eastman Kodak has launched a new post-production system which combines film’s much-valued high-information level with the ease of electronic (video) editing and image manipulation.

The Cineon Digital Film System was developed because high-definition television post-production systems were not deemed satisfactory electronic intermediaries for the posting of film.

The essential elements of Kodak’s Cineon consist of a ccd film scanner for digitizing film images, a digital film workstation for interactive image processing and a powerful gas laser film recorder for recording digital images back to film.

In a presentation entitled ‘High Resolution Post-Production/Evolution in the Digital Compositing Suite,’ C. Bradley Hunt, a senior executive with Kodak in the u.k. and a pioneer in Cineon’s research and development, explains the impetus behind the new system. Hunt says the demand for digital film post-production systems and tools, capable of working at multiple resolution-levels, from D1 video to hdtv to film, has grown because 35mm film continues to be the medium of choice internationally for motion pictures, quality television programming and national brand tv commercials.

According to Hunt, special effects for television production increasingly are being post-produced digitally at film resolutions.

He says producers are adopting this approach so that their special effects scenes can be cut in with the original film photography in order to achieve a complete film master for future tv (hd) syndication. It is also useful when tv commercials are destined for both the small screen and theaters.

Def not high enough

Hunt says high-definition video systems were initially promoted as being capable of performing this application, but the film and television production industry has now come to the conclusion that higher resolution systems are required.

Following the advent of hdtv telecines and film recorders, Hunt says the post-production market discovered hdtv did not have the spatial or color resolution to transparently manipulate 35mm motion film images. The market demand was for a higher resolution post system capable of converting film images to data, manipulating the data electronically, and then converting back to film without any sacrifice of film’s huge information levels.

In order to preserve the film quality throughout the Cineon posting process, each frame of 35mm full-aperture film is scanned in at 3112 lines (4096 pixels x 10 bits per color rgb) at a rate of three seconds per frame. The Cineon workstation is based on the Silicon Graphics multiprocessor Onyx Graphics Supercomputer using Cineon proprietary software. The system’s manipulation capacity includes paint, compositing, the building of special effects scenes and real-time previewing on a monitor.

Digital negative

Once the manipulation stage is complete, the digital images can then be sent to the laser film recorder for output on film.

The resulting digital negative closely resembles the quality of the original camera negative, with the added option of downloading to whatever video format is required, including digital or hdtv.

While film is clearly recognized as the highest quality imaging medium in existence, and is fully future-proof, Hunt says its biggest weakness has traditionally been in the area of image manipulation.

And while the D1 format and disk-based video compositing hardware have done much to eliminate the use of optical printing techniques for the post-production of tv commercials, Hunt says 525/625-line video systems come up short when the required output is film, or feature film special effects.

In the post-production world, Hunt says the powerful general-purpose computer platforms which are beginning to replace dedicated black-box hardware used in video-compositing suites, combined with a growing variety of software applications, permit a facility to work at any resolution, from full film to 525/625 D1 video.

In Europe, Hunt says video post-producers are starting to post commercials at full film resolution in order to create a down-sampled D1 video master for tv and/or a film master for theaters.

By changing software, he says, a facility can easily configure its suites based on projects currently in-house.

Crossing over from digital editing to digital film compositing to 3D computer animation is increasingly easy as operators learn how to work in a scalable environment and at the appropriate resolution. This is determined by the resolution level of the original material, the level of required interactivity and the resolution of the designated output.

Hunt says software-based systems also allow post-production companies to differentiate themselves from the competition by combining packages and writing their own program extensions.

In the fall of 1992, Kodak opened a fully owned subsidiary called the Cinesite Digital Film Centre in Burbank, Calif., a beta-testing location for the Cineon Digital Film System. This facility was the location used for the highly praised digital restoration of the Walt Disney classic Snow White.

A number of Canadian film producers, including the National Film Board, are currently evaluating Cineon software and other digital film post-production systems.

Pixel Magic, a unit of OSC/ Freeze Frame, an optical house in Toluca Lake, Calif., is the first customer site to acquire a million-dollar Cineon digital film workstation.

(this article is based on a paper by C. Bradley Hunt of Eastman Kodak, London, Eng., submitted to the Organizing Committee of the International Workshop on hdtv ’94. The workshop is scheduled to take place Oct. 26-28 in Turin, Italy this fall.)