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600 PowerMacs Make One DVD
vaporland writes "NYTimes.com has this story about using a network of 600 PowerMac G5's to scan original movie negatives at 4000 lines per inch and create high-resolution digital recreations of classic movies."
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It's not like these are crisp, sharp modern prints. Jesus, at 4000 dpi, the film grains will be dozens of pixels in diameter...
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
I guess having a crazy high-res version will help when they scale it down for DVD/VHS/Broadcast.
Vote for global prefs bug
Given that DVD's perform lossy compression, to fit an entire movie into one disc, is there going to be much noticable difference between using the original final cut and a 3rd/4th generation copy?
Macs are great for stuff like this, sometimes I wish they had had the marketing smarts to get the market share PCs have now. They have alot going for them...
Ah well, "Macs for productivity, Linux for stability, Windows for solitaire"
Pretty cool. =)
Commence pc/mac flamewar!
You cant fight in here, its a war room!
once digitised, could they not be processed to remove those? I don't know much about image processing but I'm sure someone would be able to come up with a filter that would pick up such spots and remove them (based on previous and next clean frames maybe?).
It makes it easier to work with when they are cleaning up and removing artifacts later on.
So now I'm going to have to go out and buy a whole new set of DVD's when they release the '4K Edition' of all my favourite films. And I thought I was safe until Blu-Ray came out...
click!
I've already pre-ordered mine. Hurry now, while supplies last!
James Bond is now in the "classic" realm?
I'd much rather see true cinematic accomplishments (like the ones the article mentioned: Casablanca, Singin' in the Rain, etc) restored in this way, not cheesy predictable spy flicks.
Clif
clifgriffin > blog
This post is supposed to be insightful? Read the fine article.
this sounds really cool...
but if its so secret, they better watch out... those pesky copyright lawyers might come after them....
"but we're just recording it for posterity, preserving the classics so that they can be enjoyed by future generations!"
"tell it to the "
and if you see me strut, remind me of what left this outlaw torn...
What are the Macs being used for?
Yes, I RTFA, and they mention the Imagica 4000 lines/frame scanner and the 600 Macs, but not what the Macs are used for. Only that the frames are offloaded to a server with a large hard disk.
So WHAT part of the process are they being used for? Someone enlighten me please.
The Official Steve Ballmer Webpage
Surely it will be useful for those films that might need a bit of remastering? A nice high res digital version would be invaluable.
We just better hope that George Lucas hasn't already booked time on these to scan in Star Wars ready for some more changes...
the poster got it right wrong. The film isn't scanned 4000 times per square inch, the entire film is scanned at 4000 LINES of resolution.
Current HDTV displays 1080 lines interlaced.
Your post wasn't insightful, it was a reasonably intelligent first post attempt.
That said, scanning at 4k is just the first step, all of the secondary processes will catch defects such as film grain.
Regards
clifgriffin > blog
at 4000 dpi, the film grains will be dozens of pixels in diameter
Doubtful, given that a standard 35mm print is only 24 mm tall (barely an inch).
Most people are confusing 4000 DPI (dots per inch) with 4000 Lines Per Inch. A line could be any length, as the inch is only a measurement one way; this is one of those techniques for making something seem bigger and/or better than it really is (think weight loss commercials).
Film grain represents the physical resolution of the film, it's not dust or something which can be removed by duplicating adjacent pixels. Moreover film grain is aestethically much nicer than any rounding and blurring the kind of filter you are proposing would produce.
once digitized, they could be processed to replace the guns in the movie with walkie-talkies.
More music, fewer hits
Lawyers for the MPAA are probably preparing 4000 lawsuits right now, one for each Mac G5 participating in the illegal scanning effort.
a beowulf cluster of... oh wait.
If DVDs of this image quality became available, then knockoffs of merely-terrific quality could follow pretty quickly. These could still be better than the DVDs the studios are now selling...
The point could be to get new theater prints from the scans. Or material for the new digital projectors.
the grain is even mentioned for the post capture processing as an occasionally desired element.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Great, so he's doing optical at 4000 lines per inch.
But what about the sound? Is he using non-compressed 24-bit samples at [at least] 96KSS [kilo samples per second]?
Your ear is a vastly more sophisticated sampling device than your eye; I don't know of a single sound compression technology on the market that can fool the human ear.
It would be a real tragedy to go to all that trouble to make good digital copies of the optical prints, only to try to cheat on storage space by downgrading the soundtracks to one of these abominable undersampled, compressed audio standards.
4000 lines per frame is higher resolution than 4000 dpi. A standard academy 35mm frame is 0.825" x 0.6".
It won't be crazy high res. 35mm prints are one inch tall. that's 4000 vertical resolution, which in the scheme of things isn't much different to scanning an A4 document landscape at about 450dpi.
High res for detail, but not as crazy as dozens of pixel sized film grains
So, in 500 years, the copyrights will be expired, right?
I can only wish.
Some of the stuff I get off emule is really low quality. If I can use this for porn I might buy a Mac
How you sample analog material plays a big part in the overal quality of the finished product. For music, you typically think of samples per second (CDs play at 44.1khz). But typically for the initial digitization of analog material, you oversample (perhaps sampling the analog music at 88.2khz, or even higher). This gives you something that's much closer to the original work than normal, and allows you to work with a higher quality, well, sample. Performing digital transformations, including cleaning up the video, removing scratches, etc. always works better if you have more samples to work from. So a higher resolution picture will make it easier to get rid of any scratches or imperfections in the original film.
Eventually, of course, you have to downsample to fit the format that you will be distributing. For CDs, you downsample to 44.1khz. For DVDs, you downsample (the resolution) to 720x480 NTSC or 720x576 PAL. Note that that's somewhere around 1/8th the resolution that they're scanning.
The idea is simple. With this one scan, they can be prepared for format changes. Once high definition DVDs come out, they can downsample to whatever that resolution will be. If they want to broadcast a movie on an HD television channel, they can downsample to 1080i or whatever HD format they wish.
This seems to be about making a high-resolution copy now for archival purposes, so that if the film itself degrades (as it is prone to do) there will still be something really close to the original to work from. Not a bad idea, I think.
4000 dpi isn't that weird if you look at the actual size of a frame on the various film sizes used.
Also, the more lines available, the easier it gets to downsize to various resolutions.
Nice artice, but where are the screenshots?
"What are the Macs being used for?"
You cant even imagine a beowulf cluster of those?!
Yeah - why don't they just use a $50 TV capture card and capture the film off a video? It'd work out a darn sight cheaper. Surely they'd have these movies on VHS somewhere? ;-)
on the 2nd page... they talk about that:
##
Since then, he has bought hundreds of computers, hired a staff of 30 and worked on 80 DVD's -- including the long-awaited DVD of "Star Wars" -- erasing wear, tears, dirt, scratches and other ravages of age. (In the early days, he sometimes erased too much. By his own admission, his restoration of "Citizen Kane" is too clean; the natural grain of film is gone; it looks like a video. He later figured out how to fix flaws while preserving grain.)
##
I'm guessing lucas considers "greedo shooting first" wear, tear, and scractches!
e.
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
You digitise your originals, then "offline" edit with your scaled down versions on a PC/mac. Once you have everything editied to your liking, you get back on the big, expensive "online" system and it can build your film - even going to the point of writing out your 35mm print.
The news here I guess is that they are using this technology to archive old films. I still don't see where the 600 macs fit in however.
Do they have a schedule somewhere, I want to know when House Party 2 is slated for 4000k.
It's called a despeckle filter.
than 600 oxen
Still, if G5's are your hammer then it's your prerogative to use them.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
How do they store these digitized movies? Even better, how do they transport them?
Some back-of-the-envelope calculations assuming a 4000x4000 image, 24 bit color (too low?), lossless (optimistic) 4:1 compression and 24fps show that a 2 hour movie takes up over 1.8TiB.
Is it just a box of 300GB tapes, or do they have something even cooler?
Can you imagine the restore times for a movie from tape...
- mib
are those the same guns that they don't fire first?
Don't worry - its just stigmata. Pass me a napkin and don't you dare tell my mother.
nuff said
this whole thread is rediculous...anyone that has spent any amount of time scanning FILM at 2k, 4k and 8k resolution KNOWS that he parent if completely wrong.
>> It's not like these are crisp, sharp modern prints
wow, you are absolutely right. They _aren't_ prints, it's film. Prints can't hold a candle to the level of detail that is captured by film. Even 100 year old film.
In general, if quality is a concern, you always scan film at 4k. 8k is even better.
2k was an option 10 years ago, when the process was much more expensive.
this is old, but still cool http://www.apple.com/pro/film/lowry/
I want 2D games back.
And there isn't any technology that can "fool" the eye either.
Artists have known since at least the time of Rembrandt [i.e. almost 400 years] that the human eye can be fooled into seeing what it wants to see; in the case of Rembrandt and his pointilism, the eye [or the part of the brain responsible for processing data collected by the eye] merges small dots of color into a larger whole that it would prefer to see.
I know of no such technique for fooling the human ear. If you run any of these hideous compression technologies through even mid-range audio equipment [at the level of Sony, or Onkyo], you'll be more than aware of what you're missing.
And, while the art of reproducing optical phenomena doesn't even have a popularized concept of "noise," try reproducing ANY sound on ANY electronic device [$100,000 and up] and see if you can get rid of that crackling, hissy sound in the background.
I'm sure he's not an idiot - he'd probably sample the sound at an appropriate level of compression (which includes none at all), taking into account the age of the soundtrack and consequently the signal-to-noise ratio.
I wish I had your confidence, but I never cease to be amazed at the myriad excuses and [the resulting] myriad techniques people use to cheat on the sound.
I wonder whether one might just be able to make out droplets of sweat on Natalie Portman with this level of sampling? Mmmm... Natalie Portman...
Actually, it's about 2-3 film grains per pixel.
I used to make 35mm slides from computer files with my Agfa QCR-Z slide writer (and I still do from time to time for the few places that still use 35mms for projection).
It has the same resolution of 4k (4000 lpi) that these films are being scanned at. The pixels are significantly bigger than film grains, but are just about too small to bring into focus with a really good 35mm projector.
Later on, they made 8k and 16k resolution versions, which were mostly used for larger format than 35mm output because of the film grain issue (and the fact that the damn device used an RS-232 connection and therefore took 4-5 minutes to image a 4k line file)
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
It's not LOTR at all. It's 12GB of lesbian pr0n. What good is that? Useless. :)
Now all my DVDs look like shit
That article is so full of incorrect statements, its sad it got published in such a reputable paper.
It confuses horzontal and vertical resolutions left and right, mixing the 4k horizontal resolution of a 4k scan with the 1080 vertical resolution of HDTV and extrapolating silly figures from the result, as one example.
4k scans of film aren't uncommon, although this might be the first time it was done for archival purposes.
No matter what the article author says, you'll see zero difference between a 4k, or 2k scan on a DVD transfer. A 2k scan is aproximately HD resolution, so there would be a benefit for HD formats to have a 4k scan, to eliminate noise, etc.
The article was also unclear why such horsepower is needed for such a mundane process as scanning and storing film. Thats a problem thats been solved for a decade or more by the film industry, where working with 4k frames is commonplace.
Another dimension I hope projects like this expand into is capturing a much higher dynamic range of the color information stored on the film. If you scan a negative (or positive) at 128-bit color depth instead of 32-bit color depth or the more standard 24-bit color depth, capture very subtle diferrences of light and shadow which are not visible to the naked eye, but with careful image processing you can enhance and amplify those subtle color shifts and nearly normalize an under/overexposed picture, pulling details from the light/shadow/color which no one has ever seen before. Some might argue that the director did not intend for the audience to see Brando's face in full light in "The Godfather" and that the heavy shadows were intentional, but in most cases any director would agree that some of the detail they wanted in some shots was obscured by poor lighting/exposure and they would like to tweak that.
On the consumer side, putting a wide screen high-res video track on a DVD is one thing, but making that video (plus audio and subtracks) fit within 4.7GB (if you want to keep it all one disc)*and* having it play back reasonably well on the average consumer-level DVD player (which can only handle around 7Mbs bitrate) means you have to compress the hell out of each track which means reducing the quality of the picture with compression artifacts. So it seems to fully appreciate a high-res film-to-DVD transfer you'll have to have a nearly uncompressed DVD transfer (very little MPEG2 compression applied, probably spanning 6 discs or more) and a high-bandwidth DVD player that can handle a very high bitrate.
....Big Macs!
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Well first of all it's the scan is not on a print but on the original camera negative. Anyway when I look at vintage 70mm prints and at the last movies shot in 65mm (Far and Away, Hamlet or Little Buddha) I'm not really sure the the modern prints are sharper or crispier that the old ones.
There have been may changes in films since the 1960's but I'm really wondering if they lead to a actual quality improvement: having a finner grain allows to use faster film to reduce the need for artificial lighting or changes on an easier/cheaper film process (Kodakchrome vs "E6"chrome).
...most definitely affects the final product. I am currently working on a digital film myself with some friends where the original images are being done at Hi-Def resolution (1080 lines) and then downsampled to 525 for output to DVD. In the event this does wind up going to celluloid (unlikely, but possible), we might need to ramp things back up to 2,000 lines. If we're stuck halfway through, rather than redraw a lot of the material, we might be able to use a product like PhotoZoom Pro to make up the difference (at a slight cost).
I suspected we would need to start making 4K digital safeties of film as a standard practice at some point. Hi-Def telecines are good as telecines, but not for archiving.
Honorary Member of Jackie Chan's Kung Fu Process Servers
The early Connery films are classics now -- they're on AMC! And I love the scene in Goldfinger where Bond wakes up on the plane. A beautiful woman is pointing a gun at him and so he asks her name. "Pussy Galore" she replies. Bond pauses, still coming to he says, "I must be dreaming..."
You only use 2% of your DNA
Lines per inch refers to lines that can be seperated, for example black lines with a white space between them.
So to get 4000 lines per inch, you need a lot more dpi, most likely 8000.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Ha! Listen to the background noise of your enviroment much? In nature there is always a noisefloor. Any audio recording has a noisefloor, we get a good signal level and it sounds ok.
Modern production sounds like shit! Fucking with the dynamics and gain structure raises the proportion of enviromental noise and equipment self noise in the program. Everything has to sound loud, digitally normalised and artificially maxxed at the expense of sounding natural. Audio is subjective, I don't care about noise figures so long as it sounds good. Engineers stopped using their ears when they started looking at monitors, I've not even mentioned the harmonic series or THD. Audio data compression is the least of your worries, it's the entire process that conspires to make audio program sound like total cack.
Great! now if they could just get rid of that darn Macrovision protection :-P
Film grain represents the physical resolution of the film
One thing to keep in mind is that there are varying sizes of film grain, and having multiple grain sizes is a good thing, larger grains are good for low light image capture, smaller grains are good for capturing detail. Thus, one would want to make sure that the scanning resolution is higher than the finest grain in the image.
Also, there are good filter available in much more sophisticated means than simple blurring. If you ever get a chance to see the last two Matrix movies in IMAX, or any other film not shot on IMAX systems transferred to IMAX. Their system is IMO fantastic, had they just been 35mm projections or direct unprocessed transfers, it would have looked horrible.
From what I gathered, from this article and the profile of Lowry on Apple's website, the software doesn't just remove dust and scratches but also film grain, by comparing each frame in the context of the surrounding frames and then softening or even removing irregularities. Yes, the difference will be huge.
Even on DVD; a 4th generation copy is like a movie that has had compression added 4 times, and each copy is progressively worse. Ideally, you want the cleanest print possible before you add lossy compression.
Well 4000dpi @ 24bits/pixel for 24fps for what will be at least three four-hour films... is about 28TB if I've done my sums correctly. That's pretty much a 10000(doublesided)DVD box set, and swapping discs every four seconds of footage will soon piss you off.
You can insert the obligatory quote about a speeding stationwagon loaded with DLT tapes here.
We're talking Apple here. The guns will be replaced with stylish iPods.
And there isn't any technology that can "fool" the eye either.
Umm, have your heard of optical illusions. You may have seen your local magician perform some of these. If not David Copperfield performs regularly.
Seriously, There is a difference between what you see, and what you know. You know David Copperfield didn't make an elephant disappear, but to your eyes, it did.
Why worry? Each of us is wearing an unlicensed "nucular" accelerator on his back.
Sig changed for readability by G.W.
This is similar to the techniques that Disney did in the restoration of Snow White for DVD.
n Ca mera/oct2002/snowwhite.shtml
Disney took the original camera negative, hand cleaned it frame by frame, and then scanned it one frame at a time using a specialized Kodak hi-res 6000 line scanner. If you have ever seen one of the pre digital restoration prints in the theatres and then see the DVD you will realize the miracle this restoration is.
http://www.kodak.com/US/en/motion/newsletters/i
Actually, thats the size of a 35mm still photograph. A movie print is half-height (12mm)
It may also be possible to construct a virtual frame in memory at a much higher resolution, then use positional manipulation of the frame (I.E. move it) while imaging it. Just as the handheld "scanner" technology for cellphones etc will allow you to wave a camera over a printed page and build a high resolution scan based on multiple passes, correlation, and interpolation, so we could do with movies. The problem with digital scans is of course that your scan quality is limited by the CCD pixel element size, the film grain size, the difference in their sizes, and the correlation (or lack thereof) of their positions.
As for duplicating adjacent pixels, no one uses that for a scaling algorithm any more unless they are a complete nincompoop, since so many other algorithms are readily available, but you're correct (obviously) in that data is always lost when using digital enhancement, which makes it useful for things like trying to decipher what license plate is on the back of a car, but not so useful for improving the quality of digital media.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You think they sent that sucker through 600 macs without having the tape come off the spool or some other tragic incident analagous to that piece of crap tape deck you had in the '82 pontiac that had a nasty tendency to eat tapes?
I don't think so.
The Agfa's grain capability is significantly larger than the brand-new Kodak Vision2 stock, however. By an order of magnitude in my experience. (Shoot, I saw some Super8 done with Vision2 and the grain was of the same level as 16mm from the 80's, damned impressive if you asked me)
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
When will there be a consumer film scanner able to capture individual frames of 8 or 16mm reel film?
I have a ton of family home movies from my father childhood in the 50's which I would love to put on dvd. If it was cheap to scan individual frames, I could use photoshop or the gimp to batch process them, removing dust and scratches before assembling into a movie. Much better than pointing my camcorder at the projector screen!
I don't have a network of 600 PowerMac G5's you insensitive clod!
Try digital film restoration. All that grainyness will become smooth.
you know how when you read something about which you have great knowledge, you can point out all the misconceptions and errors? ALL the articles are like that, you just don't realize it.
...but yet again, we have a ./ story 'about' Macs being used for something. The story is actually about restoring old film. They are using Macs - big deal. I'm sure you could do this with Linux or even with... gasp... windows if you wanted to. Most image processing stuff is pretty low level and you can write something that rips along at a very decent pace in C/C++ on any platform.
I'm sure the pretty curves and colours and one-button mouse are really helping with the ol' digital film resolution, however.
Read Pynchon.
The quality of celluloid always seems to be underrated. I have a dvd of "North by Northwest" (1959) that looks every bit as clean and crisp as "Almost Famous" (2001).
The worst DVDs are sourced from the laserdisc, or from a old print.
I bet 4000 dpi is as high as the scanner goes, so they are just using the highest setting. If HD-DVD is 1080 x 1920 pixels per frame in the future, then this means dropping the resolution by half, assuming each 35mm frame is about 1 inch wide by 1/2 inch high. Scanning at double the output resolution is common practice in digital photography.
More importantly, optics are much more important than resolution when it comes to digital cameras and scanners. A 3 mega-pixel camera with a great lens will produce far better prints than a 5 mega-pixel camera with a cheap lens.
That's true - I switched firts to Fuji, then to Kodak film so many years a go that I forgot Agfa even had an own-brand stock.
To clarify, my earlier comment was wrtten about my experiences with Kodak Ekta-100 color reversal film, other films will vary, often quite drastically!
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
It's possible that your negative experience was the result of inept projectionists.
IIRC, "The man who wasn't there" was filmed with color stock, and digitally reduced to black and white, as Kodak and the other film companies had neglected the research and development of quality B&W film.
If I bring in my 8mm ANALOG film recorder into a movie theatre, no amount of anti-recording technology can thwart me now. BWAAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
once digitised, could they not be processed to remove those? I don't know much about image processing but I'm sure someone would be able to come up with a filter that would pick up such spots and remove them (based on previous and next clean frames maybe?).
Most people probably would prefer an accurate reproduction of the original film media, like a pristine film print, grains and all, to one that is digitally processed in the manner that you suggest. But I have no doubt that eventually, your TV set will have the power to do this in real time, so if you hate grain, you'll be able to get rid of it.
...Is rather dumb. If you were blinded and dumped in a set that simulated a virtual seashore - would you believe it? Even if your ears didn't tip you off, you sense of touch, smell, taste etc would pick up variations in the air humidity, temperature, and other atmospherics.
Same if you were rendered deaf... even if your eyes could be fooled other senses come into play.
Senses run more as a mesh than individually. In many cases, sound is also accompanies by a touch sensation, and a visual one. The same for visuals.
All your senses working as one help you realize an environment, so you'd have to fool all rather well to do a proper "simulation."
However, as to the grandparents' post that sight is more advanced than sound because we can "fool" sound better... that's just BS. We can create "sounds" better than "sights" because the technology is currently more advanced, and because soundwaves are a bit easier to manipulate than light at the moment.
Still, something blasted from a very good stereo over a distance may sound perceptually equal to actuality no more or less than say, a very well-done painting or statue done at a distance, etc.
FYI,
Currently recordable DVD offerings for the general public are limited to 4.7GB, but the film-type DVD's are dual-layer and achieve roughly twice that capacity. Writers for the dual-layer standard can be expected in a few years.
That's an interesting article, they don't even speak of what the 600 G5's are used for. Mr. Lowery's process is for dirt and scratch removal, that's what the G5's are for. The 4k scan, is to aid in the removal of dirt and scratches, but doesn't make it look much better since it's being downresed to HD or SD. NYTimes should fire this reporter, and should be ashamed for printing this article. It reports nothing.
I would think this procedure would perhaps even serve better to preserve the audio from a given movie than any procedure that stores the digital audio on the film itself, like Dolby Digital. Of course, it would serve just as long as the CD-ROMs were preserved along with the film. Lose those and you're stuck with a silent movie without intertitles.
I've always thought that Warner Bros. should have made a deal with DTS to call DTS Digital Sound "VitaPhone2K" or something like that. Then again it's only movie geeks like myself who'd care about how DTS and Vitaphone relate on a historical level...^_~
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
I love to see pictures of racked macs!
-- I use MacOS and Unix for work, and Windows for drink coasters and little frisbees.
The high-resolution scans are so that they have a higher quality scan for when the next generation of HDTV comes out. HDTV on my TV is only 1080 right now but with 4000 lines now they wont have to do any rescanning or upsampling later on.
I still make 35mm slides. The spacial resolution seems about right. The color depth is the next place digital has to go to catch up with the quality of film.
This story was posted in more and less confusing detail on Apple's own pro-user webspace months ago. The article written by Joe Cellini is much better at explaining why the high resolution of scans, etc. The primary purpose of this studio is to remaster degraded and degrading films.
Here's the link:
http://www.apple.com/pro/film/lowry/
...you don't actually have to view it, or make copies from it, causing wear and tear. Or the place it's stored isn't struck by fire, flood or somesuch disaster. Or more likely, lost, mistreated or otherwise damaged.
You're right, IF preserved perfectly it'll be just fine. But the beauty of digital copies is that they can take a beating, as long as not all copies are destroyed (beyond the ability of error correction), it doesn't matter.
Just me. On completely standard, consumer equipment. No expensive, temperature and humidity-controlled vault in some obscure location. That is the beauty of digital film.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
i posted this exact same thing. my post gets removed because some insensitive clod comes and posts the same thing? why? because he's a registered user? I said it first >:\
Those are old movies, they'll be replaced with Newtons
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
Ah cool, Ekta-100 is quite good to work with, tight grain. Only 4x as grainy as the new stock in my experience.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
I mean compared to this other G5 cluster (see below), wouldn't this thing qualify as up there (yeah yeah, it doesn't have anything more than Gethernet for backplane communication, but still, thats a whole lot of processing going on!
If someone more gungho on a monday morning wants to flesh out the Tflops this thing could crunch, as well as potential requirements for so much juice? Perhaps it loads the ENTIRE film into the cluster's memory and does some wacky matrix transforms across the entire bolus of data? Remember that's 24fps*seconds which is generally around 8 million frames * 4000x3000 pixels * 24 bit resolution == 288000000000000 bytes == 288TBytes of data ... that's some kind of matrix! (btw I didn't dbl check the math!:^)
I hope someone can dig up some more stuff on this, as using all this horsepower is either doing something very cool that is not obvious, or else it sounds like more sizzle than steak...
Oliver's Law: Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it.
One thing to keep in mind is that the grains do not line up from frame to frame. So even though the grains represent the physical resoultion of the filmstrip, they do not represent the resolution that could be interpolated across multiple frames of the same image.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
While I know it's not nearly as cool as building your own scanning set or even buying a program and running it, there are commercial services who will take your 8mm films and put them on video or DVD. Type in "8mm" and "dvd" on Google and look at the ads to the right. My grandparents recovered footage of their marriage (admittedly about 5 seconds of the best man and friends twitching nervously followed by 25 seconds of the marriage kiss, but eh) a few years ago.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
According to TFA, the company that's scanning the prints, then passes the scans off to the G5s that has the filtering software on them. All of the processing is then done by them. The article mentions already having cleaned up several DVDs (Gone With the Wind, Citizen Cane, North by Norhtwest) and working on the Star Wars and James Bond tranfers. The submitter made it seem as if the technology is just now blooming, but TFA indicates that it's already been operating for a few years now. The article really is an interesting read, though.
I think it's awesome that Mr. Lowry admitted to messing up the Citizen Kane dvd (by accidentally "cleaning up" the grain).
In any case, I think that this scanning is great for making home video products, but it's quite immature for real film restoration. Digital restorations still look pretty terrible, and I think that the studios should wait until they can scan the films at a much higher resolution before relying on the digital technology to preserve films like Modern Times. They shouldn't even be touching the camera negative (or the best source, if there is camera negative to work from, or it's no good) unless they're going to significantly improve its longevity (e.g., by cleaning it), or significantly improve the quality of the other elements out there (enough to justify the damage done by running the camera negative).
600 Macs to make one DVD! Why, I do that in the background while playing Splinter Cell in windows!
Yours truly,
Anonymous Windows user
Poking Mac users with pointy sticks since 1981:)
And all the characters with black silhouttes?
Tired of legitimate data sources? Try UNCYCLOPEDIA
World's fastest DMCA notice, I think...
You obviously haven't seen the re-release of their famous "1984" commercial ;-)
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
I think they should have used TS techonology and A/D conversion to make high resolution stuff, in REALTIME.
Many of their cartoons were filmed separately in R, G and B. That allows them to scan each color frame separately and use the multiple copies to find and eliminate scratches, etc. They also eliminate the registration errors in the final combined prints.
The net result is a version that is vastly superior to the originals.
(Posting as AC so they don't have me killed.)
Make Gigli look good?
Interesting that this guy made the same joke as someone up the page and got a Score: 1 Troll when the other guy got a +5 Funny.
4000 lines top to bottom is (about) what most modern films are created at (if they are digital or use digital effects). 4000 lines top to bottom isn't exactly 'high resolution'. On a 9 x 16 foot screen, each pixel covers 1/37 of an inch (2/3 of a millimetre). For fine detailed sharp images, you really don't want anything smaller than that, otherwise circles start to appear with jaggies. The normal grain size depends on the speed of the film. For slow speed film, the grain (individual silver halide crystals) are about 0.2 microns. For fast film, the grain is much larger (about 2 microns). It's much more difficult to enlarge 1600 ASA (very fast) film (and have it not look grainy) than it is to enlarge 100 ASA (slow) film. The larger silver halide crystals are more reactive to light, therefore producing faster (but grainier) film.
When even the NY Times sub eds let "DVD's" through instead of correcting it to "DVDs", then we know the End Times are at hand.
Da Blog
1 - scanning: the imagica XE can scan at a resolution of 4096x3112(1.31:1 aspect ratio), the just-announced
2 303.html
xe-advanced uses a 10k capture device that allows overscanning and subsequent downsampling from
8k(8192) to 4k. the 4096 pixels is the horizontal res. from perf-to-perf, and is nothing new(i've been
doing 4k since ~1995). the reason for 4k at the moment, is that 4096 pixels across is just _below_ the
grain of commonly used Oneg/intermediate stocks. using higher resolutions is a waste of processing
time and disk-space when your scanned resolution is higher than the source(this applies to t-grained
(tabular)films as well.)
anyway, you shouldn't see any pixels unless the color calibration is sub-optimal, you're looking at a digital
projection or there were hardware probs.
kodak(cinesite) has had "dust-busting" on their menu for quite a while now, although it was originally
done by hand, by artists using high-res paint programs(photoshop/matador, etc).
as correctly noted by another poster, the scanner is run by a linux based machine. the previous version
of their scanner used an SGI o2 running IRIX. see: www.imagica.com
Kodak used to make a commercial scanner(the cineon genesis scanner) that i believe is no longer avalable.
another scanner to look at is the Oxberry Cinescan.
this is the week to look for info as it's NAB time; new products and updates are typically announced there.
2 - color: the dynamic range of film is described in logarithmic terms(due to the sensitivity function of the
emulsion-processing chemistry) so it is appropriate to record/store using a log-based imaging format.
in this case, a 14bit DAC is used to generate 10bit log/pixel color data stored in the industry standard
Cineon format(created by Glenn Kennel @kodak and subsequently adopted industry-wide. see FIDO, Cineon)
10bits log is equivalent to 14 bits linear and covers approximately a 10-stop range or a density
range from zero(or film base) to somewhere around 2.048D to as much as 3.0D depending and the
scanner and recorder.
3 - lowry and warner: lowry and warner are both working on restoration systems. warner has a large library of
SE(sequential exposure) shows that will need duplicate archives and cleaning for DVD releases. SE is a method
for recording the RGB channels on individual-sequential frames. this process retains color integrity by
maintaining channel separation as long as possible avoiding channel bleed/crossover. lowry is using
the Macs to do the image processing; a feature-length film can be very, very large(90min x 24fps x @4k)
since each image can be ~50MB each - lots of disk space and processing time. as previously mentioned,
warner has a system which resizes/aligns each channel in a logical frame, resulting in a very clean image
with no(virtually no) fringing or edge artifacts due to sep misalignment. this is normally not an
issue with SE as each sep is on a single piece of film. for three-strip technicolor, the alignment is
more critical as there are three individual pieces of film that were run through a special camera(the
Technicolor camera) which i believe has a patent... for an interesting site with info on SE(w/pictures) goto:
thedigitalbits.com/articles/robertharris/harris07
4 - some resolutions:
HDTV - 1280x720 or 1920x1080
NTSC - 640x480(4:3)
PAL - 720x486
film - 2048x1536(1.33:1 AR)
4096x6144(vista-vision 8-perf)
i can expound more if additional details/info is needed.
"...that's as white as it gets; all the bits are on..."
Lowry's digitization of "Empire Strikes Back" is pretty darned amazing. We'll see how the rest of the trilogy holds up soon enough...
"It's not like these are crisp, sharp modern prints. Jesus, at 4000 dpi, the film grains will be dozens of pixels in diameter..."
I don't think film resolution has changed that much in the last 50 years. It's always been very high.
Whoever moded me down has no sense of humor at all. ;-)
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
'Pleasantville' was done the same way, and for much the same reason.
Wow, given 4000 dpi, let's assume we are talking about a 90-minute film at 29.97 fps and suppose it is a 4:3 aspect ratio. Anyone have any idea how wide the filmstrip is??? Heck, I don't know, so I will assume it is 35 mm and each frame is laid out lengthwise... If they are storing this movie UNCOMPRESSED..... 90 min * 60 sec / min * 29.97 frames / sec * ( 35 mm * 46 mm ) / frame * ( 1 inch / 25.4 mm )^2 * ( 4000 / inch )^2 * pixels * ( 24 bits / pixel ) * ( 1 byte / 8 bits ) * ( 1 terabyte / 1024^4 bytes ) We have about 18.054 TERAbytes.
Thanks guys this gives indication of the context of the main thread, lacking somewhat in the earlier posts. Its fun to find the strange small places where patina remains important.
Moderation in all things - including moderation.