OT: SD movie at HD Film Festival tonight!

Coursedesign wrote on 12/30/2008, 5:30 PM
Tonight the movie Sounds will be shown at the Beverly Hills Hi-Def Film Festival.

Yeah, so what?

It was shot in Standard Definition.

How did it get accepted to an HD Festival, you might ask?

It took more than a tray of shrimp sandwiches to get this film past the screening committee.

It was uprezzed to HD, using Topaz Labs Super Resolution Technology.

This was multi-million dollar NSA stuff not long ago, now anyone can buy it cheap as an After Effects-plugin for example.

The film is showing at 7:30pm tonight at the Fine Arts Theater on Wilshire Blvd. in B.H.

Hey Bob (Farss), if you can make it tonight, your ticket is on me!

(I'll extend the offer to Grazie also, so he doesn't feel slighted :O).

[I just checked again, there are still tickets available.]

So is this film garbage? I don't think so.

Concept: “Take The X-Files and morph it with Monty Python, add a touch of Tim Burton, and toss in a hint of Close Encounters and you’ve got one wickedly wacky film.”

Also, the filmmakers got support from UCLA Professor Herb Lightman, who previously mentored young directors George Lucas and Steven Spielberg.

Comments

Robert W wrote on 12/30/2008, 6:11 PM
I'd be interested in seeing SRT up-rezzing from Z1 1440x1080i formats to 1920x1080p or 2K. Can the existing plugins do this already?
farss wrote on 12/31/2008, 2:34 AM
There's very little in it going from 1920x1080 to 2K!
Lots of movies are shot in 1080 and uprezzed to 2K as there's not many cameras around that shoot 2K and post for 2K is more difficult than 1080. Even going from 1440x1080 to 2K isn't much of a stretch really as it's only the H res that's going up by any significant amount.
What is interesting is the DCI 2K spec for scope, the frame is just letterboxed not stretched so a lot of V res is lost. On the upside the data rate drops quite a bit.

Bob.
Grazie wrote on 12/31/2008, 3:01 AM
(I'll extend the offer to Grazie also, so he doesn't feel slighted :O). So where's my Concorde Air fare?!?? Hmm Hmmm!??YEs! Well where is it!!? I "cherish the thought of your offer. What a way to slither into '09!

Grazie



Robert W wrote on 12/31/2008, 5:42 AM
It was going from 1440x1080i to 1920x1080p and 2K rather than 1920x1080p to anything else. I wish there was a slightly more intelligent way of taking advantage of the extra resolution of the interlaced fields rather than just blending them together. Converting two 1440x540 fields into a single 1920x1080p frame is quite big transform.

Even straight scaling of 1440x1080p to 1920x1080p can be handled lots of different ways. It is not too difficult to make you 1920x1080p look noticeably worse than the 1440x1080p source.
farss wrote on 12/31/2008, 7:08 AM
Of sorry, missed that bit.
Well there's some pretty smart de-interlacers available.
Mike Crash's Smart De-interlacer is OK for the price.
There must also be something that does motion vector based de-interlacing for free in VirtualDub. Beyond that I think it's programs like Twixtor running in AE.
Then again cameras that shoot progressive in the first place aren't a kings ransom these days.
It's quite possible that Topaz could use the data in two fields to enhance resolution in the same way that it ferrets out more resolution from nearby frames. I think you can download a trial version to see how well it works with whatever footage you've got.

Bob.
Coursedesign wrote on 12/31/2008, 9:26 AM
Topaz has a high quality motion-compensated de-interlacer, you can see the real-life difference here.

The only snag is that you need to have After Effects (or FCP) to plug it in to.

The movie last night ("Sounds") was shot with a DVX100 in 24P. After briefly using an anamorphic adapter lens, they decided that was too clunky, so the movie was shot with "electronic 16:9" meaning the top and bottom of the frame were snipped off in camera to produce the widescreen effect.

Ever seen a DVX100 on a gear head before? This is the camera and the DP, and, last but not least, the gear head:





So how did this ultra low budget film ("33 days of malnourished MOVIE MAKING INSANITY!") look on the big screen?

The quality varied between "good" and "freakin' amazing." Overall it was at least as sharp as a lot of film-originated material not shot with the latest film stocks and $25,000 lenses.

This is clearly an option for ultralowbudget film making, as well as for repurposing of previously shot SD material.

I think that Ryan Humphries, the young (three years out of high school) first-time film maker who wrote directed, edited, scored, and produced this movie, is headed for a solid future if he sticks to this.

I could write a complaint list a mile long about this movie, but that list would have only things that can be fixed next time (the dialog had a slight "listening-through-the-wall" quality to it, like it was recorded on the camera's audio tracks rather than using a separate field recorder, etc.).

In the most important areas however, the movie delivered:

It had a beginning, a middle, and an end (anyone who thinks that is a given hasn't even tried).

It had good pacing, with an even rhythm interspersed with higher and lower intensity where appropriate.

And the cinematography was competent, which really helped the movie.


So the next question is how all of this will look on DVD.

TV is often less forgiving than a theater screen, so it will need a competent encoding artist to make it look maximally good.