Digital YCM.

Prime Focus offers a full Digital YCM service as a way to ensure that content is conserved well into the future. Once a digital master is created in the DI process, it is then recorded to yellow-cyan-magenta (YCM) separations on the black and white film, which is very stable.

During YCM recording, images are sharpened to compensate for the normal sharpness loss in a film recording. Technical data frames are added to the head and tail of each reel to enable proper and accurate automatic color correction in the digital recombination.

The YCM’s are then scanned at a resolution depending on the desired final element. These scans are sharpened appropriately depending on the resolution to achieve the best level of sharpness.

Automatic color correction is applied to the recombined images based on look up tables generated from technical elements placed on the head and tail of the YCM film recording.

Once complete, the scans pass through final visual media output and can be layed out.