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Macs Do Star Wars Dirty Work
bfl writes "The BBC is running a story about Lowry Digital Images and how they used 600 dual G5s and 400 TB of storage space to clean the dirt off of the old Star Wars reels, and upgrade the resolution to get them ready for their DVD release."
378 Terabytes Of Star Wars on 600 G5s
Movie dirt is a special kind of "noise" in images, from a statistical point of view. Thus special filters can be applied.
Apple has it on their own web site here.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
That would be the FIRST time the Trilogy has been released legally on DVD. RTFA!
ILM used and contribute code to Film Gimp/Cinepaint.
ILM contribute code as a plug-in (OpenEXR). It would be interesting to know if Lowry Digital Images used Film Gimp/Cinepaint including the ILM developed OpenEXR plug-in in cleaning Star Wars.
Check them out on the previous slashdot articles for ESB and ANH. You can compare the improvements in the image quality. It's amazing how much improvement can be made and detail added in.
To the guys with how-does-it-fit-on-a-DVD: the resolution they work with is the scanning res needed to process the cleaning on high quality. The size is the uncompressed size of th scanned frames. When putting on a DVD the resolution is highly reduced and compressed into mpeg2.
Well, and that is not what's usually the biggest size. I participated in a project in which we cleaned up a pretty much damaged color movie from the 1950s. It was about 130000 frames, each frame was scanned into ~2K files (w/ 3 channels, 10 bit log density / channel - this res was enough for this movie, but usually higher scanning res is required). If you add that up, multiply it by a few times for storage of during-the-work duplicates for checking, quick back stepping, etc. and you end up with lotsa-lotsa hard drives.
Then calc up how much space you would need to process all that stuff on e.g. 4 or 6K res.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
but remember that 1GB isn't 1000 MB (but 1024MB), nevertheless it isn't 400 TB.
There are also multiple high quality audio channels.
Love,
Jay and Silent Bob
You have all three: -faltivec turns on vector optimizations in Apple's GCC. Also there are the vImage and vecLib frameworks (contained under the Accelerate.framework umbrella) for a set of altivec optimized library routines. Finally there is -mabi=altivec in gcc to turn on support for vector keywords and altivec asm (this switch is implied when -faltivec is given)
Only people then invest their own personality in something refer to themselves as "literati"
A computer is a tool. A mac just happens to be a good video tool because it was built that way. Calling someone illiterate because they chose a good tool for the job is just assinine.
A really good vector unit, vectorizing compiler, vector libraries, and a host of system and application software make the Mac platform well suited for the task described in this article. Why people feel so threatened by this fact is beyond me. Linux is great at the things it was built to excel at, Windows (gasp!) does some things very well, too. BIG FUCKING DEAL.
If you were a true computing enthusiast you would have one of each. I do.
They really do not have a website. I know someone who works there and he says that they don't bother to market because they are overwhelmed with business.
It turns out that a huge part of the film restoration/cleanup work is done using programs from MTI Right now huge film libraries are undergoing scanning and cleanup using MTI's products in preparation for high-def DVD release (once the standards get, uhm, standardized)
These MTI workstations might have highest software/hardware cost ratio of any widely deployed system. The hardware costs are a couple of thousand dollars, and the software is well over $50,000 per system. But, they get the job done like nothing else, and it is my experience that studios demand that particular software for their restoration.
It's not a completely automatic process by any means. The software can do a lot on its own, but it does require an artist to painstakingly review and correct the things that the software misses, or to guide the software to a correct solution.
A friend of mine who is building a large restoration facility would love to have a Linux solution, but unfortunately none exists at this point.
Thad Beier
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Can someone elaborate on how shot noise applies to optical systems, specifically, cinematography? Since the original source material is conventional 'analog' film, at what point is the noise introduced? How is it introduced?
Well, it's all explained in the article. And you've got half the answer yourself. But I'll try to explain further...
(Yes I realize that film is not a pure analog format; the resolution being limited by the grain size of the emulsion - but at the same time, it's not what we consider digital.)
Film grain itself is a noise component. Film grains are nothing more than crystals sensitive to a particular light wavelength. In commonly used 35mm film stocks, there are three layers of emulsion - one red, one green, one blue. Think of the grains as "pixels", although they're somewhat randomly distributed, they're not all of a uniform size, and they're not all uniformly sensitive to light. The end result is that the minute differences between adjacent grains makes them easily discernible on a theatrical-size screen, and somewhat visible on a large TV set. They appear as noise.
Optical effects also involve compositing several layers of film on top of each other. According to the article, the light saber scenes were the worst. I'd imagine at that time, shooting a light saber duel probably involved three layers of film; the master shot and one optical shot for each light saber. Obviously this triples your noise and also softens the image. It can also introduce color casts because the light is being altered through each layer of film.
As films age, chemical reactions also cause color shifts in the grains. This can lead to even more noise.
Films also get just plain dirty over time. The Star Wars negatives have been handled a lot, so they're probably dirtier than most. 35mm not being very big, when you blow it up onto a theater screen or even a TV set, a small layer of dust or tiny particles of dirt will add a lot of crud to the image.
The software they used to clean up these films apparently works by comparing each frame of film to the frame before and the frame after, to see what's picture information and what's noise (random noise will be easy for a computer to pick out, because it will not match at all from one frame to the next). It should have no problem removing both film grain and dirt, as well as other types of noise.
I'd imagine they must have manually isolated each individual edit in the film to reduce errors, but this wouldn't have been that big a deal in the grand scheme of things. There's probably only maybe a couple thousand cuts per film (assuming a high average of 5-10 cuts per minute), so it wouldn't take more than a couple days for one person to do this.
Have you seen any of the results. Lowry has said that their job is not to IMPROVE movies but to restore them to what they were when they were released. Now I don't know how old you are, but would'nt be nice to see a film like "The Good, The Bad and the Ugly" or "Fall of the Roman Empire" that was as good as when the first print was made?
THX1138 is the only one of the movies Lowry has done that's been "enhanced"...that's Lucas's Job. All the rest are as close to what they were when first released in the theaters (except for the fact that back then the projectors were not as good).
"AoTC was not shot digitally. It was shot on 35mm film,"
Really?
There ARE very good DVD rips of the un-altered laser discs already. Look for BitTorrents.
Also, if you look on IMDB, there were actually a few minor changes already in the early-80s re-release of ANH. They were for the better, like the "close the blast door! open the blast door!" in the chase on the Death Star.
What I'm wating for is for people to use next-frame/previous-frame analysis software to remove video noise from the LD rips, as well as combine some of that video with video from the unaltered portions of the movie from the DVD releases to create higher-than-LD quality rips. I might get on this if I have some time.
An even more pie-in-the-sky dream is for someone to get their hands on one of the still-surviving 35mm prints from 1977, scan them, and share the resulting raw scanned image data so people can REALLY get to work making their own home video releases . Wait, wait, I know what you're thinking. Those prints must have all faded by now, right? Wrong! There were, at the time, some 35mm dye-transfer prints made of the original 1977 Star Wars. Dye-transfer is a process that uses color matrixes pulled off the original camera negatives and lays down inorganic dyes on top of a silver base B&W print for truly striking color reproduction. And because all the materials are inorganic (metal-based dyes), the color does not fade, EVER! You could lock a dye-transfer print in a time capsule for hundreds of years and it would still have full color after you took it out. Hell there are surviving dye-transfer materials from the old 3-strip Technicolor movies of the 1930s that still have full color today. Search google for "technicolor dye transfer" for more info about this process. Film-tech.com even has some picuters of dye transfer prints in the Reviews section.
Anyway, I happen to know (although I can't say how) that there still exists at least one 35mm dye transfer print of the orignial 1977 Star Wars in private hands. Perhaps one day someone will sneak it to a film scanning facility and post the resulting 4K hi-res image data to various sharing networks (such data would be HUGE but invaluable). I hold out hope that this may one day happen.