American Cinematographer - May 2007 - 88

Before-and-after images from the feature Zodiac provide a rough illustration of the image enhancement that DTS provided for a scene in which inspector Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) and his partner search the trailer of a suspect. Enhancing Zodiac by Noah Kadner Deep into postproduction on Zodiac, which Harris Savides, ASC captured with Thomson Viper high-definition video cameras, director David Fincher decided some of the images needed to be enhanced. To accomplish this, post supervisor Peter Mavromates turned to DTS Digital Cinema in Burbank, a company that specializes in digital film restoration. “The work consisted of some up-rezzing of the 1920x1080 anamorphic images from the Viper, which we’d squeezed slightly to a 2.35:1 frame,” Fincher told AC last month. “By interpolating sub-pixel image information from multiple frames before and after each individual frame, DTS was able to able to up-rez and slightly sharpen the footage.” Mike Inchalik, vice president of product-line strategy for DTS, recalls, “It started when they began to see high noise levels and the occasional artifact in some of their shots. They were seeing noise in low-light conditions, dead pixels, and ringing patterns. The Viper is a terrific camera, but as with all digital sensors, it’s hard to make [the image] perfect. David’s goal was to achieve a sharper picture with more detail. We have a lot of experience restoring older films that suffer from loss of detail 88 May 2007 because of the many stages of duping the film elements. That same technology applies well to today’s digital productions.” DTS Digital’s content-services group was originally founded as Lowry Digital Images by John Lowry. Lowry began his restoration career by cleaning and enhancing live broadcasts from the Apollo 16 and 17 moon landings in the 1970s. The company has restored more than 120 feature films, including Casablanca and the original Star Wars trilogy. For its image processing, DTS uses a cluster of 600 Apple Power Mac G5 computers networked together and running proprietary software. The work is supervised by project managers who are imaging and computer specialists. “The core of the process is comparing images,” says Robin Melhuish, the company’s director of production. “In film you have many sequential images, and you may not find the detail you need on one image, but it may be there on subsequent or preceding images. If you do a lot of fairly complicated math, you can take that detail and apply it to every image. Because we’re not in the business of live broadcasting, we don’t need to be concerned about doing things in real time. Consequently, our math can be a lot more sophisticated and subtle. Our processing times can be as much as several minutes per frame, but then we use a multiple-cluster supercomputer so the overall output is quite quick.” DTS offers a variety of imageenhancement and repair services for today’s films. Some of the problems routinely addressed include excessive video noise or film grain, sensor and lens artifacts, flicker, scratches and emulsion damage. “For example,” says Inchalik, “we can pull focus on material shot out of focus. We can also fix isolated shots with high noise, or film fogged by an X-ray scanner at airport security.” On Zodiac, Fincher’s original plan to enhance a handful of scenes was ultimately expanded. “We were in the ‘director’s cut’ period, and we initially sent DTS some bluescreen visualeffects plates that Digital Domain was working with,” recalls Mavromates. “We later sent them some additional effects, and then we made the decision to do the whole show with DTS.” Zodiac’s data-centric post workflow turned out to be a perfect match for DTS. The filmmakers completed an offline edit using Apple’s Final Cut Pro in DVCPRO HD. The online version was created by assembling the original 1920X1080 10-bit 4:4:4 DPX raw data files derived from the Viper using a custom conform application created by Andreas Wacker. Opticals were created using Autodesk’s Fire. The DPX files Zodiac images courtesy of DTS Digital Cinema.

American Cinematographer - May 2007

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