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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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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?
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
"MGM has hired Lowry Digital to make 4K digital masters of nine James Bond films, including all of those starring Sean Connery."
Seems authorised to me. The other movies mentioned, are MGM productions as well.
Singing in the Rain
Casablanca (1942)
Once Upon a Time in the West (MGM/UA)
on the 2nd page... they talk about that:
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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.)
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I'm guessing lucas considers "greedo shooting first" wear, tear, and scractches!
e.
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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.
Actually the workstation that controls the scanner runs linux.
You can see an overview here of the machine.
If you look at the press releases they came out with an add-on that allows the machine to scan at 10k lines in 12 seconds.
As an aside, the smaller film scanners that capture 35mm slides have Digital Ice to remove surface blemishes. Part of it works by shining an infrared light through the film. The infrared light is unaffected by the different shades of color, but the dust "stops" it and therefore is detected. Quite ingenious.
I imagine as expensive as this machine is, it uses this and other techniques to remove surface and film imperfections. If you use an original to scan that has been well cared for, the results should be impressive.
I toyed around with the idea of homebrewing such a machine to convert some old family super8 movies.
The two problems that you are going to have is the film transport, and the amount of time it takes to scan the film. As it stands, it would be time intensive to build such a machine and technically challenging. That and not having a workspace, it will have to wait for another day.
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But what about the sound? Is he using non-compressed 24-bit samples at [at least] 96KSS [kilo samples per second]?
While this is not my field, I have observed the audio track on 35mm movie film often times is encoded in the negative. So 4000 lpi and 18mm per 1/30 of a second. 540mm per second or 21.2 inches/sec. 21.2 * 4000 = 84.8KSS Unknown bit width.
This figure is aproximate and doesn't take into account the fact that the audio track extends in the blank space between the frames. My point is if the audio is encoded photographicly, it can be extracted photographicly.
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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.
...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.
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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