The two-grade reality: festival cuts and streaming masters

A finished indie feature now ships at least two grades, not one. The festival cut is built for a DCI P3 projector at roughly 48 nits, in a dark and controlled room. The streaming master is a Rec. 709 trim at 100 nits, and most of the time an HDR pass at 1000 nits rides alongside it. We used to talk about "the grade" as one decision. It is a decision tree now, and the order in which we walk it changes the picture the audience sees.

This is a note about the order of operations we have settled on inside the studio, and the practical reasons we no longer treat any single export as "final."

What the festival actually asks for

Pin the Sundance technical specification to a wall and read it twice. The in-person screening will take a DCP as either Interop or SMPTE at 24, 25, or 30 fps, at 2K or 4K, with a 5.1 mix that places dialogue on the center channel and low-pass filters the LFE. The online file is a separate ask: Apple ProRes LT in a .mov wrapper, 1920x1080 square pixels, Rec. 709 / gamma 2.2, audio at -24 dB LUFS with a -2 dBTP ceiling, and closed captions as .srt or .vtt.

Two observations sit on top of that. First, the floor under the festival deliverable has shifted in the last two years. As Filmmaker Magazine has documented, SMPTE DCP has eclipsed Interop in every major territory, 4K packaging has quietly become the de facto norm at the major festivals, and RGB laser projection at venues like Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater and Alice Tully Hall now exposes more of the P3 gamut than most colorist monitors can fully resolve. The reference instrument under the festival cut is, quietly, a better instrument than it was three years ago.

Second, the festival cut is not "the master with a different wrapper." It is a P3-graded, XYZ-encoded picture authored for a 14 foot-Lambert reference projector, packaged according to the SMPTE 428-433 family of standards that govern the Digital Cinema Distribution Master, the package itself, and the quality metrics the room is held to. Treating it as a derivative of a streaming export is the most expensive mistake we can make.

What the streaming master is doing instead

The streaming pass is two graded versions, not one. A 100-nit Rec. 709 SDR trim covers the legacy distribution path, and a 1000-nit Rec. 2020 HDR pass covers the platforms that ask for it. The HDR pass, as SMPTE has put it plainly, carries dynamic metadata that travels with the image as its own deliverable. Dolby Vision is the common case. That sidecar is not a setting on the file. It is a separate object the platform has to read, and it has to match the picture frame for frame.

Streaming masters are derived from the cinema master by LUT and trim, not regraded from scratch. The home pass typically starts from the cinema aspect ratio and the cinema color correction, runs a color-space conversion to video space, and then takes a trim pass to recover what the smaller, brighter reference cannot hold. Audio follows the same downstream logic. A -24 LUFS streaming mix is authored after the cinema mix, with a different headroom budget and a different reference room.

The cost of skipping any of this is concrete. An H.264 streaming export that looked correct on a 65-inch OLED falls apart at projection scale, as a Filmmaker Magazine working guide put it years ago — web video is lossy by design, and the imperfections that hide on a small monitor are obvious on a forty-foot screen. The mirror case is just as ugly. A single Rec. 709 file pushed into an HDR streaming pipeline gets aggressively re-tonemapped on the viewer's set, and the picture the director approved is not the picture the audience sees.

What we changed in the room

We grade the festival cut first, on a P3 reference, and we author the streaming masters after. The order is not stylistic. It is the only order in which the downstream trim passes make sense.

We book screening-room time before the DCP ships. Projectionists routinely catch contrast, focus, and color drift at projection scale that a 55-inch reference monitor will not surface. The festival's own inspection step helps, but it is not a substitute for ours.

HDR metadata is a deliverable on the spec sheet now, not a checkbox in an export dialog. If a platform requires Dolby Vision, the sidecar has to be authored, QC'd, and named to match the picture file the moment the picture file is locked.

We label every export by its target. Never "final." Always "festival DCP," "Rec. 709 streaming," "HDR-DV streaming." The single-file mental model is the thing that breaks the workflow, and the labels are how we keep it broken on purpose.

A closing note

A two-grade workflow is not overcomplication. It is the honest answer to the fact that a P3 projector in a dark room and a 1000-nit OLED in a living room are not the same instrument and never will be. When we sit with a director at picture lock, the question we ask is which audience sees the cut first. The answer decides which master gets authored first. Everything else trims down from there.

That decision is what film is now, on the delivery side: a layered set of masters that all point back to one set of creative choices. The grade is still a single creative decision. The deliverables are not. More working notes from the room are in the journal.