New technology a boon for big screen
By John Borland
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
June 30, 2003, 4:00 AM PT
BURBANK, Calif.-- In the middle of the Warner Bros. lot here, surrounded by vast warehouses and soundstages, the past and the present are meeting amid banks of data-crunching and storage devices housed at a high-tech control center.
It is here that the studio recently turned the original Technicolor release of "Singin' in the Rain" into a crystal-clear digital file, using state-of-the-art technology that produced a far better version than would have been possible just a few years ago. The studio's chief technical officer, Chris Cookson, showed it off to most of the original cast late last year.
"The comment I heard was that it looked like it did when they did it on stage," says Cookson, laughing. "Debbie Reynolds, who was maybe 19 when she did the movie, said it was so clear you could even see wrinkles on her face."
The 1952 classic's restoration reflects a seismic shift for Hollywood studios, broadcast networks and other media companies, which are digitizing new works and decades of archives to take advantage of new distribution channels: the Internet, high-definition DVDs and TV, and next-generation theaters.
Digital technology is also redefining the art of moviemaking itself, an evolution that is apparent on-screen in current releases such as "Finding Nemo" and "The Matrix Reloaded." With the right digital manipulation, Keanu Reeves can fight scores of computer-generated villains, Pixar Animation Studios can give birth to another family of wise-cracking 3D cartoon characters, and virtual armies can storm citadel walls in the "The Lord of the Rings"--with no extras required.
Behind the scenes, meanwhile, the tools used to create and support this digital wizardry represent multibillion-dollar opportunities for companies such as IBM, Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI), Apple Computer and Thomson. And perhaps the most dramatic barometer of this evolution is the seemingly innocuous technology of data storage.
Hollywood companies will spend roughly $500 million on data storage in 2003, and expenditures will increase about 70 percent each year, according to Tom Coughlin, an independent analyst tracking the entertainment industry's storage use. By 2006, Coughlin estimates, the annual storage needs of film studios, video and television production companies, and distribution outfits will reach 740 petabytes, or 740 million gigabytes.
"These trends are forcing spending on information technology tremendously up," says Rick Dougherty, principal analyst with research firm The Envisioneering Group. "It's a glamorous section of IT. Apple, IBM and Sun all brag when they get a big Hollywood contract."
Almost all action thrillers, children's tales and, of course, science fiction epics employ computer-generated effects or characters that would have been impossible with film alone. Digital imaging of this type requires processing, storage and server resources of mammoth proportions.
In the Pixar blockbuster "Monsters, Inc.," for example, fur-covered star James P. "Sully" Sullivan had more than 2.3 million individual hairs that needed to be processed separately by banks of powerful computers. Individual frames in complicated works of this kind can take as long as 80 minutes to render. Similarly complex were the kung-fu fights involving dozens of Agent Smiths in "The Matrix Reloaded," which required the painstaking re-creation of each character's face and clothing, along with innovative lighting effects.
A single hour of digitally animated film can take up a terabyte or more of data storage, and all of it must be available at any time to animators, directors and others working on the movie. That requires networks, storage devices and databases flexible and fast enough to juggle these massive amounts of data.
IBM is one of several companies aiming squarely at this market. It is applying some of the supercomputing techniques used by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to create a fast storage server system that gives multiple people simultaneous access to high-resolution files.
Big Blue is pitching its Linux-based technology as a cheaper, faster and open alternative to the proprietary systems most studios use for this kind of storage and processing work. So far, it has found only a few takers for its most advanced systems, notably Threshold Digital Research Lab, an animation studio that worked on "The Faculty," "Dogma" and "Scary Movie."
Threshold's demands are similar to those of many other digital animation or production studios. It coordinates a staff of animators based in various locales--in Threshold's case, California, Utah, Australia and South Korea. For a movie called "Foodfight!," set for release next year, each 3D character represents a digital file of many gigabytes--and once the scenes are set in motion, that number climbs exponentially.
The company uses IBM's servers, databases and content-management tools to let its artists swap those files and work on them without stumbling over one another. Feedback from Threshold is helping IBM develop new versions of its products, which may well be useful in other areas.
"It's interesting to look at where they're going and where we as an animation studio are going. It's not all that different," says George Johnsen, Threshold's chief animation and technical officer. "What we need is management of extremely large files over a far-flung network. In that sense, it's not that different from a medical-imaging or insurance company."
Vaulting into the future
The digitization of celluloid films is being driven by several factors. Studios are restoring old movies with new, cheaper technology and converting old and new films alike for release on high-definition formats that will far surpass current DVDs in quality.
For both processes, studios are looking to new generations of million-dollar-plus film scanners created by Thomson and a few other companies, which capture far more of the data contained on a film negative than was previously possible. These tools are able to produce digital files with much higher resolution than a DVD, even from old black-and-white movies.
That increased clarity comes with a price. A typical single-layer DVD holds a little less than 5 gigabytes of data. Digitizing the latest "Harry Potter" film with a high-quality scanner yielded about 3 terabytes of data--the equivalent of about 500 DVDs. Using the new scanners, that figure would quadruple to nearly 12 terabytes for a single film.
That's why the high-tech control center on the Warner lot is filled with storage servers that make it look more like the basement of an Internet company than a facility at a movie studio. The control center has about 80 terabytes of storage capacity, and that will grow to about 100 terabytes by the end of the year as demand increases.
These servers aren't used to store movies permanently. Magnetic storage is still unstable compared with film, which can last hundreds, or even thousands, of years. Studios store many of their archival films in vaults deep underground at an old salt mine in Kansas or at a former limestone mine in Pennsylvania.
"Not a lot of it has been done yet," says Brad Hunt, chief technology officer for the Motion Picture Association, the studio trade group. "The technology has been too expensive, and there wasn't a lot of short-term financial return before. But the dynamics are changing."
That change has not escaped the notice of television companies, which have begun digitizing old videos to take advantage of the twin attractions of Net archiving and DVD sales. As part of a $20 million project, CNN is digitally converting more than 120,000 hours of archived material with the help of storage, cataloging and distribution technology from Sony and IBM.
Despite the relative instability of magnetic storage, there's no denying the power of digitization when it comes to sprucing up aging works. The restoration process comes into sharp relief at Hollywood's Lowry Digital Images, one of the premier independent shops for making old films look new again for re-releases.
John Lowry has done digital work on such classics as "Sunset Boulevard," "Gone With the Wind" and "Dr. Zhivago." By the standards of Hollywood and high-tech, he's been in the business forever--his company processed the live pictures from the 1971 Apollo moon mission, and he is the original patent holder on many of the first "noise reduction" techniques for film.
These days, Lowry's shop is lined with 300 Macintosh G4 computers. On a big job, they'll all be churning though a single movie, frame by frame, to tease out imperfections. Such labor-intensive work wasn't financially feasible for a small company a few years ago, when expensive SGI workstations were the norm.
"This is a business that could not have existed 10 years ago," Lowry says. "It's only the development of personal computers and their growing power that makes it possible to be an economical business."
No happy ending just yet
For all the advantages, the movie industry remains cautious about going entirely digital--in large part because many key players are unconvinced of the digital medium's absolute superiority to film.
Any digital storage medium is only as good as the resolution it supports. A DVD stores far less information than what is contained on film, for instance. Digital shooting limits resolution from the outset, because even today's highest-definition digital movie cameras often cannot match the quality of their traditional 35-millimeter counterparts.
Regardless of the quality of the original, celluloid films shown on cinema screens often appear blurrier than digital versions because of reproduction and projection. A film loses a certain amount of clarity as it is copied from a negative to a positive print. And when that print is put into a film projector, it slides around, further degrading the on-screen image.
A vocal minority led by über-producer George Lucas is pushing for all-digital shooting and production. His most recent blockbuster, "Star Wars: Attack of the Clones," was the first high-profile movie shot entirely with digital cameras, and Lucas is lobbying others to follow suit.
With a fully digital process from production to distribution, studios would arguably save the millions of dollars now required to make celluloid prints for each theater that wants to play their movies. But for that to occur, theaters must spend hundreds of thousands of dollars each on digital projectors--something they are not anxious to do in these tough economic times.
Warner's Cookson is one of the industry's voices of caution in the digital production debate. In a demonstration for other studio executives at the Warner lot, he compares a scene shot using film against three versions shot with high-end digital cameras. The film version is markedly better than all three digital versions.
Its resolution is better, and the way it handles light and shadows superior. Some of this may simply be the result of viewer conditioning. The movie-going eye is used to accepting the effects of film. By the same token, it could become accustomed to digital over time. Nevertheless, Warner Bros. will not move to all-digital production until it is certain that the archival copy will be as good as a film negative.
"The point is to do it in a way that doesn't compromise the final product," Cookson says.
Still, he acknowledges the value in discovering Debbie Reynolds' teenage wrinkles a half-century later: "The work we're doing really proves the feasibility of the things we see happening with digital products." 
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