Weaving is a wonderful thing if you’re making a rug. It’s not cool if you’re driving home late at night. It’s downright annoying if you’re transferring film.
In film-to-tape transfer, the weave is a small but noticeable shift on the screen, and is often caused by deviations in the transfer process. It’s most obvious when the shot is composited with other elements, from additional layers to electronic supers. For example, when a price graphic appears to "swim" over a product shot, the reverse is generally true: The product shot was not stabilized, causing it to weave beneath the graphic.
Earlier this year, Philips Digital Video Systems, Salt Lake City, introduced the SteadiScan Electronic Stabilization System to enhance the performance of the Spirit Datacine film scanner. The Digital Lab, a division of Sight Effects, Venice, Calif., that provides hardware and software for digital compositing, recently announced that it has become the first company in the U.S. to install and offer SteadiScan.
"It’s a solution to a problem that’s always existed," says Rudy Hassen, chief engineer/ partner at The Digital Lab. "Even the best telecines ever built have weave [in the transfer] that isn’t in the original film. In the old days, when a client shot with a pin-registered camera, they put the film on a pinned optical printer and everything stayed aligned. Today, there are no pins to align the film on the gates. They use pinch rollers like those on videotape decks."
SteadiScan offers a solution that is both electronic and digital. The process uses a high-resolution CCD camera mounted on the Spirit to create a graphic representation of the film’s negative sprocket holes. The image is then viewed on a computer monitor. The system precisely measures the sprocket hole’s shape, size and position, and corrects any minute vertical or horizontal deviations automatically by feeding an offset back into the Spirit.
For now, speeds of up to six frames per second can be achieved with perforation-related stabilization, which is close to non-real time film scanning devices. Real-time stabilization is on the horizon, according to Hassen, who by the end of the year expects to take delivery on an upgrade that will allow for use of the SteadiScan at all speeds and resolutions. "We’ve already purchased the upgrade and we’re` ready to go. If we get it on a Monday, we’ll be using it on Monday," he says.
Practical Uses
The Digital Lab, which acquired SteadiScan in the spring—the company purchased the Spirit in January—has already used the attachment on parts of several projects, although Hassen was not at liberty to disclose specifics. Recently, the company used SteadiScan to complete a campaign for a western utility company that Hassen could not discuss at press time, as the campaign hadn’t yet broken. "The first project we completed [with the SteadiScan] involved several high-resolution locked shots of office settings with dozens of splits [which refer to the process of marrying one shot to another] that were designed to be repositioned later," recalls Hassen. "If there’s a guy sitting in a chair and there’s a coffee pot, a desk, a copier and another guy and all these things are split. … If eight things are weaving even slightly, you’re going to see it."
In that situation, the standard operating procedure would normally be the same as it’s always been: Fix it in post. Hassen has a problem with that—and a solution as well. "Flame will stabilize [the individual elements], but it’s not the same and it’s time-consuming. It’s much easier to have it stable from the beginning—and if you can do it, why not do it?"
The issue of time, of course, is also the issue of money. Depending on the platform the producer is working on, SteadiScan appears to promise significant savings. For example, if 20 elements for an effects-intensive commercial take 10 minutes each to stabilize in a Flame suite, that’s over three hours—and several thousand dollars—saved if the stabilization is accomplished in the transfer.
"The cost savings is a bonus. It’s one less thing you have to do in post," Hassen emphasizes. "The picture’s stable [at that point] so there’s no question of ‘We don’t have time to stabilize it, it’s not moving that much so let’s live with it.’ You don’t have to make that decision anymore."
Extra Help
Since Philips introduced the Spirit Datacine (which is capable of transferring either 525 or 625 formats, and has both HDTV and high-speed 2K data options available for future upgrades) in ’96, several options have been made available for improving its performance. In addition to the SteadiScan, the add-ons, all of which are available for retro-fitting to existing systems, include Vista Vision for six or eight perforation scanning, extended color ranges, new scan effects and new high-definition and DTV outputs.
Hassen calls SteadiScan a radical but essential adjunct to the Spirit itself. "The Spirit is inherently stable, and three years ago it would have been universally acceptable alone," he maintains.
"I think people may look on it as an odd system, and it is expensive," says Hassen of the approximately $80,000 component. "But the reality of it is, Philips has done a great job and the thing works. When you’re talking about the cost of the Spirit, some people think the additional cost of SteadiScan is expensive. We think it’s necessary."
