Improving the Quality of Film to Digital Transfers for Digital Cinema

High quality on screen picture performance is the ultimate technical goal of Digital Cinema. Tests have been performed projecting movies from standard and High Definition (HD) telecine transfers that were intended for home video and HD broadcast applications. The results of these have fallen short of the image quality needed for large screen theatrical projection. — This paper reports on work that has been undertaken to improve the image quality by altering the source characteristics through adjustments the telecine transfer process. The work is based on using a display with identical characteristics to the ultimate theatrical projector to perform the transfers. This has resulted in transfer images with a different quality to the “standard” transfers using CRT monitors as the transfer target. — The image was improved by concentrating on the treatment of the following: gamma, black and white crushing and clipping, colorimetry and digital enhancement. The results have been remarkable, as will be demonstrated in the presentation following this paper.

Published

1998-10

Content type

Original Research

DOI

10.5594/M00296

ISBN

978-1-61482-929-4