DIT Chris Bolton tackles complex challenges across projec...

As productions grow more sophisticated, skilled digital imaging technicians (DITs) are in high demand, with their role rapidly expanding. Being fluent in the latest camera and production equipment is a core part of the job. DIT Chris Bolton of Chromatic Pictures understands this well, having lent his talents to commercials and feature film projects, such as Underworld: Awakening, Here, Wonder, and Welcome to Marwen. Wherever projects take him, Bolton always brings his DIT cart, which includes high-quality monitors, Pomfort Livegrade Pro software, a multi-viewer, an AJA KUMO 3232-12G SDI router, and an AJA ColorBox color management and conversion device, among other tools.

Preparing for wide-ranging demands in the field

Bolton's day-to-day work looks different, depending on the gig, but he's always responsible for communicating the Director of Photography's (DoP's) creative intent to stakeholders downstream of the camera. This helps ensure the creative vision is carried out while also meeting studio requirements. In episodic and feature work, he helps design and implement an on-set camera-to-post workflow with the DoP and colorist to craft the show's look. Bolton also makes sure the camera bodies, monitors, and all the system components work correctly and accurately. On commercial projects, he assumes the role of a dailies house, creating on- or near-set dailies, and completing finishing-grade color corrections with the DoP to refine the project s look. His cart and workflow play an integral role in meeting various project needs in the field.

Establishing a camera test and live grading workflow

Two crucial aspects of Bolton's job on any project are camera tests and live grading, for which he uses an AJA ColorBox built into his DIT cart. The color management and conversion device enables him to review a clean 33-point tetrahedral 10-bit UltraHD color pipeline and serves as his 4K/UltraHD HDR review option for live grading with Pomfort Livegrade. KUMO 3232-12G provides the routing backbone of his setup. Using an Elgato Stream Deck, he s able to build macros to control the KUMO for greater speed and efficiency.

Although Bolton currently executes 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 game-changing piece of hardware. The ability to send a low-latency HD signal out of the HDMI port makes it even more versatile, explained Bolton. And the 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.

Bolton 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 color 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 continued. Its low latency and 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.

Technology in action

Bolton uses ColorBox across projects, but one more memorable job for him is Here, an original film that follows the stories of multiple families in a special place they inhabit. He collaborated closely on the film with Director of Photography (DoP) Don Burgess, ASC, and Director Robert (Bob) Zemeckis. It's one of those rare projects that doesn't come around often, Bolton said. Fortunately, I had experience working with Don Burgess on two films Wonder and The Christmas Chronicles 2 and I also had the opportunity to work with Bob and Producer Derek Hogue on Welcome to Marwen. The stars aligned, and off I went.

Here was unique, according to Bolton, in 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 Bolton 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, which we were able to do with ColorBox, 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 out the window started creating unwanted aliasing effects.

At the end of the day, AJA is known for mission-critical hardware that just works, and that's worth a lot to me, he added. No one else on the market offers everything ColorBox does 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.

Focus on the future

Though Bolton's 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 his adoption of tools like ColorBox. As 4K and HDR become more common on set, creatives 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.

About AJA ColorBox

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