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."

Comments

What is the point of scanning at such a high res?

[JessLeah]

It's not like these are crisp, sharp modern prints. Jesus, at 4000 dpi, the film grains will be dozens of pixels in diameter...

Re:What is the point of scanning at such a high re

[Repugnant_Shit]

I guess having a crazy high-res version will help when they scale it down for DVD/VHS/Broadcast.

Macs

[basil montreal]

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"

But what about the sound?

[mosel-saar-ruwer]

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.

Re:But what about the sound?

[Jonas the Bold]

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.

Um, no it isn't. Your eye is vastly more sophisticated. Is it easier to recognize people by their faces or thier voice? Even musical instruments, is it easier to tell what kind of instrument is being played by looking at than listening to it.

And there isn't any technology that can "fool" the eye either. When you look at a picture, you don't think it's real, you know it's a picture. Just like a recording, except a recording can come a lot closer.

Super-hardcore audiophilia is a bit of a religion.

Re:What is the point of scanning at such a high re

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Let me see if I have this right...

[dcsmith]

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.

I would imagine that, as with anything else that has components that can be categorized as either "good" or "popular", sales of the "popular" stuff will subsidize the production of the "good" stuff.

Face it - they're going to sell more copies of "Dr. No" with Ursula Andress wearing the New & Improved High Resolution Digital Bikini than they are of Singin' in the Rain, starring Gene Kelly and the Incredibly Vivid High Resolution Raindrops.

Re:Pointilism

[plover]

Please, read what you're preaching.

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.

You've just described compression. A particularily artful, beautiful form of compression (especially Monet,) but it's compression nonetheless. You just proved point the previous poster made: nobody is going to be fooled into believeing that a pointilist painting is actually a scene taking place in front of them. You may admire it for its beauty, for the technical and artistic prowess required to render it to the canvas, for any number of reasons. But it's not a "perfect" rendition; if you 'believe' you're at the seashore any more or less than you would by staring at a photograph of the seashore it's an emotional decision, not a rational one. And you certainly wouldn't settle for seeing James Bond rendered in a pointillistic style for two hours, not when you know you can see it in all of its Technicolor glory in the next theatre over. It's different -- it's an art form.

Now, there's almost nothing artful about audio compression. (I say almost because there are artists applying all sorts of distortion to their sounds to create new ones, including overcompression.) For the most part, the distortion caused by compression is just a nasty side-effect. But the ear is indeed "fooled" by the compression. When you listen to a compressed audio stream, you hear music. It may be poorly reproduced, tinnily digitized, and companded down to the level of a phone line, but you still hear the music behind it. That's "fooling" the ear -- at least as much as pointilist art "fools" the eye (and without the art.)

Anyway, setting all "golden ear" arguments aside and getting back on topic, I very seriously doubt they'd use compression at all on the audio. The imaging they're doing on each frame is lossless (each frame is probably around 40MB RAW), and this guy didn't get funding for 800 Macs by being stupid and cheap.