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35mm Original Film and Damaged Video Stand Side by Side in Sinatra Production | |
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SANTA CLARA, CALIFORNIA, December 15, 2003 — The designers and engineers at
Guava, a visual effects and design facility in New York, had a tall task –
making less-than-pristine 30-plus year-old video footage look visually
comparable to work print 35mm film when projected at up to 60 feet for the
theatrical stage production "Sinatra: His Voice. His World. His Way." The
varied footage of singer Frank Sinatra is part of a show that employs
sophisticated projection technology on large moveable panels to create 3D,
life-like images of Sinatra performing and moving around on stage.
The post-production solution came in a much different form than expected by the engineering folks at Guava: the Alchemist Platinum Ph.C standards converter from Snell & Wilcox. Nice Shoes, a sister company to Guava, makes extensive use of its Alchemist Platinum for high-end standards conversion, including HD upconversion and video to film processing. Guava Engineer Ari Zohar Klingman said he was initially convinced that a software-only solution would be the best way to change the timing of the material from 60 interlaced fields-per-second NTSC video to 24 progressively scanned frames-per- second 1080HD video. “When we ran footage through the Alchemist as a test, we were very surprised by the resulting picture quality from our several generations down, decades-old material,” said Klingman. “I never thought hardware would be able to make this old footage look so good.” The original NTSC footage arrived at Guava on Digital Betacam, but Klingman said that it was likely bumped up after originating on one-inch or Quad tape and going through several generations of analog. “We were very concerned how shocking it would look to go from high-resolution film to this low-quality SD video, especially when projected in 24p, and sized up to 60-feet tall.” And any artifacts created during upconversion would make the subsequent rotoscoping of Frank Sinatra’s image onto updated backgrounds even more challenging. “Any artifacts generated would have made isolating his outline very difficult,” explained Klingman. “When reducing 60 individual frames of movements to 24, you’re removing detail and can introduce temporal artifacts like motion blur. Drawing a line around a blur is next to impossible. We were extremely surprised by the minimal amount of artifacts introduced during this process. We expected so many, but saw so few.” Along with many of the film footage performances, the Guava crew also rotoscoped Sinatra’s image from two of the four video performances that made it into the show. The four songs in the show that came from the 70’s era video footage upconverted with the Alchemist Platinum were: “Come Fly with Me,” “That’s Life,” “Send in the Clowns,” and “Lost in the Stars.” Given the hurried, four-month production schedule, Klingman said the time saving Alchemist provided was essential. “With software-only, upconverting each five-minute song would have taken a full day. It took an hour per song with Alchemist.” |
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