Roughly four months after it opened its doors downstairs from Soho Post and Graphics, Soho Digital Film has introduced a new solution for transferring video to film.

Brian Hunt, special projects manager at Glenex, the parent company of Soho Post and Soho Digital Film, says the software, which has been in development for 10 years, is a unique proprietary solution to seamlessly transferring video to film. ‘We’re transferring to film with no noticeable artifacts,’ says Hunt. ‘The point is for someone to watch it and not know it was transferred, but to just say it’s good film.’

Soho Digital Film opened its doors in September of 1996 as a service facility for scanning film, outputting and transferring. Hunt says the system addresses the 30 to 24 fps frame rate, the key to the task.

‘Changing the frame rate is the basic secret of taking video to film,’ says Hunt. ‘Because of up-resing there’s lots of different types of algorithms that could be used to generate the bigger resolution frame, but the real key is generating the 24 frames.’

Material from a wide range of video formats is transcoded to D1 and stored on a 10-bit digital video disc recorder connected to a Silicon Graphics workstation. File transfers can then be done directly into the sgi to manipulate images.

Hunt says the original patent on the software’s motion-detection technology was issued in 1988, and actual programming and testing of the software has taken place since the shop opened in September.

Hunt wrote the specifications for the software with a veteran freelance programming expert as well as incorporating some of the image processing technology used at Colorization, where Hunt had previously served as technical director. He says the next generation of the software is already in the works. TI