Fearlessly 4K

Forging Ahead With Higher Res, Lower Cost Finishing Systems

By Michael Grotticelli

November 1, 2005    Source: Film & Video

IBC 2005 made it clear that European audiences, like their U.S. counterparts, have an appetite for high-resolution content. From 2K and 4K resolutions for digital-intermediate work to high-definition video at 1920x1080, the key technology on display offered affordable ways to fix it in post — as quickly and cost-effectively as possible.

At last year’s show, 4K was only for the highest-end facilities and movie studios that were reconditioning their most popular content. This year, a large variety of systems, some on personal desktop workstations, offered uncompromising, uncompressed workflows. DI tools have reached a maturity, using off-the-shelf IT components to keep costs manageable, that was only dreamed about three years ago.

This is an important step for the DI industry, which has languished beneath a cloud of high cost and slow processing speeds, and many facilities have gotten into the field in a big way. Post Logic, a major post house in Hollywood, announced at IBC its purchase of a Grass Valley Spirit 4K film scanner and DataCine, five DVS Clipster real-time HD and DI workstations, a fully loaded storage area network from Bright Systems, and a Barco 2K digital projector.

Of course, not everyone is making the move to 4K, with its larger data files and larger costs. The industry learned a lesson in the early years of HD post-production— when DI houses do make the move to 4K, there has to be a way to make it pay. Rendering 4K deliverables isn’t usually practical when you factor in all of the extra time and significantly increased disk storage that’s required.

Many companies addressed these issues specifically. Quantel demonstrated what it said was the world’s first "real-time true 4K super-film resolution playout with real-time pan and scan." Quantel’s system pulled a continuous 1.15 GB/sec data stream from the disks. In addition, the iQ and Quantel’s new Pablo color-correction system were also scaling the material to HD on the fly in order to display the result on a giant plasma screen. It was also applying look-up tables (LUTs) and masks without generating new copies.

At the show, Kodak announced a new relationship with Arri that will help users process images faster and at lower cost. The company’s Digital ICE scratch and dirt removal software is used for still photos, but at IBC it was being applied to moving images. The process requires an additional infrared pass on the Arriscan film scanner to identify artifacts, producing a defect map that can either remove smaller defects or be loaded into a DI system for more accurate color grading and correction.

Edifis introduced a new film grading system, the f/stop, that is designed to meet the growing need for color-correction of full-aperture 2K RGB footage generated from electronic acquisition, or for digital intermediates for film-acquired material. The f/stop system applies the real-time capabilities of the company’s Finalizer video-grading system to 2K applications.

Imagica upgraded its Imager XE Advanced Plus Digital Scanner to scan 35mm film at 1.3 seconds per frame for 2K and 1.9 seconds for 4K. An optional liquid gate eliminates the effects of film scratches and dust.

The latest version of Digital Vision’s Nucoda software includes a variety of color-correction tools for DI applications and leverages Digital Vision’s new DVO software-based algorithms for grain and noise reducing, Valhall, a control surface designed specifically for colorists, and digital video I/O tools for video ingest and playback.

The company also introduced a new 8-core, 4-processor workstation that has been configured by BOXX Technologies. Digital Vision said it offers a tenfold increase in speed for processing color-correction commands. The new 8-core platform is compatible with all Nucoda software, including the Nucoda Film Master color grading, editing, effects, and conforming system.

Autodesk designed its IBC exhibit to function like a working production facility for uncompressed data projects. The company’s Discreet Lustre digital color grading system, which integrates seamlessly with Smoke and Combustion, is being used on several upcoming feature films, including King Kong, Stay and Domino.

You can’t set up a successful DI facility without being able to manage the large amounts of data that high-resolution productions require. Recognizing this, data management systems were another popular item addressed throughout the show. Companies like Assimilate and Maximum Throughput showed highly sophisticated software that helps do the job automatically.

Assimilate’s Scratch and Scaffold products enables users to see their entire project in context, instead of just a small part of it at any given time, using a dual-processor PC workstation. The company has formed a distribution agreement with Kodak to bundle the Kodak Display Manager System with Scratch to help calibrate monitors.

Maximum Throughput showed its Xstoner 2 client software for Macintosh OS X systems and Xstoner 2 server software for IRIX & Linux-based Autodesk editing & effects solutions. Xstoner is a client/server application for exchanging content between PC and Mac CG workstations, Autodesk editing and effects systems, and Maximum Throughput’s Sledgehammer NAS, SD!O and HD!O, "media-aware" shared storage systems.

Like the early days of HD production, the availability of affordable systems and number of clients willing to produce their film projects in the digital domain is currently small, but will grow with time. Now offering powerful new compression algorithms, processing speed and tightly integrated software suites, manufacturers seem eager to develop systems that target specific applications. At IBC, the bar was raised and the costs came down. Now it’s a question of what digital post houses want to do with the tools at hand.