“I think cinematographers have always advocated for a better experience for the audience, whether it’s fast film stocks with tighter grain, better projection technology, or higher quality digital-capture and display technologies. HDR is just another step in that direction.”
Erik Messerschmidt
At NAB 2023, Carolyn Giardina, tech editor of the Hollywood Reporter, sat down with Dominic Glynn, senior scientist at Pixar Animation Studios, and Jay Holben, director of the ASC’s StEM2, to talk HDR. During the conversation, Glynn remarks that HDR isn’t so much a disruption of traditional filmmaking as it is a natural progression, incorporating higher resolution, greater dynamic range and wider color gamut – characteristics that color scientists and engineers working at Kodak and Fuji had been striving toward for years. Jay Holben says filmmakers aren’t making an effort to learn about HDR.
Carolyn Giardina: Jay, you directed the project called The Mission, which is the ASC’s Motion Imaging Technology Council’s short film, most commonly known as StEM2, and you had a lot of opportunities to experiment in that; what did you learn? what are the creative benefits of these new tools?
Jay Holben: Unfortunately, I would love to take about two or three hours to talk about everything I’ve learned, because it’s a phenomenal list; but the truth is, the thing that I take away most that I’ve learned specifically about HDR, is that, for the first time, we really present a true integrity of the artist’s vision from the mastering suite to exhibition without compromise. To me, that’s extraordinary. We’re not in service of the print and the limitation of the print or in service of 48-nit projection. HDR affords the filmmaker the ability to really get the image exactly that we want on that screen, and to me that was unbelievable; it was life-changing. I went from being a skeptic to the technology to being just a sing-song evangelist for it now, and I’m a huge fan of it.
Carolyn Giardina: Is there maybe one scene or sequence or shot from the project that you could describe as kind of an aha moment that you had when you were grading?
Jay Holben: Well, the whole thing’s kind of designed to be aha. For those that might not be familiar, the standard evaluation material is a second step for the ASC. We produced the standard evaluation material to help projection standards in 2004 and this is standard evaluation material version 2 to help HDR and laser projection and professional monitors. So, every element of it was designed to push this technology as far as we possibly can: in contrast, in detail, in color gamut. And one of the things that was fun for me as a filmmaker was, I had actually learned from Pixar, was that we can push this brightness just a little bit… and there’s a scene in StEM where the characters have a space-age arc welder and the characters are having to shield themselves from the brightness of these sparks and I liked that I was able to put that brightness just at the edge of comfort for the audience, to put them emotionally into, or empathetically, into the experience of the actors, or the characters. And that was really exciting.
Carolyn Giardina: That’s what Annie [Annie Chang, Universal Pictures Vice President, Creative Technologies] talked about in the last session, that this is a canvas for filmmakers and you don’t have to use all of it all the time, but you can use those moments to really make an impact.
Jay Holben: Absolutely. You can’t push it to 300 nits all the time, full screen brightness; people will need sunglasses and they’ll run away screaming. But just having that container to put your story in is wonderful, is amazing. We get incredible blacks out of it that just melt into the masking, and that makes me want to cry. Because as a former cinematographer or ‘recovering cinematographer’, that’s something I was striving for my whole career. You know, ‘We want solid blacks, we’re doing skip bleach; we’re doing ENR, we’re doing Vision Premier prints’. And now, we can get it in a normal HDR presentation.
Note: “The closest look nowadays to a dye transfer print is to print on Kodak Vision Premier. ENR would increase the blacks but also reduce color saturation, whereas Premier print stock has deep blacks and stronger colors. Not as good as dye transfer but closer than any other option.” – David Mullen, ASC circa 2008
Dominic Glynn: That idea of Vision Premier, I think back to the moments before digital cinema, or as it was sort of taking over from film, we would readily spend virtually twice as much on our distribution plan to acquire Vision Premier for every single one of Pixar’s releases. The trajectory of that film technology, Kodak and Fuji together, working toward, every year, sharper, higher dynamic range, darker darks… This isn’t a new phenomenon, just because it’s digital. And you’re right: the sort of step-change and the sort of brute force capability that we have now with a lot of these technologies, it speaks to the language of cinema. Yeah, it’s magic tech, it’s shiny, it’s a great toy, but it’s not an accident and it’s not… it’s built with a very deliberate path through the language of cinema, and that vector, that trajectory, where it’s headed, is still the same direction: It’s better, it’s darker, it’s brighter, it’s more colorful – it has always been that trajectory.
Cullen Kelly’s also spoken about how color scientists were constantly striving to improve film stocks:
“We started the conversation with like, well film prints, there’s no such thing as an HDR film print. Film prints max out at an absolute peak of about 48 nits. What if I want something brighter that still looks good? Am I just out of luck because all I can do is grope at this system that hasn’t evolved past that in a number of years? There’s all kinds of undesirable aspects of film as well, and I think the only way we can borrow the best of the film tradition is to recognize it’s not perfect, it’s just the results of about a century of really smart people working really hard to make images look really good and if we steal the best parts of that tradition and leave behind the parts that they weren’t able to push further – because this is something else that you can hear about from Dr. Mitch Bogdanovich [who spent 32 years at Kodak] and any other number of the engineers and scientists who are actually working on the problems of image reproduction with film systems. There’s lots of complaints. They’re like ‘We can’t get this any better, we tried; right now we’ve got to ship this print stock and it’s going to have to do.’ There’s all kinds of compromises and things they wish they could do better that we now can do better, that they would have killed to have the ability to do; so if we’re not taking advantage of that stuff, in my opinion, that’s just dumb.”
Carolyn Giardina: You both are very excited about this technology and really see the benefits of.. the creative opportunities, but generally speaking, what are you seeing in animation and live production? Are filmmakers aware of these capabilities? Is it something that, from production to post-production, which you mention, are they making an effort to learn it? What are you seeing?
Jay Holben: I am not seeing that, in my experience. I am very close with a lot of cinematographers, being an associate member of the ASC and deeply involved. As a ‘recovering cinematographer,’ I can’t get away from it. And I see a lot of them are resistant to this, or they see it as just a deliverable; like, ‘I’m going to shoot what I shoot and they’re going to deal with HDR later. And it might not even be there.’ I advocate that that’s the absolute wrong way to approach it; that the cinematographer needs to be intimately involved in that HDR, needs to be there… I don’t see a lot of filmmakers necessarily embracing this right now, but I think that’s going to change very rapidly, within the next year or two.
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