Investigation of the Academy’s Image Interchange Framework at RIT

Students of the Rochester Institute of Technology’s School of Film and Animation produce hundreds of films each year. The focus of their studies is mainly on its story, direction, and editing. Managing what exactly happens to their scene from when they set up the lights on day one to the day the film screens in the Carlson Auditorium is the focus of this paper. There is often an assumption of ”what you see is what you get” when it comes to student filmmaking. However, there is an enormous amount of image processing that occurs within the camera on set, the equipment used during post-production, and the projector at final exhibition. Often this produces unwanted or unexpected results. The solution to this problem is to develop a color management framework as a basis on which students can properly manage the “final look” and maintain the creative intent of their projects. When film is exposed, processed, printed, and projected, the reproduction of real world color and contrast is not perfectly accurate. It is, however, how people seem to prefer to see the world. Across the world, people will most often prefer the “film look,” one that has been tweaked for decades by Kodak and other companies.1 The question becomes whether people enjoy this look for habitual reasons, or if it is truly the most pleasing to the eye. Because film is a subtractive system consisting of cyan, magenta, and yellow dyes, achieving that look with a red-green-blue additive system such as digital capture is a challenge. Digital camera manufacturers have been struggled with this issue for years. The organic nature of film does, however, carry its own limitations on color rendering. This begins a philosophical debate of whether future digital systems should attempt to imitate film or discover a look more pleasing than that. With the shift to digital capture upon us, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has formed a committee to discuss this question, and develop what is known as the Image Interchange Framework. The IIF will be a standard encoding and rendering for digital motion picture mastering. Just as the film imaging chain renders a certain “look” when you simply expose and print a piece of film, this new framework is a digital imaging chain, on top of which directors and cinematographers can place their own artistic intentions. For the past four years, work has been done to develop this standard, but the question of whether to imitate film or go beyond it remains in debate. The current stance is to start with film as an aim, but take advantage of digital imaging capabilities to improve it. During the course of this research project, a key component of the Image Interchange Framework is developed using the equipment available to a Digital Cinema student at the Rochester Institute of Technology. This component is referred to as an Input Device Transform (IDT), a transform which fits a specific input device into the IIF. Extensive characterization of the Panasonic HVX-200 camera is done in order to build IDTs for scenarios typical of a SOFA student using this camera. Future implementation of a complete framework would allow students to be sure that “what they see is what they’ll really get,” and this project serves as a proof-of-concept to help advance the Academy’s work.