“When we saw a preview of the film that was converted to 4K, the results were amazing. There’s just no comparison between CGI HD and CGI Ultra HD. We would have shot the film in 4K if there was a 4K camera available at that time. 4K conversion is the key for all of our HD content at this point in time. In the future, all GNAM productions will be produced in 4K.”
Although producing content in 4K is the right way forward, NanoTech’s Senior Vice President of Product Development, Alex “LX” Rudis says “the growing demand for 4K content will not be met if we rely solely on the development of new ultra HD entertainment.”
“Fortunately, with recent technology advancements, we are no longer limited to just creating new 4K content to meet this growing demand. Content owners such as broadcasters and movie studios have vast libraries of content that can be economically converted to pristine 4K and offered to consumers while providing added ROI on their investments. The freemium versions (with embedded ads) can also be quickly turned into very high-quality 4K VOD content that can be used to generate incremental income.”
4K Studios, for instance, has invested more than $750K in 4K film scanning and post-processing equipment.
“The equipment enables us to efficiently and effectively scan 16mm and 35mm film using proprietary multi-scans per frame at a variety of colour and light-levels to capture a highly optimised Wide Dynamic Range (WDR) 4K digital scan of each frame,” explains Rudis.
“We also apply a dynamic and optimised de-noise filter and colour correction process to efficiently produce a pristine 4K raw master file. As a final step, we scan through each frame of the film and manually remove scratches and any remaining artifacts. The end result is a near-perfect 4K scan which is a raw mezzanine master file awaiting final encoding for streaming OTT delivery.”
A two-hour film requires cleaning, scanning, optimising and encoding, which should ideally take three to four days. A damaged print with many defects would take many more man hours, according to NanoTech.
