Webinar: Color in Digital Cinema

Our speaker will be Anthony P. Stanton, an ISCC Board member. Anthony Stanton is a Teaching Professor and Director of Graphic  Media Management for the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). In addition to teaching, Stanton is responsible for developing the curriculum, administering over adjunct faculty, and advising students in the graphic media track. Stanton has held this position since 1996. In 2003, he received an award for sustained teaching excellence.

Prior to teaching at CMU, Stanton spent twelve years as Director of Process Controls for the Graphic Arts Technical Foundation. In this position, he was responsible for designing and overseeing the manufacture of quality control devices for the printing industry. He also performed research on print analysis and color reproduction. During his tenure at GATF, Stanton introduced whole-process test forms into the product line, which previously included only individual devices. He also introduced digital targets (and later,  native PostScript targets) into the Foundation’s product line.

The title of Anthony’s webinar is “Color Reproduction in Digital Cinema”. Here is the abstract for his presentation:

Of all popular media forms, the cinema industry was the last to evolve from photomechanical to digital processes. This delay was due in part to the complexity of cinema production. Three distinct phases of production had to migrate from film to digital before beginning-to-end digital cinema was realized. These were:

● Image capture (shooting the scenes of the movie).

● The editing process (putting the captured scenes together with computer-generated imagery to produce the master file).

● Image display (projecting the completed movies in theaters).

 This webinar will begin with a brief description of the history of color in cinema and the means by which color correction and control were achieved with photomechanical processes. “The adoption of digital processes in each of the three phases of cinema production will be described, as will color control methods and the comparative differences from film workflows. Various mastering, distribution, and projection systems will be analyzed for consistency and quality. “Color conversion and color correction techniques, as well as the current idealized projection characteristics, will be examined.”