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Cineform Codec Quality
Hi.
I’m thinking of scanning my 16mm movie directly into Cineform 2k files at “Pixel Harvest” post house in Los Angeles. I have an extremely low budget project and this scan is fairly inexpensive. Has anyone done this? (or used the codec to edit HD) This seems too good to be true. Beautiful quality 2k files easily edited on a home PC in Premiere (using Raid drives, I suppose). I don’t even have to rent a deck for this or buy a hardware card (unless I want to output to tape). Can anyone verify this quality and ease of use? Cineform even claims that generational loss is minimal with this lossy codec. Is all this possible?
I further wonder if a 10bit scan of my negative really leaves adequate room for quality color timing. At Pixel Harvest, I was told that even though the negative is scanned flat, 10bit’s of color info at 2k will preserve “the full quality of the negative”. I have several poorly exposed shots which will need some serious tweaking. I’m trying to future proof my film. Am I dreaming?
Thanks. -
4 Replies
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I think you’d be pleasantly surprised.
The film “Dust to Glory” was not offlined…but onlined using CineForm Prospect at HD res (1920×1080) and taken out to film again. The response to the image quality has been very, very positive.
10 bit color depth won’t add detail of course, but once you start stretching or compressing grayscales for that poorly exposed footage, you have increments four times finer than 8 bit…1024 steps per channel with 10 bit vs. 256 with 8.
The codec is for real. 1. It’s a wavelet…a full screen transform, not a DCT using macroblocks like just about every other video codec that exists…therefore the “blocking” artifacts simply can’t happen. A full screen wavelet doesn’t have blocks. The other issue is variable bit rate based on the footage. This adds detail in high motion sections and saves data in relatively stagnant sections.
Any camera format that writes onto tape is (and needs to be) fixed data rate, so these formats do not have the flexibility to ramp the data footprint up and down like a VBR codec does…
I’ve been working with the CineForm codec for a variety of projects HDV (Aspect HD)to HDSDI (Propsect HD) and I handled and viewed some of the 2K content that CineForm has been working with…in my opinion, this may be the best performing motion image compression non-long GOP codec the industry has seen to-date.
Overall, I’d say that you’ll be happy with it…particularly if traditional video artifacts are the basis of your fear.
TimK,
Kolb Productions,
Creative Cow Host,
Author/Trainer
http://www.focalpress.com
http://www.classondemand.net -
Do you think that a traditional transfer, where the image is tweaked before it is laid down to tape would be any better than this flat film scan? (Perhaps all digital intermediate scans are done flat like this.) In your opinion, if you were doing your own 16mm film, would you consider this process as a future proofed and archival copy of your film?
Thanks. -
A film scan is definitely a notch above a traditional telecine job.
Basically in a telecine, you’re passing a film image over a HD video camera. Now in the case of a something like a Spirit, it’s actually a line-scan camera, where-as others, like Cintels, are flying spot scanners, but suffice to say, they are compromising quality for the speed of transfering your film at real-time.
Film-scans on the other-hand are truely that-a scan of the entire dynamic range of the film, from d-min to d-max, and are made to make as much of a digital replica of the film-frame as possible. In this case they have sacrificed speed for the highest quality available. Also there are no true 2K telecine’s (except for the Spirit 4K I believe). The Spirit 2K basically scans the film with the line-scan camera and digitally blows it up-but the camera that scanned the film is no different than what is inside the other “normal” Spirit telecine/datacine’s.
So yes, a film-scan of your film is going to be much higher quality than a normal telecine job. A film-scan to Cineform files is also going to be a top quality product that I think you will find very attractive for doing your own DI work, especially if you know what you’re doing in digital-to-film transfers (on the back end for distribution). And of course you have the added benefit of fitting your film on a simple RAID 0, not some behemoth of a drive array system needed to sustain the 250MB/s+ that 2K 4:4:4 RGB DPX files need. The only downside to Cineform right now might be the 4:2:2 compression format (when you want to compare it to a 4:4:4 RGB file), but I think the workflow enhancements make up for any of the down-sides, and again, the Cineform codec is extremely high quality to the point where I think you’d have a very hard time telling the difference.
For a back-up/archive, what I would do is trim your project (plus any out-takes/extras you think you might want in the future), and then archive it as DPX files if you are concerned about the long-range liability of your footage.
Hope this helps,
Jason Rodriguez
Virginia Beach, VA -
Thanks! Very Interesting. You sure you guys don’t work for cineform? (you don’t have to answer that)
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