How does hollywood transfer film to digital?

AlphaCine

AlphaCine

I worked on a UFO documentary 2003 and we had old UFO footage transfered from film stock to digital media by AlphaCine. www.alphacine.com I don't see that service listed today but it looks like they still do Motion film processing and tape to film. Cory
 
Man how painful the wait time must be to get the DI's of film. I always knew they used a scanner but still, its not like scanning a photo. I'm sure there is many passes done and put together to create the final master DI.

One thing I do know is that not everyone uses the 2k DI's to actually edit with. They use proxies for those DI's. The Coen Brothers used FCP with DVCPROHD 1080 proxies for their DI's for No Country. They edit the film then use an XML file to have the proper cuts made to go back out to film. Unless your in AVID and have the specific system to edit the 2k footage...everybody uses proxies nowadays I believe.

- Kyle
 
Oh boy, here goes...

I was a scanner/recorder operator on "O' Brother" back in the day, at Cinesite Hollywood (now laser Pacific).

Cinesite had two ways to digitize 35mm negative; the Spirit Datacine, a high end telecine that could scan in almost real time, and their Lightning 2 film scanners, which were very exotic machines that (slowly) scanned one frame at a time using a super expensive transport with the drum on a gas bearing to eliminate all vibration, etc.

As far as I know those machines have been retired. The North Light and Imagica scanners seem to be popular now. These scanners give the best image possible but still stop to scan each frame. I once had to perform an emergency re-scan for "Pearl Harbor" using the lightning scanner because a particular scene needed more fine gradation in the smoke, which the telecine could not capture at that time.

Recording back to film is done with very expensive laser recorders, and we're talking about fairly large lasers. Our scanners and laser recorders were in a class 10,000 clean room with positive air pressure and dedicated air conditioners to offset the heat the lasers generated. It seems like Arriflex has most of the laser recorder market these days.

Another method of recording digital images back to film is to use a high resolution military-spec CRT, which was monochrome. A color wheel would rotate to expose the red, green and blue channels one after the other, and there was a conventional Bell & Howell animation camera mounted on a riser photographing the image.

Celco makes most of those and they cost far less than a laser recorder. All of these can record to slow, fine grain IP stock so the o-neg (original camera negative) grain doesn't get combined with more grain in post. While laser recorders are the most popular, the CRT recorders have an advantage when it comes to recording star fields. I guess it's hard to throttle the laser intensity quickly enough to record those tiny specs. Of course all this has probably changed by now...

Our 65mm scanner used a CRT, because it was more flexible when it came to changing formats between 5perf, IMAX and so forth.

Some large digital effects houses have their own scanning/recording facilities. We used two Arris to record all of the Lord of the Rings films at Weta, and Sony, Digital Domain and ILM as well as a few others have their own imaging departments. It can be very complex, with LUTs (lookup tables) created regularly to compensate for variations in rawstock, computer monitor calibration and all that stuff.

Technicolor has a division that specializes in scanning and recording, and Modern Vid Film, Pac Title, EFilm and Laser Pacific (all in the Hollywood area) also have scanners/recorders. It's still pretty expensive but it is also possible to maintain the full resolution of 35mm film if you have the space to store the data. We would scan some demanding shots at 4k when the detail was really needed. Wide shots of the Titanic come to mind...

It's quite a science and a loooong ways from pointing a camera at a screen... (which I still do for my old home movies 8^0 )

So now the mystery is solved!

Cheers,
Glen
 
starts with a low quality scan called an offline transfer, the editor does his thing, they get the timecodes and keycodes, then they edit the film, cutting as logged, then they do an online transfer high quality, where they do the color grading and such, then out to film.
 
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