DIT Chris Bolton works on commercials and feature films, relying on his DIT cart equipped with monitors and essential tools for on-set grading, multi-viewing, routing and colour management
As video production from broadcast to cinema grows more complex, skilled digital imaging technicians (DITs) are in high demand, while their roles are rapidly expanding. Knowledge and experience in the most up to date camera and production equipment are a core part of the job.
DIT Chris Bolton of Chromatic Pictures understands this trend well, having worked on commercials and feature film projects such as Underworld: Awakening, Here, Wonder and Welcome to Marwen. Wherever projects take him, Chris always has his DIT cart with him, equipped with high-quality monitors and essential tools for on-set colour grading, multi-viewing, routing and colour management, among other tasks.
A Day in the Life
Chris’ work varies from day to day, depending on the job, but one of his constant priorities is communicating the Director of Photography's (DoP's) creative intent to those working downstream of the camera. This helps ensure the creative vision is carried out while also meeting studio requirements.
For episodic and feature work, he helps the DoP and colourist to design and implement an on-set camera-to-post workflow, to craft the show's look. Chris also makes sure the camera bodies, monitors and all the system components work correctly and accurately.
On commercial projects, he takes the role of a one-man dailies house, creating on- or near-set dailies, and completing finishing-grade colour corrections with the DoP to refine the project's look. Meanwhile, his cart and workflow play an important role in meeting various project needs in the field.
Two crucial aspects of Chris' job on any type of project are camera tests and live grading, for which he uses an AJA ColorBox built into his DIT cart. A colour management and conversion device, Chris uses ColorBox to review a clean 33-point tetrahedral 10-bit UltraHD colour pipeline for 3D interpolation for colour space conversion, and it also serves as his 4K/UltraHD HDR review option for live grading with Pomfort Livegrade.
AJA KUMO 3232-12G is the routing backbone of his setup and, using an Elgato Stream Deck, he's able to build macros to control the KUMO for greater speed and efficiency.
Live Grading
Although Chris currently produces on-set dailies in HD, he anticipates a shift toward 4K/UltraHD in the future, for which he sees ColorBox as a key supporting component. "I can't wait for ColorBox to become my daily driver—it's genuinely a piece of hardware that changes everything. The ability to send a low-latency HD signal out of the HDMI port makes it even more versatile," he said.
"AJA’s box has some incredible capabilities that I haven't fully tapped yet, like image overlay functions and enhanced ACES provisions. ColorBox is one of the best tools for live grading anywhere, and I love how AJA continues to add features. They really listen to end user feedback, which makes me happy."
Chris has found ColorBox's low latency live grading interface with live frame capture and overlay functions especially useful for fast-paced productions or any production that requires live colour adjustment. "ColorBox supports nearly every resolution we can use on set today, and even less common use cases like fine calibrations of high-end consumer panels," he said.
"Its low-latency, high precision image, plus the flexibility of what its hardware and software can do using the web GUI or third-party software vendors, are equally impressive and very cool."
Perfect Alignment
One memorable project for him is Here, a feature film that follows the stories of a series of families who successively inhabit one particular place. He collaborated on the film directly with DoP Don Burgess, ASC, and Director Robert Zemeckis.
"It's one of those rare projects that doesn't come around often," Chris said. "Fortunately, I’d had experience working with Don Burgess on other two films – Wonder and The Christmas Chronicles 2 – and I had also had the opportunity to work with Bob and Producer Derek Hogue on Welcome to Marwen. The stars aligned, and off I went."
For Chris, the stand-out feature of the production is that the camera never moved. To get everything just right required a long prep schedule to test every aspect of each scene before production shot a single frame. One challenge was ensuring the camera was perfectly aligned every morning. Any changes in the rigging hardware overnight would shift the camera's position, which is where Chris found ColorBox useful.
"We wanted to review the alignment and qualities of the set in UltraHD resolution, which helped ensure the camera was perfectly aligned. ColorBox is a good tool to use for this task," he noted. "By zooming into a higher-resolution image, we could assess the smallest discrepancies. ColorBox was also valuable in determining how far we could throw focus into the background before the virtual environment screen, set up outside the window, started creating unwanted aliasing effects.
From Unpredictable, To Predictable
"I don’t know of any other product on the market with everything ColorBox has in such a small form factor. The best part about it is its deep customizations, which can alter the incoming live image. I'm just scratching the surface of all its capabilities."
Though Chris’ line of work can be unpredictable, he is confident that 4K and HDR will one day become the on-set norm and is preparing accordingly through adoption of tools like ColorBox. He said, "Creatives working on set with 4K and HDR will be able to make better judgments. On-set production is overdue for an upgrade, so I'm exploring the technologies and workflows today that will give me more control over an image with the impending shift," he concluded. www.aja.com
