What Colour is that?

BELLADONNA as you may have gathered by now is being shot in two seperate shoots, one in Poland and the other in Australia. We are currently in the gap between the two, so we're in post and pre production at the same time. One of the things that we are working on is a couple of simple effects shots for the 15th century section of the film. I'm working on on one of these currently using a combination of Terragen (landscape generating software) and Shake (compositing software).
The shot I'm working on at the moment is an establishing shot of Jadwiga and Jan's house which intercuts with the rest of the sequence shot in Sanok. Even though we are not doing the final DI grade till we get to Poland next year, to complete the post production we would like to do a test grade now of a few shots, for our own reference and to allow us to match the effects shots too. Now this is the first time we have worked on a DI ( digital intermediate, essentially colour correcting the film digitally rather than the traditional process on film), so we are currently trying to find a cost effective way to be able to calibrate the colour, brightness, gamma and contrast we see on our monitor to match what the image will look like once it is transfered to film.
With HD and SD this is easy all you need is a calibrated trustworthy monitor, with a DI the process is not so straight forward. The path these particular images will take is HDCAM (HD gamma YUV) to 1080P rgb 8 bit quicktime files to 2k dpx files to a film recorder outputing to neg stock (processing variations) then printed and projected , crikey! what a twisted alphabet soup path of potential confusion . Now each of these stages inevitably involves changes to the way the image looks, so the solution is to know how the image you are looking at at each stage relates to the final projected image. This is achieved through the use of files called 3D LUT's. These are essentially a calibrated correction the program you are using to view the image uses to correct the image to appear as it will in the finished projected image. The LUT doesn't actually change the file, just how it appears.
The Two solutions for generating these 3D LUT files that we are currently investigating are Cinespace 2.5 from Rising Sun research and 3D LUT cube builder from Digital praxis.
Another use for these 3D Lut files will be in the monitoring of the image from the RED camera. We are going to use of 3D lut 's loaded into a Blackmagic design HDlink pro to view the red camera output on an Apple 23" lcd. This should allow us to monitor onset how the final image will appear. Throught the use of different 3D LUT's we should also be able to view differnt grading options live.
So what colour is it really is really all very relative. One of the things that is immediately apparent is that almost endless digital options invite constant (time consuming ) experimentation, that doesn't necessarily lead to the detailed and instinctive image making control knowledge that can come from using one film emulsion for a long time.