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Old Film to DVD Transfers Examined 306

Posted by Zonk from the high-quality-maltese-falcons dept.
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."
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Old Film to DVD Transfers Examined More

Old Film to DVD Transfers Examined

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  • Would love to see ... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dcarey ( 321183 ) on Thursday March 03, 2005 @01:07PM (#11835305) Homepage
    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.

    • I know it's possible (Score:5, Interesting)

      by dknight ( 202308 ) <damen&knightspeed,com> on Thursday March 03, 2005 @01:13PM (#11835356) Homepage Journal
      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 ;)
      • A couple Christmases ago my sister and I paid to get our family 8mm films transferred to DVD. We used a local, small video studio rather than sending them out (and possibly losing them) to a mail-order processor. The technique they used was basically to run the films through a projector and direct the light onto a CCD.

        The results were passable but not great. The apparent resolution is below broadcast TV, not nearly as sharp as a DVD of a commercial film. Your grandfather might have used a similar meth

        • Your grandfather might have used a similar method, projecting into the lens of a digitial video camera, or even projecting onto a screen and just recording the image from there.

          Unfortunately, projecting into the lens of a camera doesn't work. The rays from the projector are too divergent and directional for the camera to be able to pick up the whole picture. You have to put a screen in place to scatter the light.

        • Re:Possible but variable quality (Score:4, Interesting)

          by Phreakiture ( 547094 ) on Thursday March 03, 2005 @03:45PM (#11837039) Homepage

          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.

        • Re:Possible but variable quality (Score:4, Interesting)

          by MrResistor ( 120588 ) <.peterahoff. .at. .gmail.com.> on Friday March 04, 2005 @01:20AM (#11841734) Homepage
          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.

    • Please tell me that there was a ton of sarcasm in that statement. There are NUMBEROUS products out there to be analog-to-digital bridges for the exact purpose of transferring old VHS material to DVD.

      Pinnacle Studio [pinnaclesys.com] AV/DV Deluxe is but one of the many.

      • Re:Would love to see ... (Score:3, Interesting)

        by swb ( 14022 )
        I don't think he meant VHS, I think he might have actually meant *film*, as in one of the 8mm variants.

        • Re:Would love to see ... (Score:4, Interesting)

          by WidescreenFreak ( 830043 ) on Thursday March 03, 2005 @01:24PM (#11835473) Homepage Journal
          Actually, the same method can be done for transferring 8mm with only one extra step.

          I've done it by doing nothing more than shooting the 8mm image onto a bright-white screen, recording it with my camcorder, then transferring it to DVD. It certainly is not the same as a direct telecine transfer or the method that Warner is using, but for home use it works beautifully.
          • Right, but you left that part out.

            I've seen tripod/screen combos that let you do this. It's like a rear-projection screen that you point your camera at. I guess the advantage is brightness and maybe some clarity, since you're recording projected light and not reflected light (depending on the quality of the mirror).

            But it's not like 40 year old super 8 stock is known for clarity or color fastness anyway.

            • Re:Would love to see ... (Score:3, Informative)

              by Gemini ( 32631 )
              But it's not like 40 year old super 8 stock is known for clarity or color fastness anyway.

              Depends on the stock. Old super 8 ektachrome fades after a few years. Kodachrome seems to last and look beautiful forever. Kodachrome is wonderful stuff.
            • They also make little boxes that are nothing more than a Mirror and a spot for your projector lens and a spot for your video camera lens. Note: You will most likely need a video camera with a variable/selectable shutter speed, as film speed does not match video speed (this is why telecines were created, to correct for the mismatch in framerates and to preserve quality of frames with sharp lines [alternating fields are slightly offset]). Anyway, if you want higher quality and/or do not have a video camera
      • "I work in I.T. Don't make me rm -r / you."

        Yeah I bet, except you need "-f" to force [many times rm is aliased to 'rm -i' to force interactive] and many "proper" setups have users who can't write to /

        so your sig should say

        I work in I.T. Don't make me attempt futile humour because my two week college course didn't go into far enough depth.

        fwiw your command should be "rm -rf ~" ...

        Tom
    • Regarding my previous comment, Pinnacle has since renamed the AV/DV Deluxe to the MovieBox DV [pinnaclesys.com].

      Don't get me wrong - there are others out there that are NOT from Pinnacle. But Pinnacle is one of the better companies IMHO - and they've bought out some of the more prevalent competition, like Dazzle.

    • Re:Would love to see ... (Score:5, Informative)

      by tinrobot ( 314936 ) on Thursday March 03, 2005 @01:24PM (#11835464)
      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.

      • Re:Would love to see ... (Score:5, Funny)

        by dcarey ( 321183 ) on Thursday March 03, 2005 @01:29PM (#11835542) Homepage
        Your family shot your home movies in three strip Technicolor?

        Are you Cecil B. DeMille III or something?
        Nope sorry just us Barrymores here ...

      • Re:Would love to see ... (Score:5, Informative)

        by HotNeedleOfInquiry ( 598897 ) on Thursday March 03, 2005 @01:44PM (#11835695)
        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.

        • Re:Would love to see ... (Score:2, Interesting)

          by Anonymous Coward
          It's easy to spot a lot of Technicolor films not because the film itself it so much better - especially when viewed on an analog NTSC TV - but because the directors usually found the temptation to play with their new toy irresistable. So, the films are loaded with all sorts of highly saturated colors, bright primaries in the costumes and sets that you didn't have before, designed to show off the process and dazzle the masses.

          The giveaway is the flinging about of pigment, not the quality of the process its

        • Re:Would love to see ... (Score:5, Funny)

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 03, 2005 @04:16PM (#11837364)
          > My daughter, when she was 10, could look at a movie on television and tell me whether or not it was shot in Technicolor.

          Yeah... It says so at the beginning of the movie...
        • Because it uses three strips of film, you actually have more film area with which to record color information. This gives you better dynamic range, which gives you more vivid colors.

          It's similar to the way a 3-chip professional TV camera gets better color than a one-chip consumer camera.
    • 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.

      You have technicolor home movies? The best film I have from my family archive was from christmas 1942 and it was Eastman Kodak Kodacolor IIRC. I never knew anyone who had a technicolor camera which requires three reels of B&W film and a prism.
    • I think scanning individual film frames (like with some kind of self-feeding film scanner) would be too time consuming and storage intensive for the home user.

      I know I've seen these tripod/screen setups that let you essentially project a film onto a screen and have a video recorder perfectly aligned with the screen for transfering to video. With DV, you could import to the your PC as AVI and do some basic fixes depending on what your software will do and your willingness to devote CPU-days to processing.

    • But you CAN transfer film to DVD at home (Score:5, Informative)

      by WidescreenFreak ( 830043 ) on Thursday March 03, 2005 @01:34PM (#11835591) Homepage Journal
      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.
      • Hmm . . . do you get any flickering due to the different frame rate of the projector and the video camera?

        • Re:But you CAN transfer film to DVD at home (Score:4, Informative)

          by WidescreenFreak ( 830043 ) on Thursday March 03, 2005 @01:59PM (#11835862) Homepage Journal
          I never did. Most movies transfer at 24 fps, although a lot of older, home formats used 15 fps, but digital camcorders record at 29.97 fps. I'm guessing that the higher speed of the camcorder compensated for that. If you go frame by frame, you might see spots where the projector was switching to the next frame, but at 1/30th of a second it would not be easy to see.

          Regardless, I never did see any flickering of any note. Even if you look at transfered movies on DVD, such as the old Tom and Jerry cartoons, you might see that every sixth frame is a duplicate because of capturing 24 fps within ~30 fps. But it happens so quickly, even at every 1/6th second, that you don't notice it ... well ... I don't notice it. :)
          • In animation you use a plain black frame to create a sensation of shock, like when a character takes a blow. This may not be visibly noticeable, but your brain gets the idea just fine.

            I would bet that a flickering dark frame every 2 or 3 frames would be quite noticeable. But it could also give a feeling that the movie is in fact being projected by an old (15 fps) projector (pehaps not entirely undesirable).
      • 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.

        To really minimize the trapezoid effect, what you need to do is project the image to a screen with a lot of translucidity to it and record from
        • They've had those out for a while, although I will admit that I haven't seen one lately. It was a single unit with a "input" on one side, a 45 degree mirror (not in reference to termperaure, as I'm sure some /. smart-asses are ready to mention), and a translucent screen on the other side. Aim the projector at the input, aim the camcorder and the translucent screen, and record away. It was something like $39.95 many years ago. I should have bought one when I had the opportunity, although there were varou

      • Re:But you CAN transfer film to DVD at home (Score:5, Funny)

        by tobiasly ( 524456 ) on Thursday March 03, 2005 @01:57PM (#11835837) Homepage
        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.

        That's way too much work. Just pay some neighborhood kids to re-enact those old films of your children going up and record it digitally this time.

        In fact, I hear that's what George Lucas did with his old home movies. You can even add in some hilarious CGI sidekicks!

      • There are flatbed scanners that have a bulb in the lid so that you can scan photo slides. So if you were extremely patient, you could carefully scan your 8mm film one frame at a time, crop and align them all exactly the same, and then string them together. That would likely give the best possible quality for home use, but the problem here would be finishing the project before the film finishes degrading. :)

      • Re:But you CAN transfer film to DVD at home (Score:5, Informative)

        by Derling Whirvish ( 636322 ) on Thursday March 03, 2005 @02:08PM (#11835970) Journal
        And if it's old family 8mm movies, have the old folks, Aunts and Uncles, Grandma and Grandpa, sit around and watch it as you show it and record it. Their audio commentary on the new sound track (which with most 8mm would otherwise be silent) is invaluable in sorting out who was who, what was what, and where they were doing something. It's a win-win. They get to see old footage they probably haven't seen in a while and you get a great commentary to go along with your new video version.

    • Ask the library (Score:3, Informative)

      by bluGill ( 862 )

      Most big city headquarters libraries have the equipment for this.

      You need to prepare everything beforehand. That is put everything on one big roll so once in go in your feed the film and hit go. They don't want you editing in there at a time. You only get an hour, plan to convert as much as you can in that time.

      Big city and headquarters is key. Your local branch is unlikely to have it, and they might not even know who has it. Call the headquarters and ask though.

    • Well, if you have lots of time on your hands and you want a really nice end product, you could do it this way:

      1) Use a good negative scanner to scan each individual frame from your 8mm or 16mm film at the highest resolution that you can manage.
      2) Use Adobe Photoshop or your favorite image editing program to tweak the images.
      3) Import the images into Adobe After Effects or your favorite an animation program.
      4) Depending on the frame rate that you shot the original film at, make each image the appropriate le

  • Color alignment? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 03, 2005 @01:10PM (#11835320)
    And here I've been thinking all those movies were 3-d! Apparently it was just a red/blue misalignment.

  • Digital mapping of film grain? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by lawpoop ( 604919 ) on Thursday March 03, 2005 @01:12PM (#11835345) Homepage Journal
    I'm no expert in film, but I'm wondering if there's a more robust way to digitize film. Depending on how large the color crystals are, I don't think it would be too hard to plot each crystal's location. You could either plot the center, or try to draw the geometric shape of the grain using shape ananlysis algorithms. It's that's too much data for now, just wait a few years for storage process to drop ;)

    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?

    • That's quite a cool idea. Sort of reminds me of Richard Feynman's essay There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom, where he discusses a hypothetical limit on data storage using the arrangement of individual atoms in various crystalline structures. If we can get all the information about the film down to the molecular scale (which is rapidly becoming feasable with the advance of digital storage technology) we would finally be able to make a perfect analogue reproduction instead of the (reasonable, for today's tec

    • Re:Digital mapping of film grain? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Dun Malg ( 230075 ) on Thursday March 03, 2005 @01:24PM (#11835472) Homepage
      Depending on how large the color crystals are, I don't think it would be too hard to plot each crystal's location. ...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?

      Sure, but really, it's going to an absolutely unnecessary extreme. You could plot the details of the grain like that, but the original prints were never expected to show anywhere near that much detail. At some point it just becomes gratuitous.

    • Re:Digital mapping of film grain? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Illserve ( 56215 ) on Thursday March 03, 2005 @01:35PM (#11835600)
      It's still about visual resolution at the end of the day. You could show me atomic level recreations of films and I couldn't tell the difference from modern digital remasterings.

      The art of this process is in learning what has to be preserved for perfect perception, not slavishly reproducing every physical detail of the original.

      And remember, crystal level resolution is BAD. They are effectively a blotchy quantal reproduction of what is really a smooth analog transition from one colour to the next. But of course, people tend to confuse "original" with "good", and seem intent on dragging the baggage of previous, shitty technologies into the digital age. Same story with vacuum tubes and audio equipment.

    • Re:Digital mapping of film grain? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Bruce Perens ( 3872 ) <bruce@perens.com> on Thursday March 03, 2005 @01:36PM (#11835621) Homepage Journal
      This would bring a completely unnecessary level of noise into the process. Film grain is noisy and doesn't contribute extra information once you can resolve a single crystal. What you really should do is defocus just enough so that the grain noise is averaged out, or digitize at a higher resolution than the grain and then filter out the frequency band of the grain noise. The effect of those two processes might be identical.

      Bruce

    • Depending on how large the color crystals are, I don't think it would be too hard to plot each crystal's location. You could either plot the center, or try to draw the geometric shape of the grain using shape ananlysis algorithms.

      Film scanners use different algorithms for constructing images depending on the type of film scanned. For example kodachrome is particularly difficult to scan . . . older film scanners had a lot of trouble and in fact even professional 35mm film scanners did not recommend scannin

    • 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.

      I don't see why some of what you suggest wouldn't work (you're basically just talking super-high res scans, for the most part), but it's incredibly wasteful. Plotting the shape of each individual film grain, on a per-frame basis? First of all, it would take forever to do this. Second of all, visib
    • I think the IMAX upconversion process does something similar to this if their promotional literature is to be believed. Whatever the process really is, the results are absolutely beautiful. I've seen Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, and The Matrix II and III on an IMAX screen. The last two looked so nice that ignoring the movies are bad was pretty easy. There's no way that Blu-Ray or HD-DVD will retain that level of detail.

      You could say just project the 35MM reels, but it doesn't work that way if y

  • I wonder what kind of noise removal they're using (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Noose For A Neck ( 610324 ) on Thursday March 03, 2005 @01:12PM (#11835348)
    I'd be quite interested to hear about what kind of noise removal algorithms they use to remove all the dirt spots from the high-res film scans. From what I know of the film industry, most effects houses still use someone (or several someones) at a Linux workstation using Cinepaint [sourceforge.net] (nee Film Gimp) to manually paint over suspension wires for films like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

    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?

  • Criterion (Score:2, Interesting)

    by smiley2billion ( 599641 )
    Is this the same process that Criterion [criterionco.com] uses?

    All of their restored movies look top notch.

    • Re:Criterion (Score:2, Interesting)

      by mako1138 ( 837520 )
      Criterion's catalog is so large and of such variety that they probably have a whole battery of techniques. They also probably don't do it all themselves. For example, the Criterion release of Jean Cocteau's "La Belle et la Bête" notes that the restoration was done for an anniversary of Cocteau's work. They used a wet projection process and digital scrubbing.

  • Very nice - but will profits or posterity decide? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by WidescreenFreak ( 830043 ) on Thursday March 03, 2005 @01:15PM (#11835377) Homepage Journal
    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 classic look... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by 3nuff ( 824173 )
    This is fine an well, but the painta of old films are almost part of their character. It's like the sound of a vinyl record, it's part of the experience of seeing a classic film.

    • Re:The classic look... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by OG ( 15008 ) on Thursday March 03, 2005 @01:25PM (#11835485)
      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.
      • I think they are referring to the older gramophone record players. They were totally mechanical (wind-up) and have either flat records or use wax cylinders. Sound was very tinny and clicks and pops were part of any listening experience.

    • Re:The classic look... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Jerf ( 17166 ) on Thursday March 03, 2005 @01:42PM (#11835680) Journal
      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.

      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 :-) ), 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.)
      • I've been shocked at how digital restorations look when compared to how I remember films when they were first played.

        Two recent examples from my memory where I noticed this:

        Speed Racer and Kima: The White Lion.

        These were shown in my youth ('70s) on a local UHF channel and I distinctly remember the colors being so washed out they were not so much black and white but various shades of red and very little other color. The originals aired in Japan perhaps 10 years earlier.

        Now I have DVD restorations of bot

  • If you have an HDTV... (Score:4, Informative)

    by KrackHouse ( 628313 ) on Thursday March 03, 2005 @01:17PM (#11835394) Homepage
    "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.
    • 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.

      Na, DLPs are better. And they can do 720p. CRTs still have problems getting to the higher dimmensions (about 50"). I have seen beautiful full res DLPs at 60.
    • T2 Extreme Edition DVD has a second disc with the film in 1080p. But the downside is that it only plays on your computer and its protected by windows media crap DRM.
      • And extreme crap that DRM on T2EE is. The license is validated online. I had to set up a proxy because the license validator rejected my IP address.

        When the license validator will be gone (bankrupt, or somewhere else) - and that's a when, not an if - my HD movie won't play anymore. (Luckily there is a standard DVD left in the box and the price wasn't more than a normal DVD, so...)

        The visual quality of the movie itself was worth going thru the trouble though - once! - and a showcase for my hp2335, but tha
      • The resolution of the T2EE wmv hd disc is actually just 1440 x 816, which comes close to the vertical resolution of 1080p since it just cuts off the black bars on top and bottom, but the horizontal resolution isn't even 3/4 of 'proper' 180p.
    • Do you have a specific HDTV tube recommendation?
      • The Sony KD-34XBR960 is probably the best right now in terms of pure picture quality. I got lucky and found a reference monitor on the AVS Forums deals section for $700, best deal of my life. They're going for $1,500 and up according to a Froogle search.

        Here's a review [cnet.com].
  • Yunno, until I read TFA, I don't think I ever really appreciated the challenges of digitizing technicolor prints. A good read.

  • We need these works of art preserved forever. What better way to preserve them then by spreading high quality copies all over the world?

  • Snow White Restoration (Score:5, Informative)

    by Bruce Perens ( 3872 ) <bruce@perens.com> on Thursday March 03, 2005 @01:33PM (#11835574) Homepage Journal
    I worked on the Snow White restoration with Kodak Cinesite while at Pixar. The film was made with nitrate stock, as were all films back then - there wasn't another good method to make clear plastic stock. Nitrate is great organic fertilizer - as well as being chemically quite close to nitroglycerine and a tremendous fire hazard if the projector jams and the hot lamp burns the film.

    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

  • ....Heaven's Gate will still suck.
  • that industry's way ahead of hollywood on this one.
  • 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.
  • two years ago, the 1926 movie Metropolis was completely restored and transfered to DVD, the results were beautiful

    • Re:Metropolis (Score:2, Informative)

      by 3nuff ( 824173 )

      I have seen this version of the film and found it to very good. The sharpness of the B&W images is excellent and there is very little "noise" on screen (ie. dirt and hair)

      This movie has awesome special effects for the time period. That mechanical suit that actress wears was made out of balsa wood!

      The official site of this reproduction can be found at Kino.com [kino.com]. They have some great production stills.

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