Toronto-based Cine-Byte Imaging took another step toward reaffirming its position as one of Canada’s preeminent digital film facilities when it recently acquired U.K.-based FilmLight’s full lineup of digital intermediate hardware and software.

Digital intermediate systems are becoming increasingly popular in Hollywood, where several shops have set up proprietary solutions to transfer features. Filmmakers enjoy the virtually limitless possibilities to tweak and enhance their movies once transferred from celluloid to the digital domain.

FilmLight has been gaining recognition for the speed and quality of its Northlight pin-registered film scanner, Baselight color-grading system, and Truelight color-calibration system. The package is picking up an increasing share of business among European location shoots, including the multiple Oscar-nominated Cold Mountain.

Cine-Byte is currently completing its first feature with the system, Quebec release Elles etaient cinq, directed by Ghyslaine Cote and produced by Maxime Remillard of Remstar Productions and Richard Lalonde of Forum Films, both out of Montreal.

The 10-year-old shop already has a well-established reputation for such services as scanning, film recording and digital opticals, having completed work recently on The Snow Walker, The Gospel of John, Mambo Italiano and The Blue Butterfly, not to mention Oscar winner Chicago.

According to Cine-Byte president Alan Bak, the greatest advantage of the FilmLight system upgrade stems from the Northlight scanner’s ability to master a film digitally into high-quality 2K data.

‘We’re preserving, right through the whole process, the entire dynamic range that was captured on the negative,’ he says. ‘We don’t lose any color resolution.’

While telecine-type HD scanners can do the job, Bak maintains that his system, which can scan at 2K, 4K or 6K, is superior because in HD transfer the negative goes into a ‘very truncated color state as the first step of the process.’ In other words, it won’t give you the same color depth.

‘So we can maintain the full quality that was on the negative and have all the flexibility that gives us right up to the last step of the process, when you film-record it,’ he says.

‘[HD scanners] can’t handle the dynamic range of a typical scene on film where you might have several stops of overexposure on specular highlights. They’re just going to clip and that’s going to be visible on the film at the end of the day. With this method, we have none of that, and it also lets us produce a wonderful video master at the end.’

Unlike HD scanners such as Spirit or C-Reality, the Northlight does not work in realtime. Rather, it’s a pin-registered system, meaning the film is not moving through the gate at 24 frames per second. Each film frame physically stops in the gate on the scanner and ground metal pins are engaged into the perfs, effectively registering every frame in the same position relative to the next frame. Pin registration has always been important in FX, where frames cannot be off by even a few pixels.

The knock against such systems has been that they take too long to transfer an entire feature. But according to Bak, the Northlight manages to cut down the process considerably. ‘The Northlight scanner is allowing us to scan in 2K data at just over two seconds a frame,’ he says. ‘We scanned in [Elles etaient cinq] in four and a half days, which is great. It’s all stored centrally. It’s on the color-grading system. The DOP [Alexis Durand-Brault] has been in for a first session and is very pleased with what he is seeing.’

Data is stored on a disk array at Cine-Byte that provides nearly seven terabytes of centralized storage. The Baselight color-grading system has an additional two terabytes for storage.

Bak is equally pleased with the results he’s seeing from the Baselight color-grading and the Truelight color-calibration systems.

The shop accomplishes the color grading by projecting a digital print onto an eight-foot-wide screen for the filmmakers in Cine-Byte’s custom-built studio, and making necessary adjustments on the go.

‘It gives them much more of a film feel. The bigger the image is, the fewer surprises there are when you see it big. But that’s really the key. You have to be able to display the image the way the film will look. So, from there, any change that you make digitally will be faithfully reproduced on the film,’ says Bak.

According to Bak, Cine-Byte is one of only two shops to use an Arri Laser recorder to make the final transfer back to film. (Toybox is the other.) The challenge faced by any such operation is to scan in a frame of film into the digital realm, turn it around and put it back onto film and have it exactly match the print from the original negative.

‘If you’re in a dark-wood paneled room and it’s walnut, it can’t look like oak when we scan it and film record it. It’s all got to be exactly the same. So now we bring that same commitment and technical fidelity to this aspect of the game,’ says Bak.

-www.cinebyte.com

-www.filmlight.ltd.uk