Cinnafilm makes the Analog Digital for Cinemas

If you’ve ever seen or worked much in video production, you’ll quickly find yourself overwhelmed at the sheer volume of equipment they carry around.  What you would think should be a simple process of translating a video from one physical format to another turns into a lengthy drawn out process of hundreds of thousands (sometimes millions) of dollars of hardware dedicated to reading formats, scaling, transcoding, and writing back.  It’s not uncommon for a studio to take their analog reels and prepare them for digital distribution, and find themselves overwhelmed with the process.  Imagine this:

• Digitize the film into the computer
• Clean it up (removing dust, scratches, and various other side-effects of the analog space)
• Pipe it back out onto an Analog line to some unknown device
• Unknown device scales it to the desired format (DVD, BluRay, iPad, iPod, NetFlix, Hulu, etc) which means physically scaling it to the right resolution and possibly retiming it for the proper framerate
• Unknown device pumps it back into the computer
• Computer transcodes it into the proper container format

And tada you’re done!  The entire process took 3 analog transfers (From film, to Device, and back from Device), and has to be repeated (probably using a different specialized piece of conversion equipment) for each of the many digital distribution formats in use.  Just off the top of my head there’s DVD, BluRay, SD television, HD television, NetFlix, Hulu, and the various digital cinema distribution channels in use.

It really is a nightmare of a system.  But a solution is coming, care of a small company presenting at GTC called ‘Cinnafilm‘.  They’ve created a pure digital system capable of everything the analog system did, and doing it faster.

Cinnafilm got their start with the ARRI folks, developing GPU-accelerated software for cleaning up and working with the massive framesets that came from their professional film scanning equipment.  Realizing they needed to branch out in order to remain profitable, they’ve begun developing their technology for other studios.  With a GPU-accelerated computer, they’ve build a collection of algorithms available to all the major players in the industry (for a nominal fee, of course) that can take digitized film and perform pretty effective dust-removal in real-time.  Then, you can use their proprietary motion-vector system, which analyzes differences between each frame to discover how the various objects and cameras are moving with sub-pixel accuracy, and reconstruct the necessary frames to retime it to any framerate you like.  Run the footage through their noise removal algorithms and artifical film-grain algorithms, and then you can transcode it in near real-time back to any specifications you need.

Let me explain a bit more.  The dust removal is nice, but not frankly the big deal.  Sure, it takes what normally would be a full-time job for a team of cheap-up artists and turns it into a few hours of touchup after the automated process, but that’s not all that impressive frankly.  The truly impressive part is the frame retiming.   In the demonstration they took a scene of a horseback rider slowly trotting through a sun-bleached desert, with all of the hard cracks visible in the sand.  With typical digital retiming algorithms like what’s included in FinalCut or Premiere there was an obvious stutter when converting from 30fps to 24fps.  In the conversion, every group of 5 frames (at 30fps) was being resampled to 4 frames (at 24fps), which led to a very visible “heartbeat” as the fine details in the cracks blurred but snapped back into focus every 4 frames.  It was very unsettling, and would frankly cause a headache after prolonged exposure.  The Cinnafilm system analyzes the motion of the frames and reconstructs the 3 intermediate frames based on deforming neighboring frames, while results in seamless motion identical to what is in the old analog hardware.

The last part many people take for granted.  Afterall, you can hook up any video camera and pull in video and transcode it to any format you like on your computer, right?  Plenty of GPU accelerated options exist already for this.  Cinnafilm’s response to this: They do it wrong.  The major studios and some incredibly exacting standards for how these compression systems should work, down to individual pixel accuracy, and none of the major available ones stand up to scrutiny.  The reason the consumer-grade ones are so fast is because they take so many shortcuts, eliminating steps and processing because 99% of people won’t notice the difference.  The major studios do notice, and that’s why they keep the millions of dollars of old analog equipment around.  It’s a classic case of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.

Cinnafilm’s solution is available in SDK’s that allow any studio to integrate it into their existing proprietary suits for video conversion.  Already in use at a few studios, these studios are quickly realizing the benefits of using a pure-digital solution that can convert their old reels into multiple digital formats in a 10th of the time and even less of the cost.

Cinnafilm is also working with some major players to bring their systems into even more markets.  In particular, several european studios are customers due to the transition away from 8mm film, which Cinnafilm can do a great job of digitizing it, and replacing the film grain with something closer to 35mm, bringing it up to par for modern cinema standards. If you’re familiar with some of the big names in film like Quantel (color grading) and Harmonic’s Rhozet (transcoding), they’ve worked with them to create dedicated systems for noise-reduction and retiming that not only make them faster, but fix several problems like cadence irregularities that come from editing.

Cinnafilm's Denoising

And it’s not just for digitizing film.  Take your 4k video, render your CG elements, and slap them together in your usual compositing tools and the CG elements stick out like a sore thumb.  In steps Cinnafilm to fix it: Remove the film grain from the video, composite in the CG elements, re-create new film grain on the resulting frames and voila.. You’ld never know it was doctored.  Even better, just about any video will compress better once you remove the filmgrain, as most compression algorithms dedicate much of their time to dealing with the high-frequency noise in the frames.  Remove the noise and your videos will compress faster and smaller.

Cinnafilm sells the technology under the Dark Energy name, and offers a few different options for purchasing.  For all the details on the technology, be sure to visit their site.  And who knows, Cinnafilm was actively looking for new customers in fields like the military, surveillance, and reconnaisance.  Next time you see a security guard or police looking over that grainy surveillance footage, they might be using Cinnafilm products to do it.