600 PowerMacs Make One DVD 269
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."
How much visual difference will there be... (Score:5, Interesting)
Let me see if I have this right... (Score:0, Interesting)
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.
Clif
What are the Macs for? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Jack Valenti's not pleased (Score:5, Interesting)
Seems authorised to me. The other movies mentioned, are MGM productions as well.
Singing in the Rain [imdb.com]
Casablanca [imdb.com] (1942)
Once Upon a Time in the West [imdb.com] (MGM/UA)
Re:What is the point of scanning at such a high re (Score:5, Interesting)
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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.)
##
I'm guessing lucas considers "greedo shooting first" wear, tear, and scractches!
e.
old tech (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:cool (Score:5, Interesting)
You can see an overview here [imagica.co.jp] 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 [nikon-image.com] to remove surface blemishes. Part of it works by shining an infrared light through the film [rick.free.fr]. 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.
Re:How much visual difference will there be... (Score:3, Interesting)
Once they got it cleaned up though, I hope they make film backups of the restored digital films. Incase of something that hits and wipes out all digital data. Be a shame if they all got restored and suddenly deleted by some weird natural phenomina or a stupid mistake.
Re:But what about the sound? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Wow, whats up with the NY Times? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Compression and color dynamic range (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Macs (Score:3, Interesting)
(meanwhile I'm writing this from a Mac, because hell, it's just better... it's like breathing standing in a forest far away from civilization as opposed to at an underground train station, sure you get air in both places but the quality is much better)
The size of the original (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
actually, its you who is wrong. (Score:4, Interesting)
So to get 4000 lines per inch, you need a lot more dpi, most likely 8000.
Re:What are the Macs for? (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course, with such a setup, a G5 is a little more future-proof than a barebones computer that can just handle the task at hand for a lot cheaper.
I think this is a good setup for now... there are a lot of films that are in very poor shape that could use this kind of remastering. You WON'T find most of these out on DVD already because there was simply no way available prior to this to make an acceptable copy of the movie. Hollywood has had a big problem on their hands with this sort of thing for a while; preservation was a distant afterthought for years and now they're frantically rushing to save these movies before the prints completely deteriorate and we have nothing left.
Remember, there's no original print left of Citizen Kane, widely considered the best movie ever. We can't let that happen to every movie. I think any type of scanning project like this - film, drawings, portraits, photography - is noble when you consider how the original media can simply crumble to dust, losing the art forever.
Besides, this sort of thing keeps Apple rolling in the dough, eh? I don't see any Microsoft products listed here, so it seems like the regular crowd here should be happy with that sort of thing. *shrug*
Re:Compression and color dynamic range (Score:2, Interesting)
Since the scan is on the untimed camera negative rather than a timed print there is little chance that it uses a 24 or 32 bits depth. "Talking" of untimed negative the article completetly forget to mention that the raw scan will be pretty unwatchable and need a lengthy color timing process. There is a bonus in the Seven 2 DVDs edition showing how the scanned camera negative had been (re)timed for the DVD. In few words, it's long and need a highly qualified technician to do the work.
Snow White (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Re:Wow, whats up with the NY Times? (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh, I don't know, let's try reading the article, shall we?
He then processed the images with his film-restoration software, which he'd programmed onto some Macintosh G4 computers. (The effort took months, as the faster G5's weren't out yet.) The processed picture was clearer, sharper and more detailed still. He could see every divot on the turf. What had once looked like a smudge in the background was now recognizable as a boat on the lake.
The more important question is: since it takes 5 seconds per frame, why does he need 600 Macs? You'd need 600 Macs if your image enhancement operation took (brace yourself) 50 minutes per frame on a G5. 8-O
What kind of enhancement is he doing?
Either arguement (Score:3, Interesting)
Same if you were rendered deaf... even if your eyes could be fooled other senses come into play.
Senses run more as a mesh than individually. In many cases, sound is also accompanies by a touch sensation, and a visual one. The same for visuals.
All your senses working as one help you realize an environment, so you'd have to fool all rather well to do a proper "simulation."
However, as to the grandparents' post that sight is more advanced than sound because we can "fool" sound better... that's just BS. We can create "sounds" better than "sights" because the technology is currently more advanced, and because soundwaves are a bit easier to manipulate than light at the moment.
Still, something blasted from a very good stereo over a distance may sound perceptually equal to actuality no more or less than say, a very well-done painting or statue done at a distance, etc.
Re:Compression and color dynamic range (Score:2, Interesting)
I believe that we are missing all the beautiful out of gamut colors entirely.
Film doesn't bright light well at all. Look at the LED on your monitor - now try to get that color on screen. The greenest green on your screen is nothing like the brilliance of an LED.
We have trained out eyes to forget the real brilliance of light and color and to accept the unexciting reflected color space of ink on paper - or the even smaller dynamic space of projection systems and LCDs.
Consider a photograph of an LED keychain. unless you purposly underexpose the image - the fact that the LED is a point source of light will probably not appear.
You think now that movies are expressing the highlights - but missig the shadows - I suggest the opposite is even more the case.
AIK
Re:What is the point of scanning at such a high re (Score:3, Interesting)
I still make 35mm slides. The spacial resolution seems about right. The color depth is the next place digital has to go to catch up with the quality of film.
Assuming.... (Score:3, Interesting)
You're right, IF preserved perfectly it'll be just fine. But the beauty of digital copies is that they can take a beating, as long as not all copies are destroyed (beyond the ability of error correction), it doesn't matter.
Just me. On completely standard, consumer equipment. No expensive, temperature and humidity-controlled vault in some obscure location. That is the beauty of digital film.
Kjella
Re:Future-proof -- until your storage array dies (Score:3, Interesting)
Very few places in the computer world hold a candle to the TV and Film world.
Re:Warner Brothers is doing something even better (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Warner Brothers is doing something even better (Score:1, Interesting)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0035743/
Re:great for the public domain! (Score:3, Interesting)
I wouldn't mind at all if movie studios wanted to package and release my opencontent movies.. as long as they followed a GPL-like license. Any changes they made would have to be returned.
IMO all us people whining that we want free music and free movies and so forth SHOULD be producing our own open content. That's the way to handle the problem, not by pirating. (Which I admit to sometimes doing just as everyone else does.)