Re: [ProgSoc] Film and PCs (was: physical to electronic)

[Christian Kent <ckent@nospam.socs.uts.EDU.AU>]

On Tue, 1 Dec 1998, Roland Turner wrote:

> > Hardware today is basically up to the stage where it can cope with all
> > non-high definition television at full frame/field rates.  ("Film" is
> > always on video whenever you hold it, and will be using the full scope of
> > the TV standard).
> Talking about film and PCs in the same sentence is a bit of a joke. From

Except I suppose that you can ignore any interlaced scanning issues  :)

> memory, to do (cinematic) film requires 4000*2000*48bit (i.e.
> ~32MB/frame) @nospam.24 frames/sec (i.e. ~768MB/sec).

Hey, I said that film uses all of TV's capacity, not the other way around!
You're welcome to try to throw every film cell through a heavy-duty
scanner, and convert that to some sort of digital video sequence or even
output to PAL (which would look really nice).  But every film today is
simply copied to PAL tape, and most people don't seem to care, what with
movies on video and pay TV getting more common.  If you've got the film on
video already, then you're likely to end up using the TV-quality copy
aren't you?

Anyway, the resolution and bit-depth figures you quoted can be a bit
rubbery, especially depending on the era of the film.  Go back beyond 1990
and there's a subtle reduction in the "quality" of most films.  1960, and
1930s, it happens again.  And of course there's B&W, which today is better
than it was the first time around.  Besides which, there's a lot of noise
on many films even today, that you're just inclined to ignore because
"it's a movie".

> HDTV is comparable. IMAX is much bigger, and cannot currently be done
> digitally at real-time, full-resolution.

I went and saw a 3D HDTV demonstration at the Powerhouse Museum a few
weeks ago, and sitting in the mini-cinema it was difficult to make out any
scan-lines at all, just like a film.  (Except it was at 60 fields/sec).
Imax is going to be a real challenge, for the next few years anyway.

CK.

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