Film transfers or Digital Cinema

Having spend a good part of a decade doing film scanning and recording, I find what happens in post plays a big part in how video looks when it's transferred to film.

Before DVX100, since most video to film transfers were done from 60i originals, it was important to minimize the motion stuttering that occurred when doing 60i to 24p conversions.

Since most people were letting the transfer house use their own software to deal with this conversion. The problem would be that the clients wouldn't know what they were getting until they saw a print.

The same with image artifacts. Its been mentioned numerous times that any image enhancing or sharpening should be turned down on the camera when shooting. The same applies for image enhancements done in post.

I have seen commercials shot on film, telecined to D1 tape, heavy post enhancement done, look slick and great on an NTSC monitor, but when taken to film, look crawly, aliased and sometimes extremely noisy. This is because the images were designed to look good on video, not film. The transfer to film is almost always an afterthought.

Even though indies have better tools, the same rules apply.

If an indie is seriously considering even a remote possibility of a film transfer, the transfer house should be involved as early into preproduction as possible.

Since most indies have limited funds, it makes more sense to use the affordable tools available to them. Sure, not all indies are techies, but forums like this are there to help out.

I would recommend that before color grading or visual effects stages, the media be converted to a 10bit or higher lossless format.

I have heard it's possible, if using a Kona or Black Magic HD card, you can just drop 8bit shots into a 10bit timeline, and still get realtime feedback.

You definitely need the extra headroom in a 10bit or higher format to avoid color clipping in the high ends or crushing in the low ends.

FCP lets you work in floating point, so if you may want to try doing some tests in that.

Even if a feature goes through a digital intermediate for a theatrical release , separate color timing is done for the video masters.

It would make sense to do the same on an indie project. Do all the color timing and enhancements for the video version, then make a "cleaner" version that would be more complementary for a filmout.

This is where it gets critical to work with the transfer house to make sure that the "cleaner" version will look good on film. The transfer house should have their system calibrated to show what your image should look like on film. This way you can head off any problems that crop up.

If you are using mixed source footage which run at different frame rates, you will have convert that footage to 24. Post houses have Teranex or Alchemist systems are designed for that sort of work, but are very expensive. You can also use plug-ins like Graeme Nattress' Standards Conversion, Red Giant's Magic Bullet or Algolith's AlgoSuite.

If you are a FCP user, Compressor allows you to do standards conversion also, using the optical flow code used in Shake, though it may be extremely slow even on a G5.


The flip side of all this is that there isn't any real need for the expense and hassles of a filmout if indies just go the digital cinema route.

Currently there is something like 170 digital screens nationwide out of 36,000 traditional cinema screens. There has been estimates that something like 6,000 digital screens are planned for 2006. It will be interesting if this turns out to be true, but that ball is rolling. There is definitely a desire at least on the studio and filmmaker side for digital to be rolled in, it's more resistance on the theater side because of the costs.

Landmark Theaters owned by Mark Cuban already announced their plans to convert 60 screens to digital, and have set up a relatively "affordable" pricing structure for filmmakers who want show their films digitally.

I have heard that even though some festivals show films digitally, it's not always a properly setup system or in a choice venue, and 35mm film features get the preferential treatment.

I feel that a theatrical release is bragging rights for the filmmaker. Sure it's cool to say that a film is playing on the big screen, but I don't find it to be critical that a film needs a theatrical release to find it's audience.

HD DVD is coming in 2006....umm ok, so what??

About 15 years ago, in my film school days (back when we actually worked with film), I was introduced to laser discs. Before that, I did have a chance to play with the ancient videodisc format, but it was mostly VHS like a lot of people.

A screenwriting instructor of mine would wheel in a 27" TV with a laser disc setup and show us examples of whatever lessons he was teaching that day.

The things I admired about laser discs were that the picture quality was very good compared to VHS, and certain discs had audio commentary and other extras. Being a budding cineaste, I was excited to have these tidbits of knowledge passed on to me.

The downsides of laser discs were that they were large and delicate, you had to make sure not to touch the mirror face, and avoid scratches. It took more room to store them, was like storing old LPs. They only held an hour at the most on each side, and you either had to walk up and flip the disc or have a more expensive player that automatically flipped it. And they were extremely expensive. Anywhere from $35 to $120 for the really special Criterion editions.

Despite the downsides, I was hooked... sort of. It wasn't till I was out on my own in Los Angeles, that I bought a laser disc player, and it was a demo model because it was on sale and could play both sides. I barely had a handful of discs to begin with, and my collection never grew past 30. This is in contrast to friends and acquaintances who had laser disc collections that numbered in the hundreds.

The costs of the discs had been the biggest hinderance to me, and I bought only the stuff I really wanted.

Several more years later, DVD was introduced. I was weary at first. The images had heavy compression, especially when looking at a movie like THE FIFTH ELEMENT, that had so much detail being mushed that it was smearing. There wasn't a big hurry to buy a DVD player, especially when they were still over $500 on the cheap end.

Then a year or so later, The Virgin Megastore on Sunset Blvd. had a huge sale on all it's laser discs. At the time both Virgin and Tower Records had large laser disc sections and a small shelf area for DVDs. Virgin was clearing it all out to make room for DVDs, I knew I had to pay attention to DVDs more.

I did a comparison to a movie that was on DVD and laser disc and saw that if the laser disc had special features, so did the DVD. This wasn't always true, but it meant that the studios were interested in adding those special features, so it wasn't just the specialty brands like Criterion doing it anymore.

I did buy a few laser discs at that sale, then within months, I bought a DVD player. I bought DVDs like it was candy. At roughly $20 a movie, it was way cheaper than laser discs ever could be. The picture and audio quality got way better, and there were tons of extras on almost every disc.

So since then, every Tuesday I been checking out what's new and great in the DVD section. My collection is somewhere over 300, I stopped counting.

Next year, HD DVD and Blu-Ray will launch to bring DVD into the Hi-Def age. I knew this would come, you can't have HDTV and no movies in HD to show on them.

But I quickly realize that there's no way I'm going to buy all the movies I have all over again in HD. In fact I really don't want to.

This is all personal choice mind you, there are people out there that want EVERYTHING in HD. I'm not one of them, I will selectively buy what I want to see in HD.

As much as I enjoy watching movies like GOODFELLAS, ME MYSELF & IRENE, FARGO, ZOOLANDER, WARGAMES, BULL DURHAM to name a few, I don't care if I have HD versions of them. My standard DVD version is just fine.

On the other hand, THE LORD OF THE RINGS TRILOGY, THE GOOD THE BAD AND THE UGLY, LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, STAR WARS TRILOGIES, TERMINATOR 2, MATRIX, ALIEN QUADRILOGY are definitely ones I want to see in HD.

In the next few years even, I suspect as HD DVD starts off, I see standard DVDs getting cheaper, especially if you buy them used, like at Amoeba Records. Early adopters will be selling or trading in their old DVDs to get HD ones, just like my friends have done with laser discs.

So it'll be a bit of a mixed bag at first, unless the HD DVDs have something really exclusive.

My First Blog

Hi Folks,


I still haven't figured out what to say here yet, but stay tuned.

Thanks.

Thomas