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In the early 2000s, were TV shows shot on film using different scanners than feature films going through DI's? Film-originated TV shows (and HD transfers of optically-finished films and shows) from that era display a chunkier grain structure/noise and clipped highlights/shadows.  But I haven't noticed that feature films shot on film that went through DIs from that era look like that.

Also, were features in that era scanned in 2K, or were they scanned in 4K for a 2K finish?

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Posted (edited)

4k existed in the late 90s, but was mostly used for VFX and specific shots rather than complete features. I think there were quite a few workflows depending on the post/VFX house, but mostly it was 2k at that time. A big part of this was the processing requirements to work in 4k. A lot of stuff was done on lower res proxy footage then the media would be replaced with the high res version for final render. But managing a 4k feature in 2000, when a terabyte was still a lot of data, was a challenge. 

Most quick-turn transfers were still telecine, so they would have been color corrected on the fly during the transfer, and would have gone to SD or HD videotape. File based capture from telecine was mostly to very expensive DDRs at that time, if it was done at all - mostly you'd go to tape then have to capture that tape to a file in a separate pass. It wasn't until a few years later that you could (very clunkily) hook up a capture board like an AJA Kona or an early Blackmagic Decklink and have it record to a file as if it were a deck (and there were only one or two apps that could do this, I think). Back then everything was still tape-centric, and there weren't a lot of options for machine-controllable digital recorders that ran on desktop hardware. It was mostly proprietary (and very expensive) stuff. 

Edited by Perry Paolantonio
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Posted

Yeah almost everything in that time was scanned on the SDC2000/2001 "Classic" Spirit to 1080x1920 HD. The Spirit would be connected to a DaVinci 2K or Pogle color corrector and recorded to D5 or HDCam/HDCamSR tape. There was also the Cintel DSX or ITK Millenium scanners but they were fewer compared to the Spirit.

'Oh Brother where art Thou" was run on a SDC Spirit with Pogle to a DVS Clipster at 2K and that was very high end DI for that time.

By the early to mid 1990's 4K pin registered scans were available from scanners like the Kodak Genesis or Quantel Domino system, scan times were 30s -3min per frame. They had massive fridge sized disk arrays in the mid 1990's for VFX shot stuff that were maybe a 1/4 or 1/2 TB of storage. I remember seeing a Quantel system at NYU in 95 or 96 that was a complete 4K scanner / VFX system / 4K CRT recorder for that VFX pipeline and it was massive and I think it had 500gb of storage.

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Posted (edited)
12 hours ago, Ravi Kiran said:

In the early 2000s, were TV shows shot on film using different scanners than feature films going through DI's?

Yes correct, very different. The entire process is described here:

https://www.adapttvhistory.org.uk/16mm/

This is how a TV telecine works:

That's a negative on the telecine, but when they were in full use the normal thing would be that the TV studio would have a 16mm TV print for the show that is printed specially for telecine transfer (low-contrast and without subtitles or things they want to add electronically to the broadcast tape). The entire color correction is done by the telecine technician as you see above, and I believe they were actually called "colorists". They transfer the film to broadcast tape (NTSC or PAL), and the broadcast tape can be edited separately after transfer. For example you could remove a scene to make it shorter to fit a 30 minute time-slot with all the commercials you're packing into it. Another issue with TV shows is that by 1987 in the US they preferred to edit their shows on tape and not on film creating the problem that their film-shot TV shows then had to be standards converted from NTSC to PAL resulting in aberrant quality.

To address this specific issue the DEFT (Digital Electronic Film Transfer) device was invented. You can read the patent the Snell & Wilcox operator's manual and also see the Doom9 thread and 1990 New Scientist article. Official launch was either 1989 or 1990 and they cost about $500,000. There are DVDs, VHS, and LaserDiscs from that time that used DEFTs to convert NTSC to PAL and it leaves behind a very distinctive artefact pattern. Unlike what's described in the patent but is described in New Scientist, the PAL tape deck was modified to run at 47.952Hz instead of 50Hz, about 4% slower and in-sync with the NTSC deck, achieving the 4% speedup/slowdown when going between formats. It could cope with orphaned fields and was highly lauded when launched.

The Prisoner (1967) was shot on 35mm, it would have gone through the reduction printing to 16mm for TV and then those TV prints would have been stored with the broadcasters and temporarily transferred to broadcast tape via telecine for broadcasting. Clearly by the late 80's the cost of broadcast tapes was lower than 16mm telecine, so by 2000 they would have transferred stuff once and then keep the broadcast master tape handy for the re-broadcasting, and only rely on the 16mm copy if necessary.

What's really worth saying is that the telecine process itself lasted from the 1960's when it was first invented all the way through to the 2000's - so that was a very long time and reflective of the limitations of videotape and standards conversion between NTSC and PAL. The major difference between that process and "digital scanning" is that there's no computer involved - you're transferring directly onto electronic tape, not a hard drive. And of course, you'll scan the original cut camera negative if available - so for the Prisoner that's 35mm film and not the 16mm low-contrast prints made for telecine.

Edited by Dan Baxter
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Posted (edited)

That workflow isn't exactly right. The 16mm prints distributed to television stations you talk about were typically aired direct to TV using a film chain. This is basically a projector with a 5-bladed shutter, pointing at a camera. We had one in college, that I operated. Absolute nightmare of a machine made by Zeimark. It had a Super 8 projector, a 16mm projector, a dual-dissolving slide projector, and color video camera. All were pointed to a central optical multiplexer. If you wanted 16mm you pressed a button and a solenoid would (very loudly) move the mirror to the projector so its image would reflect into the camera.

In a television station, the camera would be fed into the main switcher and that would go direct to air. There was a local station here in Boston that was still showing films this way (channel 68) in the 1990s.

It may have been that at some point they copied the film to videotape. The Zeimark we had in college was connected to a Umatic deck, and that's how we used it. But there was no color correction beyond what you could do on a rack mounted frame synchronizer/TBC unit.

The telecine you're showing is not what a TV station likely would have had - or at least not most of them. That's the kind of telecine you'd use to make master videotapes in a post production workflow, and it's significantly more complex and expensive than a film chain, requiring dedicated color correction hardware. 

This is what a film chain looks like:

image.png

Edited by Perry Paolantonio
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Posted
2 hours ago, Perry Paolantonio said:

That workflow isn't exactly right. The 16mm prints distributed to television stations you talk about were typically aired direct to TV using a film chain. This is basically a projector with and 5-bladed shutter, piinting at a camera.

 

All the major network TV 35mm and 16mm movies would be broadcast direct from a Rank/Cintel MK3 from about 82 ( or earlier maybe ?? ) on through to the 1990's. Local stations probably did not have real telecine unless they were big stations in major markets but the big three networks had rooms full of them and would play both 16mm and 35mm prints direct from the MK3 flying spot telecine to their affiliates.

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Posted
1 minute ago, Robert Houllahan said:

All the major network TV 35mm and 16mm movies would be broadcast direct from a Rank/Cintel MK3 from about 82 ( or earlier maybe ?? ) on through to the 1990's. Local stations probably did not have real telecine unless they were big stations in major markets but the big three networks had rooms full of them and would play both 16mm and 35mm prints direct from the MK3 flying spot telecine to their affiliates.

You're talking more at the network, than the station level, which confirms what I said above.

Running and maintaining a Rank was a lot more complicated, specialized, and expensive than a simple film chain so it only would have been at a select few locations, mostly at the studio/network level, vs at the local television station. 

We had an old RCA TP16 film chain in our old office building. I tried to get it before we moved, because the building was supposed to be shut down and nobody wanted it. We never ended up taking it (and now I'm glad because apparently they're filled with asbestos insulation). But it looked like this - a cool, if useless hunk of metal these days. 

rca_tp16.jpg

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Posted

Good stuff guys. Such a waste to have used "film-chains" given the costs involved to shoot, process, and print the film in the first place, and they're obviously not capable of proper color correction for broadcast. I guess that would be less important for TV shows compared with movies where dark scenes need to be boosted up for a lit-room, and obviously running those Rank Cintel Mk3 telecines would have a cost a fortune compared to them.

Posted (edited)

On The BBC, local productions, lower end programmes or current affairs (basically anything that wasn't a flagship production) was shot on 16mm reversal stock. This was edited, given a quick clean and then transmitted on the Rank/Cintel telecine, with grading being done on the fly.

The higher end productions would have a graded, lower contrast television print made from 16mm negative.

Edited by Brian Drysdale
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