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."
I'd personally like to see how you can do this as a home user. There's got to be a software program that does this sort of thing (ok maybe not the the extent that hollywood giants can do) or at least approaches it.
I've got tons of home movies I'd like to put on DvD and man I'd love to restore them. Unfortunately I think I'm stuck with them as as.
-- (Score:i , Imaginary)
And here I've been thinking all those movies were 3-d! Apparently it was just a red/blue misalignment.
A bonus of this technique is that it would allow for near-perfect analogue re-creation of the original film by plotting grains for exposure on new film. If you want to get really fancy, you can look at the arrangement of the crystals, try to reverse-engineer the light as it struck the film, and virtually re-expose the image by plotting a new grain map on film.
Would this work?
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Have they found some way to automate this, or can they not yet trust the algorithms enough yet that they still have to manually go over each frame and correct the dirt spots based on previous and future frames?
Software piracy is victimless theft.
My grandfather (yes, that's right, my 67 year old grandfather) just recently restored some 8mm home movies from the 50's with his computer setup at his house. I dont know the specifics of what he used to do it, but obviously if he can do it, it must be possible ;)
I wonder how I can get one of these for my old home videos! I have all of the original VHS negatives, too! Oh, wait...
Seriously, though, it's nice to see studios taking such care of their movies. This is a far cry from a lot of what we've been getting for a the past few years. A lot of DVDs were nothing more than the DVD version of their laserdisc counterparts, and some low-budget DVDs were nothing more than transfers from VHS!
As a movie buff, it's great to see Warner going back to the original negatives do this. The only thing that's a concern for me is how they are going to select which movies will get this. Are they going to do this for posterity and history with all of their movies? Or are they only going to do this only with movies that can be turned around and sold on DVD? Obviously, if they're going be able to make a profit from this, they should. I'm sure that it's a huge effort. But are the more obscure movies that might not be as marketable going to get the same treatment in the future? Or are they going to be relegated to the warehouse never to be seen because "it's not worth it".
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
"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.
What if Digg added local news and a Slashdot inspired comment karma system? ---
http://houndwire.com
When you're listening to vinyl, you shouldn't know that you're listening to vinyl. The record and needle should be clean. There should be no pops or fuzz in the sound. What you should get is a great analog signal that has a better frequency range that CD, the tradeoff being a more dynamic limited range.
I'm more interested in seeing a clean movie that stands on its own than a movie that looks old and depends on accidental nostalgia (and for a time that most of us never even experience firsthand) for its emotional impact.
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.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
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!!!
Bah. I'd much rather see the movie that I would have seen if I was alive in 1953 and popped on down to the movie theatre, not what's left of it after 52 years of degrading.
:-) ), and it could well have been made yesterday; the colors were right, the detail was sharp, the audio's quality was sharp enough that my audio setup was the limiting factor. It's way better than what I've seen on TV... which surprises me nowadays, how many times the TV will play some crappy version of a movie with an outstanding DVD.)
You want to de-saturate the colors, add dirt spots, and make the audio wobbly, run it through a filter on your own player. The rest of us would rather see an old movie as if it were made yesterday.
(Even stuff from the 80s is breaking down, I've even seen degradation in stuff from the early 90s, and the DVD is the best way to view it. My wife just bought Thelma and Louise on DVD yesterday (not a bad movie, really, even if there are no space fights
Seems that those Monty Python folks are really quite interested in film preservation and restoration. There's another documentary on the "Meaning of Life" that explains all the nitty gritty. Is it worth it? I say yes. Going from unrestored faded film to a pristine new master is just as dramatic as the shift from black and white to color film.
Turns out John Wane and other early movie stars looked better in the fuzzy colors. Something to do with their alien ability to bend light. Okay so that last statement was a bit much.
8mm film is very poor quality. At best, you might get a VCD-quality playback, plus the frame rate is only 16fps.
That said, if you got a good scan of each frame, and wanted to take the time to do it, you could probably clean up the frames individually, and then use motion vector tracing to upconvert the framerate to 24/25/30/50/60/whatever. Alas, I don't know of any software for this purpose.
www.wavefront-av.com
"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.
The device to do this is called a telecine, and the technology is as old as television (how do you think they did it before video tape?) Newer ones that convert straight to digital are called datacines.
Until recently I worked for Technicolor (actually Thomson Broadcast & Media Solutions, which operates under the brand names Technicolor and Grass Valley) and actually helped service the machine that's being used to do this, the Spirit 4k datacine (minor suport role, it wasn't my primary product).
You could have your films scanned on one of these if you wanted to, though it would cost you a bit. IIRC the base model is about $1.2M, and there are maybe 100-250 of them in the world (I never had a need to look at sales data, that's just what I heard, and that number includes the older 2k line model.) They are mostly privately owned, though, and can be hired by anyone who wants to pay the price.
I wouldn't recommend it though. See, when the 2k model was first seeing action in the real world there were some complaints of occasional odd visual distortions. Analysis revealed that it was actually because at that resolution the scanner was starting to pick up the grain of the film. Obviously, that sort of thing can be delt with in post-processing, so it's not like it's totally pointless to go to those resolutions. I do think it would be a bit too much for 8mm, though.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.