ZDNet: Digitizing the analog film process: Why is this taking so long?

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December 19, 2016|Steve Tobenkin||

From ZDNet

http://www.zdnet.com/article/digitization-of-the-analog-film-process/

Digitizing the analog film process: Why is this taking so long?

Digital video is a major driver of storage growth, but it has yet to fully replace film – an analog medium – in many feature films. The holdup? We’re replacing human expertise with metadata – which means defining the digital process much more exactly than we ever did with film.
Robin Harris

By Robin Harris for Storage Bits | December 16, 2016 – 14:50 GMT (06:50 PST) | Topic: Innovation

Defining digital

There is an immense amount of work going in the industry to bring the analog world of film into the digital age. For one example, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences – the folks behind the Oscars – has developed ACES, the Academy Color Encoding System. The goal is to define every aspect of a digital video image so they can be documented and “the look” reproduced.

This is more complicated than it might seem. According to the ACES website:

“ACES is becoming the industry standard for managing color.From image capture through editing, VFX, mastering, public presentation, archiving and future remastering, ACES ensures a consistent color experience that preserves the filmmaker’s creative vision. In addition to the creative benefits, ACES addresses and solves a number of significant production, post-production and archiving problems that have arisen with the increasing variety of digital cameras and formats in use”

Consider that a digital production may use a half dozen different cameras, with different sensors and file types, and integrate visual effects (VFX) from several sources, edited on multiple platforms, and then compressed with a variety of codecs for delivery on everything from IMAX screens to smartphones. It’s a complex task, one that used to be handled on film by the tech printing the film positives.

Read the whole article here: http://www.zdnet.com/article/digitization-of-the-analog-film-process/