Big Screen Entertainment Group Inc (BSEG)

[flimdim]

A digital intermediate is when the original film negative is scanned into a digital file, frame by frame. Then the digital frames are used for all "intermediate" work (visual effects, color timing, editing, etc.) and the final composite files are then written back to film by another machine called a laser film recorder. This reduces the image loss that is typically accrued by doing those steps optically (using more generations of film prints, each one degrading the image slightly) and so it protects image quality and also provides a lossless (digital) method of archiving the film image. That's my real bare-bones understanding of it. I work at a visual effects house, so I hear the term bandied about more and more often these days. I'm not in a techie department, though, or I'd be able to tell you more. I do know that we receive DI's instead of film quite often these days, and our film scanner is starting to gather dust in the corner. Cheers.