Slashdot Mirror
Old Film to DVD Transfers Examined
Richard W.M. Jones writes "Slate is
running an interesting article on the process involved in
Warner Brothers remastering films, the quality of the films being compared to the Criterion Collection discs.
Going back to the original
technicolor
negatives, preserved in temperature-controlled
rooms, the transfer begins with a 4,000
line scan, followed by digital alignment of
each color." From the article: "In some ways, these DVDs have finer color and detail than even the original film prints. In the old days, it was difficult to align those three strips perfectly. The task became still harder years later, when the films were reissued, because the negatives had stretched or shrunk over time. If you need all three strips to get the right color, and you can't line the strips up precisely, then the colors and the sharpness are going to be a bit off."
"When a film is turned into a DVD, the first step is to scan each frame digitally and to store the data on a hard drive. The more times a frame is scanned, the more coherent is the resulting picture. Many DVD studios now scan films at "high-definition"--or 1,080 lines. Warners is one of just a few that scan at 2,000 lines (or, in the parlance, "2K scanning"). Soon, beginning with a Wizard of Oz reissue later this year, it will start releasing Technicolor DVDs scanned at 4,000 lines ("4K scanning"). This is a significant number. Engineers estimate that if you digitally reproduced all the information on a frame of 35mm film, you'd need about 4,000 lines of data. In other words, at least theoretically (and for more on this caveat, click here), 4K scanning captures everything that's on a film.
That's good news, I have TNT in high definition and the movies really look much better than DVDs. Considering most so called HDTVs can't even do 1280x720, the lowest HD spec, it's good to know that these films are being future proofed.
For what it's worth, if you want the best picture quality in an HDTV get a tube, they're big and heavy but they can actually do 1080i. Think nosehairs on CSI.
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Your family shot your home movies in three strip Technicolor?
Are you Cecil B. DeMille III or something?
Seriously, the article is about old movies shot in Technicolor, which used a separate strip of film for each of the primary colors. Aligning those three strips is a pain. For regular 8mm home movies, you can use what's called a telecine. You can get inexpensive ones that attach to a video camera to do it yourself, or there are services that transfer 8mm to video.
The negative was preserved in a climate-controlled vault for 60 years. When it was finally opened, they found that fungus had grown on the negative.
The negative was chemically cleaned. Then, it was digitized in a wet-gate telecine. This is an impressive bit of optical technology: the film is immersed in a fluid with the same refractive index as the film itself. The fluid fills pits and scratches in the film, and they disappear.
The resulting digital movie went through an algorithmic "dust-buster" process, and then the reels with the worst damage were retouched by hand frame-by-frame. An operator got about 90 seconds to retouch a frame. There are 24 frames per second of film. This stretched the computer technology at the time, MIPS-based Sun or SGI workstations with clock speeds of a few hundred MHz, as it was difficult to simply read and write the film frame in sufficient time. It would be easier today on a fast PC.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
No, you are not! You can transfer 8mm and 16mm at home. It's not the most technical method, but I've done it before for a friend of mine and it worked beautifully.
Just project the 8mm/16mm film images onto a bright-white screen that has a lot of reflectivity to it, physically place a camcorder directly above the project - or slightly above and slightly behind - to minimize the "trapezoid" effect, record the projection with the camcorder, then use one of the many analog-to-digital bridges out there to transfer it to your PC.
If there is any audio, you can capture the audio either through the camcorder or through the PC's sound card and then synchronize.
This is not going to give you anywhere near the quality of a telecine transfer, but it work beautifully, particularly if the editing software that you use can enhance brightness, contract, and color.
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Bruce
Bruce Perens.
George Lucas used Shake made by Apple to remove the all the dirt spot and clean up the image. It was somewhat automated, but I there was quite a bit of hard manual work done too.
This page was generated by a Barrel of Circus Midgets, and that is the way I like it!!!
Ninty percent of the slashdot crowd wouldn't have a clue as to what Techincolor was and why it was so great.
If anyone is interested, Google will tell you plenty. Technicolor is like the PDP 10 of moviemaking. It's a technically intricate process that delivers very beautiful results, probably the best results.
My daughter, when she was 10, could look at a movie on television and tell me whether or not it was shot in Technicolor.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
"As a photographer I know thats a bunch of bull."
As a photographer you are wrong. You've probably gotten mixed up between the frame sizes of 35mm still film and 35mm cine film. 35mm still film is about 1.6 times larger than cine film and has more detail. I'm a visual effects artist and I can tell you for sure that it's not worth scanning 35mm film above 4k. You just can't tell the difference You see more detailed grain but thats about it.