Comment by mer_mer
5 hours ago
You can, that's what Pixar did while creating the film. From the article:
> During production, we’re working mostly from computer monitors. We’re rarely seeing the images on film. So, we have five or six extremely high-resolution monitors that have better color and picture quality. We put those in general work areas, so people can go and see how their work looks. Then, when we record, we try to calibrate to the film stock, so the image we have on the monitor looks the same as what we’ll get on film.
But they didn't do a perfect job (the behavior of film is extremely complex), so there's a question- should the digital release reflect their intention as they were targeting these calibrated monitors or should it reflect what was actually released? Also, this wouldn't include other artifacts like film grain.
> Then, when we record, we try to calibrate to the film stock, so the image we have on the monitor
Except, as they say, the high grade monitors were calibrated to emulate the characteristics of film.
If we can show that D+ doesn't look like the film, then we can point out that it probably doesn't look like the calibrated monitors either. Those army men are not that shade of slime green in real life, and you'll have a hard time convincing me that after all the thought and effort went in to the animation they allowed that putrid pea shade to go through.
The best option for me would be to release it in whatever format preserves the most of the original colour data without modification, then let the viewer application apply colour grading. Give me the raw renders in a linear 16bpc colour space with no changes. Sadly, I don't think we have digital movie formats that can handle that.