DIT, The profession - Digital image Technician

DIT, THE PROFESSION

DIGITAL IMAGE TECHNICIAN

Today in the Camaleon Rental blog we are going to speak about the role of a DIT. The first question is to define what a DIT is as well as determine if this position belongs to the camera crew or to the postproduction crew. The answer would be that he is kind of a liaison between both department, even though if we have to make a choice we would say that he is part of the camera department since he works on set.

DIT WORK

The DIT, Digital Imaging Technician, appeared in the audiovisual sector with the first high definition video cameras and later digital cinema cameras. We must remember that when these cameras began to appear, camera assistants and directors of photography had been using film cameras and photochemical support for years, if not decades, to carry out their work. The arrival of such novel and at the same time very different equipment required the incorporation of a professional figure into the camera team who could advise the director of photography thanks to the use of waveform monitors and vectorscopes (since the way of exposing was radically different) and resolve the camera team's doubts regarding settings (resolution, codec, recording speed, etc.) and multi-page menus that the lifelong assistants were faced with for the first time.

And since the DIT was the person on the shooting staff who best knew both the camera and the files it generated, in many productions he also began to be in charge of downloading and backups. This task, which technically would be the data manager's, is still often carried out by the DIT today.

Another very important task of the DIT comes into play when we talk about multi-camera shoots. In this sense, he reminds us of the technicians who work in television in camera control, adjusting the necessary parameters so that the image given by the different cameras has the same brightness, color balance and, in short, is as homogeneous as possible so that there are no "jumps" when mixing the material coming from those different cameras... In addition, the DIT works hand in hand with the video assistant configuring the workflow of how the camera signal reaches the various director, DoP and client monitors. In fact, another of his tasks is the calibration of those monitors so that the image is seen as similar as possible on all of them.

In a nutshell, the tasks of a DIT as part of the camera crew are:
· To download the footage.
· To set the parameters of the camera or cameras.
· To advise and help the DoP on the best exposure for any given sequence or shot.
· To control how the video signal travels from the camera to the monitors.
· To calibrate the different monitors of the video village.
On the post production side of his duties, the DIT assume others tasks more related to the
editor assistant:
· Apart of downloading the cards, he makes at least one back-up copy of the footage
to ensure that it is safe. To do that, during the pre production he makes an
estimation of how many hard drives the production is going to need, depending on
the number of cameras, the resolution and the codec in which the project is going to
be shot.
· He makes a quality control of the footage, looking for any out of focus, drop or
corrupted files.
· He makes the transcodes of the material to an optimized codec for a smoother
workflow in edition and postproduction, regardless the fact that the film is going to
be edited in AVID, Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premiere.He could also be asked to do
other transcodes in low quality to be sent to the DoP, director, producer or script
supervisor, so they can check all the footage whenever they want.
· He makes a basic colour grading too, by applying LUTs or giving the look the
director of photography is wanting to achieve. This is specially useful when we are
shooting with cameras that are setted in logarithmic curve of color, which means the
image has low contrast and is highly desaturated, hence very edition-unfriendly.

To correctly and fastly perform all of those tasks, the DIT usually owns what is called a DIT Station. It is a computer made for managing the back ups in different hard drives through high speed connections. But it also usually features a professional monitor for colour grading and a powerful processor and graphic card to render the transcodes. The DIT Station is ready for be easily moved so it could be close either to the camera or the client’s monitors, in order to send them the video signal if required.