This technical exercise has allowed Jackson to draw certain conclusions about applying video post techniques to a film project. "I never would have attempted the SDDS trailers without digital postproduction," he asserts. "At their root, all of these techniques are photographic in nature. If you’re a filmmaker and you understand the process, you’re really doing what other people have always done, from the Lumière Brothers onward: manipulating pictures. And as long as you don’t lose sight of that, you don’t need to fear digital."
New Horizons for Digital Telecine
Tape House Digital Film in New York specializes in consultation and services for clients who proceed to film from any format, including tape, computer files, and scanned and manipulated images. With a host of off-the-shelf and proprietary technology for motion picture film recording and scanning tape-to-film transfers, or imagery interpolation from lower to higher resolutions for print and cinema the postproduction facility has a great deal of experience shuttling between the worlds of video, film and computer data.
Even so, according to vice-president/general manager Alfie Schloss, the outfit’s recent work on two theatrically released commercials presents a dramatic illustration of the ways in which video postproduction techniques can be used on film projects. New York-based advertising agency Gigante Vaz & Partners surmised that a cinema commercial would be the perfect marketing ploy for Aiwa’s home theater Surround Sound products. The rather minimalist spot (shot by Propaganda Commercials director Rene Eller and cinematographer Peter Vermeer with a Bolex 16mm camera) features high-speed product shots, graphics and an animated end logo.
Using their Philips Spirit DataCine, Tape House Digital Film transferred the 16mm negative at 2K resolution to data (10-bit FIDO files). Those files were then sent to Charlex in New York, which used Discreet Logic’s Flame to remove the dirt artifacts produced by shooting high-speed 16mm, erase a rig, and animate the logo. Meanwhile, Tape House Digital Film, employed Macintosh-driven Photoshop software to animate the title. The final pieces were assembled with Silicon Graphics equipment and proprietary software, and then shot out to 35mm negative with a Management Graphics Solitaire Film Recorder.
Since the Philips Spirit DataCine offers data transfer capabilities, Tape House Digital Film could transpose the 16mm negative as if it were a regular video telecine session, with traditional color-correction and dirt-removal tools. "If we hadn’t done it this way, an optical would have been done to blow the footage up to 35mm, which would have increased the grain dramatically rig and dirt removal would have been virtually impossible," explains Schloss. "And if we had scanned it, there would have been no color correction. When you scan motion picture negative in a digital film scanner, the idea is that whatever is on the negative is what you end up with on the computer file. There’s no ability within that process to change how that film looks." Instead, as Schloss notes, the scanned material would have been assigned to a digital workstation, where color correction is a much more time-consuming and expensive process.
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