ARRI announced today that it has entered into a Letter of Intent to develop and sell an innovative new Texture Control software tool for digital intermediate (DI) and mastering facilities. Powered by Pixel Strings™, a high performance GPU-based motion estimation engine developed by Cinnafilm, Inc., this dynamic toolset adds interactive control of grain and noise levels to the creative palette. The software is designed to run on a dedicated workstation with Fibre Channel or Gbit Ethernet connections to a DI facility’s Storage Area Network (SAN), dramatically extending the capabilities of the DI suite.
This innovative software product, brings interactive manipulation of image texture to the DI process, with remarkable motion-compensated grain and noise reduction technology. With the tool, the cinematographer can now control image texture, mixing and matching the grain of film and digital media in an integrated and fully visualized DI environment
It leverages Cinnafilm’s patent pending Pixel Strings™ technology with a high speed GPU implementation. For an industry heavyweight like ARRI, Cinnafilm is a groundbreaking pioneer merging the latest technology with artistic applications for the filmmaker. ARRI is working with Cinnafilm on a software development and licensing agreement.
“ARRI is excited about the opportunity to bring these powerful, interactive tools to the DI suite,” said Glenn Kennel, Chief Technology Officer for ARRI, Inc. “This adds a new dimension to the colorist’s toolset.”
“As an entrepreneur, I am excited to introduce this product after nearly six years of very hard work. As an engineer and independent filmmaker, I couldn’t dream of a better, more established partner than ARRI to bring this technology into the postproduction market,” said Lance Maurer, CEO and founder of Cinnafilm, Inc.
This technology was originally developed by Cinnafilm and Digital Film Central, a leading Digital Intermediate facility in Vancouver, CA. As a film mastering facility, DFC had developed a host of image processing applications over the years. This led to the development of powerful ways to remove grain from film images, while retaining detail. Their initial success with the service led to the opportunity to create a product, and Cinnafilm provided the software development on the GPU-enabled Pixel Strings platform.
“We needed a major industry player to help us take this to market. Since it’s about image quality, ARRI was the perfect partner,” says Curtis Staples, CEO of Digital Film Central.
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