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MillimeterSeeking Vintage Color
Dec 1, 2004 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman
When Martin Scorsese first decided it would be, in his words, “interesting to explore” ways to bake the visual color sense of the old Technicolor two-strip and three-strip dye-transfer processes into his new movie, The Aviator, one of his first conversations about how to do it was with Titanic's Academy Award-winning visual effects supervisor, Rob Legato. Scorsese is not known for making big “effects films,” but he had worked with Legato before, when he brought him in to consult on complex crowd shots for Kundun.
Digital two-strip skin tones, before and after.
According to Legato, Scorsese didn't exactly demand that he find a way to digitally replicate the old Technicolor dye-transfer process. Rather, he simply told Legato he had been kicking around the idea, and asked if he had any suggestions.
“I was always a fan of the Technicolor processes anyway, so I said I'd do some research and tests,” says Legato. “I shot black-and-white film of a house, processed the negative with three-color filters in front of it, used my laptop to digitize the negative, and then I re-combined them. Sure enough, when I did that on my laptop in Photoshop, I was able to create a faithful version of three-strip color. It wasn't that hard to figure out three-strip. But when I took the blue strip out and played with the other two — magenta and cyan — I discovered that when you put the two of them back together, it does not automatically create natural flesh tones, which was weird. That's when I knew there was something missing, and that figuring out two-strip would be complicated.”
Legato eventually got in touch with color scientists at Technicolor — the company that would later handle The Aviator digital intermediate. He was referred to Dr. Dick Goldberg, a longtime Technicolor veteran who during his tenure had collaborated with Dr. Herbert Kalmus, Natalie Kalmus, and other Technicolor pioneers behind the now-defunct dye-transfer release printing process that revolutionized the feature film industry in the 1920s. (Goldberg briefly returned from retirement in the 1990s to resurrect the three-strip dye-transfer process for the Apocalypse Now Redux and The Thin Red Line re-releases and to create key show prints for the original Pearl Harbor release.)
Three-strip color transfer, before and after.
Legato spent hours with Goldberg and Josh Pines, Technicolor Digital Intermediate (TDI) VP of imaging research and development. Pines was responsible for later building look-up tables (LUTs) to match two-strip and three-strip requirements for the DI on The Aviator. Legato, Goldberg, and Pines discussed color theory and processes — a discussion that continued throughout the making of the film and eventually helped Legato learn what was missing from his digital recipe for two-strip.
“I thought that by putting magenta and cyan together, I could replicate two-strip,” says Legato. “Dr. Goldberg explained that when they first put magenta and cyan together without yellow, they had the same problem. Therefore, they added yellow dye to the magenta and yellow dye to the cyan. That made the magenta orange-looking, and the cyan looked slightly less than normal cyan. When I went back to my Photoshop demo and added yellow to the magenta color, and then printed it out on a transparency acetate material using an Epson printer, I got normal skin tone. I had to do the digital equivalent of playing with the dye mixture until I replicated the formula they used back then.”
Legato adds that his research and his experience with Dr. Goldberg put him “in awe of those scientists who had to do all these processes mechanically; physically mixing dye packs without benefit of computers.” The experience also launched a sophisticated, ongoing effort to find paths for translating these formulas into realtime processes for both HD dailies viewing and the DI process during the making of The Aviator.
For Scorsese's account of his vision for this film and how it was turned into practical reality, see next month's issue of Millimeter.
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.