Digital Intermediates for Film and Video /by Jack James. Though he's contributed to such films as Neil Jordan's Breakfast on Pluto, Fernando Meirelles' The Constant Gardener and Anthony Minghella's Cold Mountain, it was his pioneering work on the Tom Hanks/Steven Spielberg HBO miniseries "Band of Brothers" that brought visual effects artist James Jack to the forefront of his craft. The 10-episode drama pioneered the debut of a new form of technology, one that would change the quality of broadcast film and video forever: The digital intermediate process. As James describes it, the digital intermediate (or DI) process is essentially an extremely advanced version of Adobe Photoshop. As with Photoshop, it is the process of taking an image from an original source (a piece of film, digital image, or even a paper printout), inputting it into your digital system (either by scanning or copying the file), making changes to the image and then outputting it. Sounds simple, right? That's because of James' ability to break the process down into laymen's terms and explain how DI can be used with any format and on any budget. It's a rare techie out can make the whole moviemaking process easy to understand, but James is one of the chosen few - and it's this talent that makes his book worthwhile.
