With more productions becoming aware of the benefits of posting film-originated material on video, there arises the challenge of ensuring a proper transfer back to film for release prints. That’s where media services provider Sonic Foundry comes in.

One film that reaped the benefit of Sonic Foundry’s know-how is Touching Wild Horses – a family feature coproduced by Toronto’s Chesler/Perlmutter Productions, Germany’s Apollo Media and the U.K.’s Grosvenor Park, which screened at the recent Toronto International Film Festival. Directed by Toronto’s Eleanore Lindo and starring Jane Seymour, the film tells the story of how an orphaned boy comes into his own when sent to live on a remote island with an aunt who studies the area’s wild horses. Montreal’s Covitec, a subsidiary of Hollywood’s Technicolor, performed a blow-up of the movie, the original post-production on which was done at Deluxe in Toronto and London.

The film was shot on 16mm and the producers decided, for cost effectiveness, to edit and finish on DigiBeta tape, scanning back to film when post was complete. The problem arises when the 3:2 pulldown, which essentially bumps up film’s 24 frames per second to the 30fps of video, becomes disrupted through the editing process, which would mar a film transfer with visual artifacts.

In going from film to video, a movie goes from being frame-based to field-based (two fields make up one frame). Sonic Foundry’s proprietary C2 (Constant Cadence) system, operating out of its Los Angeles office, was used on the project to find where the editing disruptions occurred and where they needed to be adjusted. C2 restored the proper 3:2 pulldown while ensuring only the redundant fields introduced during the film-to-tape transfer were removed on the road back to 24fps. The 24fps version was then recorded onto DigiBeta tape, fed into Covitec’s scanner and ultimately output to film.

Sonic Foundry originally developed C2 to allow the U.S. Fox network to make its programs – edited on tape at 30fps – compatible with its digital transmission systems, which are based at 24fps.

‘Then we started seeing the demand for output to film, which is even more sophisticated than what we were doing for Fox,’ says Louise Cote, director marketing and sales at Sonic Foundry’s Toronto facility. ‘So we’ve refined the technology further to meet the demands of this market, enabling things like this film to go to the Toronto film festival. It saved Covitec’s client the cost of finishing the show in film and they still ended up with a great-looking product.’

Sonic Foundry is headquartered in Madison, WI. Its six-year-old L.A. office, servicing upwards of 80 TV series and many movies this year, is wired with an amalgam of its own software, off-the-shelf hardware and what Cote deems ‘secret sauce’ to provide the C2 solution. She adds that the Toronto facility is now up and running to provide the C2 service.

-www.sonicfoundry.com