass producing prints for distribution.

I've just read the "digital intermediate" article over on WikiPedia (read it here). It seems to be an excellent article but I've got to say that I finished reading that article thinking "wow, 'DI' is a really crap term for describing digital colour grading".