The DI work was performed on iQ at FotoKem in Burbank, LA, who have one of the best DI suites available. It's based around Quantel's iQ with Qcolour and uses DPL Ltd's 2K Digital TI D-Cinema projector, large projection screen and Kiniton film projector.

The film material was scanned on an Imagica scanner at 2K resolution (using 4K Nyquist sampling) from the original 'uncut' film negative rolls using keycode numbers generated from the offline edl. The actual DI process, including colour correction, was performed on iQ with Qcolour by Digital Praxis's Steve Shaw and Walter Volpatto.

FotoKem's iQ DI suite.

America's Heart & Soul was originally a multi-part US tv series, but was deemed so good that it was decided to produce a 110 min feature, backed by Walt Disney. The film was directed, shot, scripted and produced by Louie Schwartzberg.

The project is a documentary that shows some of the more interesting aspects of American life, specifically those who live it in interesting ways.

As a result, the cinematography was awesome in content and quality, but suffered variable exposure due to the 'live' nature of the shooting - there often being little time for shot planning & lighting.

The result was variable contrast shot to shot, with incorrect film stocks sometimes being used as that was what was in the camera at the time (for example tungsten stock being used for exterior shots...)

As the project was initially for tv only this was not a problem as all material was telecine transferred to video and as part of this procedure contrast, colour balance and exposure errors could be corrected.

However, for a film final project the traditional chemical grading process would not be capable of the necessary changes, making America's Heart & Soul a perfect DI project - it just couldn't have been performed any other way!

Offline editorial for the film project was performed via Avid Matchback at 30fps, following on from the tv original version. This proved to be the film's biggest problem as it was almost impossible to guarantee the accuracy of the online edl for autoconforming. As a documentary there were a far larger number of edits than in a traditional 'screenplay' film and resulted in a large percentage of the project having to be eye matched to the offline video. Not an ideal situation, but something that iQ proved to be invaluable for, being able to split screen between the 2K film data images and the offline video in real-time while playing the dual image streams.

The underlying cinematography was excellent, as described earlier, but the fact that all material had previously been telecine transferred for tv use presented a unique problem. The director and DoP, Louie Schwartzberg, had expectations that what had been seen on the telecine was a realistic view of what was present on the negative and therefore what should be on the film print. obviously this is not true - the two mediums of film and tv being very different - and the original camera negative had never previously been printed.

Therefore, we had to develop a digital film grading process that was capable of extending the dynamic range of the final print to more closely represent the original tv version, and with the direct creative assistance of Louie and his original telecine colourist, Randy Coonfield, we were able to do just that.

This was performed via non-linear 'fettle' curve distortions of the original film negative gamma curve profile to bring original toe shadow detail and shoulder highlight detail into the more linear portion of the film's transfer curve while maintaining a consistent film print profile. Then, on top of this correction, creative grading could take place.

The final results were amazing and show a real benefit of the DI process for film-originated material.

If offline editorial could have been performed more accurately (i.e. not have been an edl from the video world) this would have become one of the most perfect DI projects to date.

It's worth saying that one of the overriding results of this project was the stunning imagery seen via the iQ and digital projector when compared to the film projected final, even when the projection print was struck directly from the original negative (answer print). The digitally projected imagery was simply stunning.