Digital colour, basically, is a confusing, paradoxical mess. A filmmaker can speak with exacting precision about the properties of digital colour. But colour is always subjective. "This is a very subjective world that I live in," says Mike Sowa, a digital intermediate (DI) colourist at Technicolor Hollywood. Sowa has mastered colour for more than 100 films including Oblivion, Insurgent, Need for SpeedandWalking with Dinosaurs 3Dand is now working with Panasonic to try and make TVs as good as the silver screen.
But the process of mastering colour starts way before the cameras roll. It starts with the script, as Sowa tells WIRED. "A lot of this depends on the filmmakers. Are they making a realistic film? Are they making a comedy where we're supposed to relate to the characters? Then you don't want the colour to be abstract," Sowa explains. "But if you're making an action film you might pump up the saturation a little bit, pump up the contrast to give it more edge. A lot of this depends on the type of film and the filmmakers and what they want to see."
Colour 'management', as Sowa calls it, comes late in the process of making a film. The camera has captured the image and the editor has built the film from the raw footage. The CGI is finished, and even the sound is mastered, more or less. It's then, if a director is working with Sowa, that filmmakers sit in a customised cinema in Hollywood, in front of a 30 by 13 feet screen-- "my room is one of the premiere rooms in the world", Sowa boasts -- and reshape the colour of the film into a consistent, dynamic form, that reflects what the movie is supposed to be. "The image is a little bit better than they'll ever see in the world, but it's close," Sowa says of his theatre room. "Then I sit at a long console, with a Lustre colour system. We've got dials. Trackballs. A lot of knobs, a lot of lights."
Out of this complexity, Sowa's job is not to find an objectively 'perfect' colour balance, but to translate a director's intention. "Probably the worst thing I can do is preconceive a look for a film," he says. "What I imagine is usually 180 degrees from what the filmmakers have imagined. I come in at a much later stage -- I haven't lived with this film for a year. They've talked about it, lived with it, edited it for months, and now we can finally create the image we've already imagined." "Some of them get that look close in dailies, so they've lived with a look already in their dailies and my job is to make it look like the dailies did. In others they'll come in fresh, with a whole new palette, and they'll come in and say: 'We don't really know. Show us something'. Then I have to start asking questions."
The mixed-up process of modern filmmaking, particularly its ever-closer relationship with visual effects and CGI, even in seemingly naturalistic films, makes this difficult. "That's a constant management problem, working between the different visual effects houses," Sowa says. "That's a big problem that I want to say has been remedied, but for years I was getting elements back that didn't match –- nothing matched."
Most theatre projections of a film -- based on a so-called "master" copy of the production -- will match, especially with digital projections. But when a movie starts to trickle down to people's homes, the problems begin.
Why? Partly because those screens are just physically unable to display many of the colours included in the master. "Most people don't know that there are different colour spaces, with a different gamma and brightness level," Sowa says. In cinema the space is called P3, and its limited only by what the projector can render. TVs are different, and more restrictive. Small screens with reference-quality images do exist, but cost upwards of £20,000. Often, director's just don't get understand the limitations, Sowa says.
"I had a director who was watching the master on this professional piece of equipment costing $30,000 that no consumer is ever going to be able to buy, and he asked: 'How do I know my movie is going to look like that when I go home?' I said, That's a good question'."
What happened next is the equivalent of the legendary 'car stereo' test used by music producers. "He brought his own TV from home in, put it at the end of the room, and it filled the room in blue. So we returned it to the manufacturer's settings, and it was really bright, and really blue. It's just made to wow the consumer, that's all. It wasn't made to represent the film in any way." "He still couldn't get his head around it, so we went down to Best Buy. There are a whole wall of TVs and they're all different. It's like, pick one. There's no way to manage this. All you need to know is that what we've made is the master. When everything is perfect, that image is perfect. If you need a version that's compromised because your TV is too blue, I'll make it -– but you're going to pay for it. It's going into your house but that's it."
Sowa was speaking to WIRED at IFA 2015, one of the world's largest technology trade shows, where he was promoting -- you guessed it -- a TV.
It might seem suspicious, but this TV is, in theory, a little different. The Panasonic CZ950 is an outwardly beautiful curved 4K, 65-inch HDR OLED screen, and is probably going to end up as Panasonic's best (and most hideously expensive) consumer model, but it is also specifically tuned to be able to reproduce the closest facsimile of Sowa's masters, from factory settings. It's the only 4K OLED TV, for instance, which happens to be THX-certified.
In a demo it was able to push colour right to the edge of a curved screen, where other similar panels produced 'vignettes' at the extremities. It is also extremely bright, thanks to the HDR tech, and though it is literally impossible to judge a TV on a tech show demo, Panasonic considers it a breakthrough. But you can still choose to change the brightness and contrast yourself. "We can't take those controls away from the consumer," said Ron Martin, VP at Panasonic Hollywood Labs. "But we can say that if you have it in this mode, you're getting Mike's work. He actually approved the colours that you're seeing on that TV. Our goal is obviously, like I say, to promote something really spectacular, but we hope it will raise the bar for the industry. We can now get closer to that than ever before, even with plasma."
While TVs capable in both panels and processors of replaying a master-quality image are only just appearing, HDR is just around the corner and set to rewrite the rules yet again. HDR makes it possible to display up to ten times brighter images and colours than before, and can outperform even cinema screens in pure brightness. This is causing headaches for filmmakers -- as well as opportunities -- but it's also forcing Sowa to reconsider how to do his job. "We don't really know how HDR will change this yet," he explains. "The complex answer is that we're trying to develop a workflow. We already have orders for HDR. I have to know what I'm doing with HDR, and how I manipulate this picture to look like the movie. "Coming from digital cinema where the master was made, there is a serious amount of colour management that needs to be done for it to look like the film. We were thrust into it by the manufacturers -- they're the ones who pushed this. We didn't push this."
Unfortunately, in TVs as in Hollywood movies, the fact is that colour will probably remain subjective: a screen capable of producing a master-quality image will look too bright in some rooms, too blue in others, and Sowa's work will always look best in a perfectly dark, perfectly balanced room. And yes, the CZ950 might be a great TV -- but you can bet a dozen more manufacturers are ready to claim theirs is even more masterful than this one.
So can TV ever be perfect? "We don’t really know yet," Sowa says. "The complex answer is that we're trying to develop a workflow. So which master do we start with?"
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
