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Can someone explain how a movie is transferred to dvd?...

post #1 of 16
2/7/06 at 8:07am
Thread Starter 
I read in another thread that movie go to Telecine suites to do the transfer. Can someone explain how a movie gets transfered? Is this where the clean and fix problems in the film?

Thanks!
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post #2 of 16
2/7/06 at 8:20am
The feature film gets transferred to video usually these days in the hi-def format. From this high def tape all the the down converts can be made and from those come the dvds. Depending on the film format there may be several high def aspect ratio versions.
Cleanup for dirt and scratchs can be hardware based and done real time or software based and done later at a restoration workstation. It all depends on the facility.

The time to do a xfer depends on the movie and budget. Sometimes you can crank out a feature in a day and sometimes they spend weeks tweaking every little thing.
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post #3 of 16
2/7/06 at 10:29am
A typical procedure would be as follows:

The film reels are mounted, one at a time, onto a "flying-spot scanner". A more-or-less conventional film-feed mechanism moves the film, one frame at a time, across a glass plate; a swiftly-moving spot of light scans the image, and the light which passes through is split into 3 primary colours [Red, Green, Blue] and picked up by photosensitive elements. At this stage, colour and black/white balance can be corrected, by changing the gain on the photosensors. The three primary-colour signals are, typically, then matrixed to produce the "YUV" signals needed for video, converted into a standard video signal, and recorded to video tape — ordinarily digital tape, and often high-definition. Sometimes the primary-colour signals are stored as "4k" RGB on hard drives, depending on how the film was scanned.

At this point, it is possible to take digital video and go through and apply different filters and techniques to it, with the intent of cleaning up scratches and so forth. Whatever else is done, the next step is typically to perform MPEG-II compression at Standard Definition resolution, and record the result onto DLT, a special kind of video tape which is matched to DVD in its properties. This tape is then given to the DVD Authoring people, who insert chapter stops and design menus and all that, and then the whole result is burned to a special "authoring" DVD-R and shipped off to the pressing plant for replication.

This is an extremely simplified view of the process, but perhaps it will tell you what you want to know.
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post #4 of 16
2/7/06 at 12:01pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
This is an extremely simplified view of the process

Geez, I feel like Joe Sixpack when explaining the benefits of widescreen over pan & scan....completely clueless.

Seriously, thanks for the info.
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post #5 of 16
2/7/06 at 1:56pm
Quote:
Can someone explain how a movie is transferred to dvd?

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post #6 of 16
2/7/06 at 2:11pm
I think you're misplacing the DLT in the process -- typically the movie would be delivered to the authoring house (sometimes called a compression-and-authoring house) on a D-5 videotape. The authoring house would then add interactivity to the program, including various special features and creation of the menus pointing to them, and only at the tail end of the process would all of the content, including the movie, finally be encoded to MPEG-2 (the bitrate at which this takes place will probably be affected by the total amount of content that has to be crammed onto the disc).

As a final step, the authored image of the actual disc would be recorded to a DLT (digital linear tape), which is then delivered to the replication facility where it is used to create "glass masters" from which the final DVDs will eventually be stamped.

-bf-
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post #7 of 16
2/7/06 at 3:30pm
I could well have gotten things out of place. I understand, anyway, that glass masters are now quite often made from recorded discs, for CDs and DVDs both, instead of from master tapes [Sony PCM-F1, anybody?].
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post #8 of 16
2/7/06 at 4:11pm
Too funny Greg!
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post #9 of 16
2/7/06 at 5:56pm
LOL. Glad somebody liked it.
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post #10 of 16
2/7/06 at 7:41pm
Thread Starter 
very funny Greg. After some further reasearch. I have found the facility that creates the pan & scan disk....

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post #11 of 16
2/8/06 at 6:42am
Yes, my knowledge of the whole process is a few years out of date. When I was following the business closely, replicators were still tending to grouse a bit about taking delivery of content on DVD-R, but it sure simplified matters for the folks making the disc.

The other thing that's changing is, like all other post-production processes, the film-to-DVD process is becoming less "tapecentric" and more "datacentric". Meaning elements at various stages of the process that used to exist as actual tapes that you could hold on your hand are now data files living on servers and shooting around the interweb. I would expect that in some cases disc manufacturers aren't getting DLT tapes *or* recorded discs but instead just being fed disc images via FTP or some other secure online transfer.

Also worth noting is that because studios are starting to transfer their films to data at 4K (meaning approx. 4000 lines of horizontal resolution), the masters that DVDs are being created from are of higher quality than ever before. It used to be that an HD transfer (approx. 2K resolution, or 1920x1080) was the gold standard for DVD masters. Now that we're entering the realm of HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc, it's 4K masters that will provide the best sources for HD content.
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post #12 of 16
2/8/06 at 7:22am
How is the MPEG2 compression performed? Is it a special hardware box designed specifically for authoring professional DVDs, or is it a very expensive software MPEG2 encoder designed to squeeze out as much quality for each Mb/s used?
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post #13 of 16
2/8/06 at 7:55am
And what about the audio transfer? Are theatrical mixes transferred directly to DVD or is remixing typically done?
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post #14 of 16
2/8/06 at 8:39am
Also, as a side note, while the Rank-Cintel flying-spot scanner was the peak of the "old guard" for telecine machines, the Philips Spirit Datacine has rapidly become very popular.

The Datacine has a gentle film transport that, unlike in a projector, the film never "stops" in the gate. The Datacine's "gate" is a backlit slot; on the other side is a 4k X 3 CCD array (red, green, blue) in a line array. The film moves past and it reads out 4k x 14bit/pixel/channel at 12fps - completely saturating two parallel Fibre Channel connections.

Compression to DVD is generally done "off-line" in software. High end software compression systems can do faster than real-time compression.

Leo Kerr
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post #15 of 16
2/24/06 at 10:45pm
Mark said:

And what about the audio transfer? Are theatrical mixes transferred directly to DVD or is remixing typically done?


dr.sound replies:
It really is a question of time and budget. Many do get remixed, but most don't. What is inportant is if it is remixed or rebalanced for DVD the
Re-Recording Mixer who originally mixed the Film should either do it or at least overseee it. This many times isn't possible. This can become very frustrating having some other Mixer rebalance or change your mix because he/ she wants to .
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post #16 of 16
2/25/06 at 11:19am
Marti, can you do us all a favor?

Just what is the role of the re-recording mixer?

In my mind, you have the on-set recordist, the orchestra recordist, foley recordist, et cetera all recording their bits and pieces. Then you have, theoretically under the guidance of the sound-designer, the guy who makes the mix. Then a re-recording mixer? Or are you the one who takes all the thousands of elements and makes the final 1-8 track final master?

Leo Kerr
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