posted 04-20-2004 03:57 AM                    

quote:

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Impressive as HDTV looks, 35-millimeter film has far more color and detail.

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posted 04-21-2004 01:27 AM                       

quote: John Pytlak

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Generally, higher quality origination (e.g., 65mm) or higher resolution scanning (4K vs. 2K) will result in higher image quality, even if the final display system is lower in resolution.

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posted 04-21-2004 08:57 AM                    

quote: Bobby Henderson

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The area where 4K needs to be used is in dealing with current films and digital intermediate processes. I watched "Kill Bill" Volume 2 this weekend, and the black and white stuff (along with the Pei Mai scenes) looked video-ish. Electronic noise, shimmering and even some hints of pixellation were popping up on screen. That stuff wouldn't show up so easy if done at 4K.

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quote:

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from other thread:
“Casino was the only film I’ve shot in Super 35 format,” he says, “and I was terribly disappointed with the release print quality. It was devastating to me. Quentin had a similar experience with Reservoir Dogs. Films stocks and lenses have improved, but there is still a chasm (separating the Super 35 and anamorphic formats).”

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posted 04-21-2004 10:28 AM                       

quote:

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The problem was that Tarantino had written specific "zoom" lens shots into the script. Richardson felt that the anamorphic zoom lenses available from Panavision didn't provide a fast enough T-stop to properly execute those shots. That drove the decision to use a digital intermediate process. That approach enabled Richardson to shoot with spherical lenses in Super 35 format and "squeeze" the images into a 2.4:1 aspect ratio during digital mastering. Basically, the edited cut of the negative is scanned and converted to digital files. The images are timed for shot-to-shot and scene-to-scene continuity in a digital suite, and then recorded out to an intermediate film used as a master for release printing. It's a familiar tactic for Richardson, who has shot many commercials that have been converted to digital format and manipulated in telecine suites. However, this is his first experience with a "film-out" from a digital intermediate.

He suggested shooting Kill Bill in three-perforation 35 mm format. That trimmed film and lab costs by 25 percent. Richardson explains that essentially covered costs for the digital intermediate process. There is no downside, since the digital files can be recorded out to a four-perf 35 mm color intermediate film with no loss of picture quality.

Front-end processing and release printing were slated for Technicolor Labs, in Los Angeles. Tarantino agreed with Richardson's suggestion about creating and timing a digital file at Technique, the lab's subsidiary in the Los Angeles area.

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posted 04-21-2004 12:47 PM                       

quote:

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By Joe Cellini



If you’re a real fan, you already own the recently-released “Adventures of Indiana Jones” (”Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “The Temple of Doom,” “The Last Crusade”) DVD set, and you like what you see: ridiculously clear images, bonus documentary, nice extras.

Chances are you’d be equally impressed by what you don’t see, conspicuous flaws removed from the films by master digital restorer Lowry Digital Images. “One of the biggest problems we had with ‘Raiders,’” says CEO John Lowry, “was a blue line cutting across the actors’ faces right down the center of the first part of the movie, about 35,000 frames of scratches.”

And if you’re loading the movie now to look for traces of the scratch, don’t bother. Lowry’s digital botox, powerful proprietary software running on a formidable stack of Power Macs, removed all traces of the unsightly line that distracted so persistently from the more compelling vertical furrows on the brow of Harrison Ford.

Jim Ward of LucasFilm, who selected Lowry Digital Images, Inc., to restore the films, says his company first considered doing the clean up themselves. “We could have done a lot of the dirt removal, but we knew it wouldn’t be as good. We owe it to filmmakers like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas to make sure that these films are pristine.”

First Mover
By all accounts, few people do pristine as well as Lowry, who holds original patents on noise reduction in film. “The first clean up of this kind that was ever done was in 1971 when I processed the Apollo 16 and Apollo 17 pictures from the moon,” he says. “So I’ve been at this a little while.” Recently he was awarded the James A. Leitch Gold Medal from the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers for his career contributions to digital technology and motion imaging.

Lowry set up Lowry Digital Images in 1988, intending to develop digital tools for sale or license, but first taking time to have his crew clean 20 movies to learn precisely where the problems were, so he could build correct solutions. “Now that we’ve done 80 movies, we’re still discovering new things, but far fewer,” he says.

His timing and tactics proved as good as his technique. Explosive growth in digital distribution channels — DVDs, cable, HD TV, digital projection theaters, even the Internet — has every major studio looking at digital restoration, and looking at Lowry.

Film To Go
It’s easy to believe that movies are forever. But a different message plays across the banks of busy monitors at Lowry’s offices in a converted aerospace plant in Burbank, CA: it says, without significant intervention, the only inevitable thing about film is that it decays over time.

You may have already concluded from watching movies through what looked like tape come unstuck from dirty floors — the swimming motes, the glowing hairs — that film is a fragile medium. You may not know that films before 1950 were shot on nitrate-based cellulose film, an unstable medium prone to disintegration, even conflagration. Fewer than half of those films exist today.

Dirty Movies
But when I suggest to Lowry that fans of recent films like the “Indiana Jones” movies might be surprised that the works of high-profile filmmakers with high-tech production cred would be in anything but pristine condition, he sits me down to explain the facts of film.

“In ‘Indiana Jones,’ we removed a piece of dirt from only every frame or two,” he says. “For two versions each of three movies, that’s half a million pieces of dirt. But for ‘Roman Holiday’ (1953), we removed hundreds of pieces of dirt from each of the 170,000 frames. In a typical old movie, you’re talking millions of pieces of dirt.”

Degrees of Degradation
As we walk the lab, Lowry outlines the three-part problem faced by film restorers, making frequent visual references to convenient examples from failing classics. “The first category is wear and tear. A popular movie tends to be more damaged simply because it’s been printed so often. Real bombs that never got printed have no broken sprocket holes, not a lot of dirt, no scratches. Even the most careful physical handling still adds dirt, scratches, blemishes and even tears. Film is a delicate physical medium.”

Lowry’s second category is age. “Just plain time results in fading and flicker. A sky might pulse from yellow to blue in a beat. On films from the 30s and 40s, you get this vinegar syndrome, and the film turns to dust.”

Third and most lethal, Lowry explains, is multiple generations of optical copies. “They’re the worst degradation that can happen to film because fine detail disappears with each optical duplicate made. We can fix dirt, scratches, tears, and flicker, but if the information is gone, it’s very hard to put back.”

Pressing his case, Lowry brings the evidence. Literal wear and tear in a frame from “North by Northwest” shows Cary Grant in a cornfield, torn in half at the waist. Aggregations of grain and dirt occlude third-generation dupes of “Roman Holiday” and “Sunset Boulevard,” the best extant versions of either film, because originals were lost.

The Digital Fix
Then from deep in the third circle of celluloid hell, Lowry shows the way out. Summoning “after” images on a screen to compare alongside the “befores,” he pulls up a perfectly intact Cary Grant. Also Audrey Hepburn in a stunningly photographed black-and-white Rome, and Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond, both looking ready again for their close ups.

It’s clear that Lowry’s software has repaired the frames, less clear how it found enough visual information to do so. “The motion picture camera presents lots of information to the film frame, to the emulsion,” he says. “The emulsion has a grain structure that allows you to collect certain information, but prevents you from collecting other information. We’re in the business of extracting that information. By borrowing and combining information from a number of frames, you can do some interesting things.”

Suspecting that he lost me at emulsion, Lowry tries again. “It’s like cleaning your glasses so you can see more. We want to remove the veil so that you can see everything that’s in the original.”

Automatic Software
Precisely how Lowry cleans the glasses is the stuff of proprietary algorithms. But the process is fairly transparent. First Lowry’s project managers scan film or tape into high-resolution digital format, note standard problems and tweak the parameters in the proprietary software (for example, to stabilize jitter and weave). Then they process the digital frames on Lowry’s battery of Macs.

Once the file has been through the process, the imagery is eye-checked frame-by-frame, and then checked with clients. “We go through it to make sure the algorithms did their job properly,” he says, “but the algorithms now are very sophisticated and so there are very few do-overs.”

Digital Ins and Outs
Impressively, Lowry’s software works with images in any size and format, including NTSC, PAL, HD, 2K, 4K. And once Lowry creates a pristine digital master, his clients can output to any of those formats to cover everything from a new film to digital projection to DVD.

Besides cleaning better than other technologies can manage, Lowry’s software enhances his clients’ translations across digital formats by avoiding unnecessary early compression. “Because we do our processing at 32-bit floating point, we expand everything we get. We avoid compression in production stages because it usually does terrible things to pictures,” he says.

The eventual compression required to get a movie onto a DVD can leave artifacts if there is a lot of noise in the images, but Lowry’s robust processing yields even compressed images that are artifact free.

Does Compute
Lowry believes that personal computers, even more than the generous studio budgets for DVD production and distribution, have made digital restoration viable.

“To do the work we are doing today 10 years ago, would have cost tens of millions of dollars for a computer facility,” says Lowry. “The economics of it, without question, would have been impossible. But along came the Power Mac G4 and the Power Mac G5, and suddenly we had an answer.”

Jim Ward makes the point that Lowry’s economic model, as much as his algorithms, brought him to Lowry. “His software does 95% of the work,” says Ward. “There’s a huge economic difference between letting 100 Power Mac G5s render all night long versus having 8 or 10 guys sitting at workstations for a much longer period of time eyeballing pieces of dirt.”

Powering Through
Lowry plans to acquire another 100 Power Mac G5s, and he’s clear about why. “Obviously speed. Both the Power Mac G4 and Power Mac G5 have outstanding 32-bit floating point processors, and we make very good use of them. Another major factor is RAM capacity, important in image processing. The new Power Mac G5s are running with 3.5 gigabytes of RAM in each computer.”

Mac OS X figures in Lowry’s plans for working in higher-res formats. “The studios say they need 4K to get out all the information hiding in their films. So we need access to memory, because these frames are all computed while they’re in RAM. Mac OS X gives us the ability to use virtual memory if necessary to swap around.”

Too Clean?
Lowry’s process, while undeniably effective, is also somewhat controversial. Some industry critics have claimed that digital processing cleans a film too well, stripping it of distinctive grain.

“Generally speaking in the industry, grain removal equals detail removal,” says Lowry. “But we’ve been able to reduce the granularity while increasing the detail. I don’t know that anybody else is doing that in an effective way. As a matter of fact, most of the grain we reduce is grain that crept into the film through many generations of optical duplications. The philosophy of my critics, that every grain in a film is sacred, and to leave grain untouched, is a bit ridiculous in my mind.”

Jim Ward, the happy customer, concurs. “The issue of how much grain to keep in the trilogy was Steven Spielberg’s call. It was really about exact balance, which John has the ability to modulate. Steven wanted a little grain — that’s what he likes and prefers — and you see that in the end product, but with beautiful clarity and color saturation.”

Back to the Future
Industry interests are broadening Lowry Digital beyond standard restoration, including amazing experiments like taking smaller formats to IMAX and re-mastering any format for digital projection. “We’re finding new things to apply the software to every day,” says Lowry.

But restoring films remains Lowry’s main business. He’s working again with Jim Ward and Warner Bros., just finishing a restoration of George Lucas’ first film, “THX 1138.” “After we saw what he could do with ‘Indiana Jones,’” says Ward, “we definitely wanted back in the queue.”

Asked what would make an ideal next project, the man who for more than 30 years has pulled the long levers behind a closed industry curtain, makes just the right call. “‘The Wizard of Oz,’ from separations.”



John D. Lowry
1. Restoration Software
2. Removing the Veil



Great Saves
“The Ghoul” (1933)
Worst-case scenario restoration from jittery, flickery, dirty print. Looks like HD on DVD.

“Sunset Boulevard” (1950)
Now famously ready again for close up with DeMille after Lowry’s reclamation from a third-generation dupe neg. Astonishing details rescued from grain and dirt (300-400 pieces per frame).

“The Importance of Being Ernest” (1952)
Red flicker, processing streaks in dark areas, overall flarey. Flare reduced, flicker gone.

“Roman Holiday” (1953)
Lowry’s most challenging restoration — grain-greyed whites, dirt, flicker, jitter and weave, tears, scratches. Now on DVD as it looked 50 years ago, with restored screenwriter credit for blacklisted Dalton Trumbo.

“North by Northwest” (1959)
Lowry’s first restoration, this very dirty job proved the concept of his approach. All dirt removed, “brutal” tear resolved, visible effects wires edited out.

“Dr. Zhivago” (1965)
Long movie, lots of dirt and flicker, none visible on DVD. Image-by-image, a Lowry favorite.

“Once Upon a Time in the West” (1968)
Technoscope, a half-height film format, yielded wide aspect ratio but also twice the grain and jitter. Cleaned, stabilized images produced a stunning DVD.

Show Stoppers (Know Your Notorious Film Flaws)
Dirt
Pervasive, miscellaneous grit that grows through multiple printing of popular films.

Flicker
A symptom of film aging that manifests itself as color breathing, as when the picture flickers from blue to slightly yellow and back.

Grain
The particulate texture responsible for film’s brilliant images can coarsen over generations of prints and actually hide information.

Jitter and Weave
Sprocket holes in film move the film through the camera gate introduce jitter and weave, which becomes more pronounced with successive printings.

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posted 04-21-2004 05:54 PM                    

quote: Patrick de Groot

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Why does 2K scanning of Kill Bill 2 makes sense if they are worried about image quality? They must surely have the budget to use 4K scanning if the digital intermediate process is used because it is after all a blockbuster movie...

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quote: Patrick de Groot

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Btw was the digital intermediate process also used on Kill Bill 1?

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posted 04-21-2004 06:15 PM                       

quote: John Pytlak

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Tarantino agreed with Richardson's suggestion about creating and timing a digital file at Technique, the lab's subsidiary in the Los Angeles area.

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posted 04-22-2004 01:34 AM                       

quote: Apple website article posted by Jeffry L. Johnson

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You may not know that films before 1950 were shot on nitrate-based cellulose film, an unstable medium prone to disintegration, even conflagration. Fewer than half of those films exist today.

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quote:

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“Just plain time results in fading and flicker. A sky might pulse from yellow to blue in a beat."

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quote:

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On films from the 30s and 40s, you get this vinegar syndrome, and the film turns to dust.”

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posted 04-22-2004 07:09 AM                       

quote:

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Too Clean?
Lowry’s process, while undeniably effective, is also somewhat controversial. Some industry critics have claimed that digital processing cleans a film too well, stripping it of distinctive grain.

“Generally speaking in the industry, grain removal equals detail removal,” says Lowry. “But we’ve been able to reduce the granularity while increasing the detail. I don’t know that anybody else is doing that in an effective way. As a matter of fact, most of the grain we reduce is grain that crept into the film through many generations of optical duplications. The philosophy of my critics, that every grain in a film is sacred, and to leave grain untouched, is a bit ridiculous in my mind.”

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quote:

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“Sunset Boulevard” (1950)
Now famously ready again for close up with DeMille after Lowry’s reclamation from a third-generation dupe neg. Astonishing details rescued from grain and dirt (300-400 pieces per frame).

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