HOLLYWOOD: Last night, in Encore Hollywood's digital intermediate theater, colorist Pankaj Bajpai offered a look at the company's advances on the popular FX series “Justified,” which puts into practice for the first time the long-anticipated Image Interchange Framework, or IIF, workflow.
The system, which began six years ago with the Academy’s Science and Technology Council and the American Society of Cinematographers, was developed in response to the growing concern about the ever-increasing number of different digital imagers and file formats and the equally diverse methods various post facilities were using to grade and process the material.
The associations, along with a great many industry partners, including Sony--maker of the SRW-9000PL camera used by cinematographer Francis Kenny on “Justified”--Autodesk (maker of the Lustre system Bajpai uses to grade the series), Encore Hollywood, Fujifilm and others, set out to create a new format for digital imagery that was open, able to hold all the dynamic range and color gamut any sensor could capture and allow for a more standardized way for cinematographers to communicate color decisions to colorists -- a digital equivalent of the photochemical realm's printer points, consistently used and universally understood by cinematographers.
At last night's event, Bajpai packed crowds of production and post pros into Encore's theater for a firsthand look at real-world examples of images put through this new workflow.
"There are many pieces to this," says Bajpai, "and it's very exciting and rewarding to be doing the work we're doing at Encore to develop the post part of the process. I think the value of all this speaks for itself in the images."
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