movie conversion?

[b40588]

How are the existing movies like "Dirty Harry" being converted to the Blu Ray format? Is there some special prosses?

[Anthony P]

same as everyone. Most movies are shot and exist on film. With older films there might be a need for restoration, but once you have a film (called the film master) that is ready the next step is to scan it. The scanner takes a digital image of the film frame by frame and this creates the digital master. The digital master might be created at 2k,4k or 8k which defines the vertical resolution, this is not only for BD but for archiving as well. Then the movie is compressed and downscaled to be in 1080p on the disk.

[Bobby Henderson]

Movies on film are transferred to high definition using one of two processes. Older and less accurate telecine machines videotape the film strip while it's playing in real time. Newer systems slowly scan each film frame with a greater degree of accuracy. The scanned data is then processed via a "digital intermediate" to adjust color and digitally remove scratches, dirt, etc.

[Anthony P]

PS and I guess to answer the question you did not ask.

there are obvious different films and different quality. But the approximate digital resolution of film is higher then HD. That i why 8k is sometimes used for the digital master (1080p has 1920 which is slightly less then 2k)

[quexos]

You know what would be interesting ? A documentary on the whole process of transferring from film to digital master. I'd love to see the big machines they use for the transfer. It would be educational.

[Blue_Baron]

Originally Posted by quexos

You know what would be interesting ? A documentary on the whole process of transferring from film to digital master. I'd love to see the big machines they use for the transfer. It would be educational.

There's a short documentary on this process in the James Bond Blu-ray Collection Volume 1 (Dr. No) called 007: License to Restore. Scanning and restoration was done by a company called Lowry Digital Images:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lowry_Digital_Images

[Midnightsailor]

The short answer: The same way as newer films.

[Bobby Henderson]

You know what would be interesting ? A documentary on the whole process of transferring from film to digital master.

Just to throw in a couple of others besides Lowry...

...There's a good bit of detail about Fotokem and the steps they took to create the world's first 8K scan and digital intermediate on Baraka. They show some of the machinery in use.

The Godfather: The Coppola Restoration has a featurette on the bonus BD about the 4K scanning, restoration and DI work for the 3 movies. Again, you see a good bit of film scanning hardware and high end film restoration workstations in use. Steve Jobs would be kind of pissed to see these state of the art systems running Windows.

[Red Hood]

Are there any other good special features or videos that show more of the restoration process and talks about DI? I watched the Baraka one last night, it was interesting but was short and didn't get involved as I would have liked.