Display Technology: Disruptive changes for post
Peter Polit, Cine-tal Systems, Inc. (2008)
"The CRT monitor, a staple of post houses worldwide since the early days of television, will soon go the way of the Movieola and the linear tape editor. Spurred by economic and environmental concerns, CRT manufacturers have abandoned the production of tube displays in favor of LCDs and other digital devices. It’s only a matter of time before CRTs disappear entirely from editing bays, telecine suites and control rooms."

ICC Profiles and Color Management Systems
Peter Polit, Cine-tal Systems, Inc. (2008)
"One of the fundamental challenges in the production of motion picture and television content is creating predictable or matching results on the wide range of display technologies existing across all options for content distribution. The match targets may be two display monitors, or a combination of two different display technologies (for instance celluloid film and a digital projector).  This paper describes techniques for accomplishing two industry-specific goals: ensuring that all displays at a given facility look as similar as possible, or making display devices look like a selected target.  To meet this challenge, a number of mechanisms have been created to produce a profile of a display device, and a mapping mechanism enabling pre-distortion of visual material to allow for a match on a different device.  This paper compares one such mechanism designed by Cine-tal Systems, Inc. – a cineSpace workflow and resulting profile[2], and a standard format frequently mentioned as potentially suitable to accomplish the same goal – the  ICC profile[1]."

Motion Perception on Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) Panels
Peter Polit, Cine-tal Systems, Inc. (2006)

Distribution, Asset Management, Workfow, and Collaboration in Digital Cinema
"With the development of the World Wide Web in the 1990s, advances in technology have made Internet experiences more accessible, more consistent, richer in content, and above all, easier to use than ever before. As a result, the Internet is creating a tremendous technological transformation, driving worldwide deregulation, mergers and acquisitions, the globalization of markets and signified cant changes across the communications landscape. By any measure, this is a new world in networking. In the new world, the key to providing the best service for digital cinema or any number of entertainment applications lies in the ability to tailor offerings to meet highly specific c needs. The SuperComm digital cinema project extended previous theatrical exhibitions with a cross-country, content distribution network secured by a site-to-site VPN solution. With this project, Cisco has demonstrated that new world services for entertainment, even digital cinema, can be custom-made with Internet networking technology and services."

Image Based Color Analysis and the Classification of Skin Tone
"Little prior image processing work has addressed estimation and classification of skin color in a manner that is independent of camera and illuminant. To this end, we first present new methods for 1) fast, easy-to-use image color correction, with specialization toward skin tones, and 2) fully automated estimation of facial skin color, with robustness to shadows, specularities, and blemishes. Each of these is validated independently against ground truth, and then combined with a classification method that successfully discriminates skin color across a population of people imaged with several different cameras. We also evaluate the effects of image quality and various algorithmic choices on our classification performance. We believe our methods are practical for relatively untrained operators, using inexpensive consumer equipment."

DVFilm.com Message Board
The message board of DVFilm.com gives access to the thoughts and opinions of today's professionals working with digital video formats in a film environment.

DCI Standards in a Post-Production Workflow
"The DCI specification is concerned with movies up to and including the Hollywood A list, using digital projectors in cinemas worldwide. It is fair to say that the specification is challenging to everyone involved, and certainly we – the post industry and suppliers to it – are going to have to up our game. In the introduction to the specification DCI states that The digital cinema system shall have the capability to present a theatrical experience that is better than what one could achieve now with a traditional 35mm answer print. To achieve that, DCI expects a compliant system to display 4096x2160 pixels in 12 bit colour. It is also interesting in that the specification has been set before manufacturers had developed practical products to meet it: it is something of a purists’ charter in that respect, and in some ways a refreshing change from specifications which seek to give legitimacy to some manufacturer’s proprietary compromises. Implementing a 12 bit 4K post-production workflow is a challenge, and the purpose of this paper is to look at how those challenges can be met."

24p, Technical Specifications and Functionality
"The 1080p/24 format has become widely popular for transferring film images to HDTV tape at the native 24 frames per second film rate. Sony, Panasonic and others have development 24p cameras, to enable cinematographers to record directly into this video format. These cameras have enjoyed a tremendous reception by those eager to try 24p, as an alternative to 35mm film. The following is intended as a review of the new format and some of the tools available to take advantage of the technology."

Digital Cinema Initiative's Official Report
"A number of significant technology developments have occurred in the past few years that have enabled the digital playback and display of feature films at a level of quality commensurate with that of 35mm film release prints. These technology developments include the introduction of: high-resolution film scanners, digital image compression, high-speed data networking and storage, and advanced digital projection. The combination of these digital technologies has allowed many impressive demonstrations of what is now called “Digital Cinema” These demonstrations, however, have not incorporated all of the components necessary for a broadbased commercially viable Digital Cinema system. These demonstrations have created a great deal of discussion and confusion around defining the quality levels, system specifications, and the engineering standards necessary for implementing a comprehensive Digital Cinema system. Digital Cinema Initiatives, LLC (DCI) is the entity created by seven motion picture studios:
Disney, Fox, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer1, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal Studios, and Warner Bros. Studios. The primary purpose of DCI is to establish uniform specifications for Digital Cinema. These DCI member companies believe that the introduction of Digital Cinema has the potential for providing real benefits to theater audiences, theater owners, filmmakers and distributors. DCI was created with recognition that these benefits could not be fully realized without industry-wide specifications. All parties involved in the practice of Digital Cinema must be confident that their products and services are interoperable and compatible with the products and services of all industry participants. The DCI member companies further believe that Digital Cinema exhibition will significantly improve the movie-going experience for the public."

Choosing a White Point and Chromaticity Considerations in Digital Cinema
"Selection of the white point for digital cinema has been an ongoing debate involving art, technology, and religion. SMPTE 196M specifies color temperature and tolerance for film based movie theatres. This paper examines the actual color differences allowed in this specification, and examines the color differences within a single specified correlated color temperature (CCT) measurement. The emerging digital projection technologies will allow much tighter control of white point chromaticity. This paper recommends the use of more precise chromaticity coordinates instead of CCT to specify white points, and recommends a white point and tolerance applicable to digital cinema projection."

Dalsa's White Paper on a 4k Workflow
"There is no question that digital capture is an attractive option for motion pictures. Digital capture can offer cinematographers more power, more possibilities, and more creative control in telling their stories. Not only can digital capture offer immediate feedback, the best digital capture can also offer unprecedented image fidelity. DALSA’s Origin® camera is the first and only digital camera to offer performance truly worthy of the big screen, but the camera is just the first link in a 4K digital chain. To exploit the Origin camera’s performance, the motion picture industry needs viable options for every link. The chain is data-centric, based on digital data rather than film or videotape. A 4K workflow requires a sophisticated digital infrastructure, but the components for that infrastructure are already available. Leaders in IT equipment for the media industry already offer solutions to bring 4K digital workflows from design into reality."

ICC White Paper on Color Management and Color Space
"Photographers know that the world we live in and view is difficult to record on film, or even using a digital camera. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could capture all the color and tone that we can see with our own eyes with our digital cameras! No need for fill-flash or fill cards, no need for additional lighting equipment; we could capture the scene as we saw it. That of course isn’t possible. A scene might have a huge dynamic range, the tones between dark shadows and bright highlights that can be (in some situations) 10,000:1! I may want to print this yet the dynamic range of the print process might be 200:1 or less. Digital cameras do however "see" and record the world in a form that’s quite different from how we see the world. The initial RAW data captured at some point has to be rendered to an image; an image as we want it to look, likely encoded into an RGB color space. This RAW data can be rendered to attempt to match the scene (as best the technology will allow) or the image can be rendered to create a pleasing
reproduction of the scene. There’s a big difference between the two and it’s important to understand the differences. The actual scene we attempt to record may go beyond the scale of color, luminance, saturation, (you name it), that our devices can record, and beyond the ability of output devices to reproduce. Even scenes that do not can look dull if reproduced accurately. In most cases, when the rendering is such that we attempt to reproduce these items as closely as possible to the scene colorimetry, the measured color of the scene, we end up with an image that’s not very pleasing when viewed on a display or printed (we have to view the digital image on something). Films have always included built-in contrast and colorfulness boosts, and highlight compression, to make pictures look better."

Properties of Light in Additive and Subtractive Color Mediums
"The human eye is sensitive to electromagnetic radiation with wavelengths between about 380 and 700 nanometers. This radiation is known as light . The visible spectrum is illustrated on the right. The eye has three classes of color-sensitive light receptors called cones , which respond roughly to red, blue and green light (around 650, 530 and 460 nm, respectively). A range of colors can be reproduced by one of two complimentary approaches: [additive color and subtractive color]"

An Explanation of the CIE Colorspace, and the Rendering of Colors
"The CIE system characterizes colors by a luminance parameter Y and two color coordinates x and y which specify the point on the chromaticity diagram. This system offers more precision in color measurement than do the Munsell and Ostwald systems because the parameters are based on the spectral power distribution (SPD) of the light emitted from a colored object and are factored by sensitivity curves which have been measured for the human eye."

An Overview of h.264 Video Encoding
"Broadcast television and home entertainment have been revolutionised by the advent of digital TV and DVD-video. These applications and many more were made possible by the standardisation of video compression technology. The next standard in the MPEG series, MPEG4, is enabling a new generation of internet-based video applications whilst the ITU-T H.263 standard for video compression is now widely used in videoconferencing systems."

A Thorough Overview of MPEG2 Video Encoding
"The Moving Pictures Experts Group abbreviated MPEG is part of the International Standards Organisation (ISO), and defines standards for digital video and digital audio. The primal task of this group was to develop a format to play back video and audio in real time from a CD1. Meanwhile the demands have raised and beside the CD the DVD2 needs to be supported as well as transmission equipment like satellites and networks. All this operational uses are covered by a broad selection of standards. Well known are the standards MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 and MPEG-7. Each standard provides levels and profiles to support special applications in an optimised way."

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