600 PowerMacs Make One DVD 269
vaporland writes "NYTimes.com has this story about using a network of 600 PowerMac G5's to scan original movie negatives at 4000 lines per inch and create high-resolution digital recreations of classic movies."
What is the point of scanning at such a high res? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What is the point of scanning at such a high re (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What is the point of scanning at such a high re (Score:5, Insightful)
High res for detail, but not as crazy as dozens of pixel sized film grains
Re:What is the point of scanning at such a high re (Score:2)
Re:What is the point of scanning at such a high re (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:What is the point of scanning at such a high re (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What is the point of scanning at such a high re (Score:3, Informative)
One thing to keep in mind is that there are varying sizes of film grain, and having multiple grain sizes is a good thing, larger grains are good for low light image capture, smaller grains are good for capturing detail. Thus, one would want to make sure that the scanning resolution is higher than the finest grain in the image.
Also, there are good filter available in much more sophisticated means than simple blurring. If you ever get a chance to s
Re:What is the point of scanning at such a high re (Score:5, Informative)
It may also be possible to construct a virtual frame in memory at a much higher resolution, then use positional manipulation of the frame (I.E. move it) while imaging it. Just as the handheld "scanner" technology for cellphones etc will allow you to wave a camera over a printed page and build a high resolution scan based on multiple passes, correlation, and interpolation, so we could do with movies. The problem with digital scans is of course that your scan quality is limited by the CCD pixel element size, the film grain size, the difference in their sizes, and the correlation (or lack thereof) of their positions.
As for duplicating adjacent pixels, no one uses that for a scaling algorithm any more unless they are a complete nincompoop, since so many other algorithms are readily available, but you're correct (obviously) in that data is always lost when using digital enhancement, which makes it useful for things like trying to decipher what license plate is on the back of a car, but not so useful for improving the quality of digital media.
Re:What is the point of scanning at such a high re (Score:4, Funny)
Re:What is the point of scanning at such a high re (Score:5, Funny)
Re:What is the point of scanning at such a high re (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What is the point of scanning at such a high re (Score:5, Informative)
Current HDTV displays 1080 lines interlaced.
Re:What is the point of scanning at such a high re (Score:2)
Re:What is the point of scanning at such a high re (Score:3, Informative)
Doubtful, given that a standard 35mm print is only 24 mm tall (barely an inch).
Re:What is the point of scanning at such a high re (Score:5, Informative)
I used to make 35mm slides from computer files with my Agfa QCR-Z slide writer (and I still do from time to time for the few places that still use 35mms for projection).
It has the same resolution of 4k (4000 lpi) that these films are being scanned at. The pixels are significantly bigger than film grains, but are just about too small to bring into focus with a really good 35mm projector.
Later on, they made 8k and 16k resolution versions, which were mostly used for larger format than 35mm output because of the film grain issue (and the fact that the damn device used an RS-232 connection and therefore took 4-5 minutes to image a 4k line file)
Re:What is the point of scanning at such a high re (Score:2)
Re:What is the point of scanning at such a high re (Score:3, Interesting)
I still make 35mm slides. The spacial resolution seems about right. The color depth is the next place digital has to go to catch up with the quality of film.
Re:What is the point of scanning at such a high re (Score:2, Insightful)
DPI LPI (Score:2)
the grain is even mentioned for the post capture processing as an occasionally desired element.
The point of all of this.... (Score:5, Informative)
Eventually, of course, you have to downsample to fit the format that you will be distributing. For CDs, you downsample to 44.1khz. For DVDs, you downsample (the resolution) to 720x480 NTSC or 720x576 PAL. Note that that's somewhere around 1/8th the resolution that they're scanning.
The idea is simple. With this one scan, they can be prepared for format changes. Once high definition DVDs come out, they can downsample to whatever that resolution will be. If they want to broadcast a movie on an HD television channel, they can downsample to 1080i or whatever HD format they wish.
This seems to be about making a high-resolution copy now for archival purposes, so that if the film itself degrades (as it is prone to do) there will still be something really close to the original to work from. Not a bad idea, I think.
Re:What is the point of scanning at such a high re (Score:3, Funny)
Re:What is the point of scanning at such a high re (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Ummm (Score:5, Insightful)
Saying that film grain is a defect is like saying pixels are a defect..
Re:Ummm (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Ummm (Score:2)
They will not be apparant when they are small enough while beign displayed. Trying to remove the grain of a film by means of filters is seldom going to give you a better viewable result, most often it does exactly the opposite.
Its only of any use when the caputred material has a resolution lower then the display it is going to be shown on, and seeing the 4k li
Re:What is the point of scanning at such a high re (Score:5, Interesting)
##
Since then, he has bought hundreds of computers, hired a staff of 30 and worked on 80 DVD's -- including the long-awaited DVD of "Star Wars" -- erasing wear, tears, dirt, scratches and other ravages of age. (In the early days, he sometimes erased too much. By his own admission, his restoration of "Citizen Kane" is too clean; the natural grain of film is gone; it looks like a video. He later figured out how to fix flaws while preserving grain.)
##
I'm guessing lucas considers "greedo shooting first" wear, tear, and scractches!
e.
How much visual difference will there be... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:How much visual difference will there be... (Score:5, Informative)
great for the public domain! (Score:5, Funny)
I can only wish.
Re:great for the public domain! (Score:3, Funny)
Copyright for Mickey Mouse is an ever advancing target ...
Re:great for the public domain! (Score:5, Funny)
Like a reverse Zeno's paradox, we will perpetually be only halfway through the time limit of the Mickey Mouse copyright...[/ExagerrationToMakeHumorousPoint]
Re:great for the public domain! (Score:3)
Re:great for the public domain! (Score:3, Interesting)
I wouldn't mind at all if movie studios wanted to package and release my opencontent movies.. as long as t
Re:How much visual difference will there be... (Score:3, Interesting)
Once they got it cleaned up though, I hope they make film backups of the restored digital films. Incase of something that hits and wipes out all digital data. Be a shame if they all got restored and suddenly deleted by some weird natural phenomina or a stupid mistake.
Re:How much visual difference will there be... (Score:5, Informative)
Assuming.... (Score:3, Interesting)
You're right, IF preserved perfectly it'll be just fine. But the beauty of digital copies is that they can take a beating, as long as not all copies are destroyed (beyond the ability of error correction), it doesn't matter.
Just me. On completely standard, consumer equipment. No expensive, tempe
Yes (Score:5, Informative)
Even on DVD; a 4th generation copy is like a movie that has had compression added 4 times, and each copy is progressively worse. Ideally, you want the cleanest print possible before you add lossy compression.
Macs (Score:5, Insightful)
Ah well, "Macs for productivity, Linux for stability, Windows for solitaire"
Re:Macs (Score:3, Interesting)
(meanwhile I'm writing this from a Mac, because hell, it's just better... it's like breathing standing in a forest far away from civilization as opposed to at an underground train station, sure you get air in both places but the quality is much better)
cool (Score:2, Funny)
Commence pc/mac flamewar!
Re:cool (Score:5, Interesting)
You can see an overview here [imagica.co.jp] of the machine.
If you look at the press releases they came out with an add-on that allows the machine to scan at 10k lines in 12 seconds.
As an aside, the smaller film scanners that capture 35mm slides have Digital Ice [nikon-image.com] to remove surface blemishes. Part of it works by shining an infrared light through the film [rick.free.fr]. The infrared light is unaffected by the different shades of color, but the dust "stops" it and therefore is detected. Quite ingenious.
I imagine as expensive as this machine is, it uses this and other techniques to remove surface and film imperfections. If you use an original to scan that has been well cared for, the results should be impressive.
I toyed around with the idea of homebrewing such a machine to convert some old family super8 movies.
The two problems that you are going to have is the film transport, and the amount of time it takes to scan the film. As it stands, it would be time intensive to build such a machine and technically challenging. That and not having a workspace, it will have to wait for another day.
Great... (Score:4, Funny)
google link (no registration (Score:5, Informative)
The Ultimate Geek Purchase: (Score:5, Funny)
I've already pre-ordered mine. Hurry now, while supplies last!
Re:The Ultimate Geek Purchase: (Score:5, Funny)
Oh dude, you should've waited another month for the release of The Ultimate Extended Special Director's Edition Complete 4K Restored/Remastered Lord of the Rings, Collector's Edition.
There's going to be four versions available, each packaged with a different collectible playset -- Helm's Deep, Isengard, Minas Tirith, and Mount Doom. And they're all lovingly handcrafted out of genuine styrofoam, just like in the movies!
What are the Macs for? (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, I RTFA, and they mention the Imagica 4000 lines/frame scanner and the 600 Macs, but not what the Macs are used for. Only that the frames are offloaded to a server with a large hard disk.
So WHAT part of the process are they being used for? Someone enlighten me please.
Re:What are the Macs for? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What are the Macs for? (Score:2)
Re:What are the Macs for? (Score:3, Informative)
Thirty-five years ago, Mr. Lowry, who is now 71, patented a method of cleaning up NASA's live televised transmissions from the moon. Six years ago, as the DVD took off, he set up Lowry Digital -- then a two-man R & D shop -- to apply his techniques to digital restoration.
He hired a photographer to make a short 35-millimeter film clip of some children playing soccer on a lakeshore. He paid a local lab to transfer the film to digital video, using a 4K scanner.
Re:What are the Macs for? (Score:2)
Re:What are the Macs for? (Score:2)
Re:What are the Macs for? (Score:2, Informative)
At 24 frames per second, it contains 168480 frames.
The article says there are a pair of Imager XE-Advanced scanners.
Each scanner takes four minutes per frame.
Using these numbers, You Only Live Twice will take about 25 days to scan.
To answer your question, I have no fucking idea why so many Macs are being used, except maybe for their hard drives.
Re:What are the Macs for? (Score:2)
It pays even more to recheck the parent before clicking submit.
Re:What are the Macs for? (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course, with such a setup, a G5 is a little more future-proof than a barebones computer that can just handle the task at hand for a lot cheaper.
I think this is a good setup for now... there are a lot of films that are in very poor shape that could use this kind of remastering. You WON'T find most of these out on DVD already because there was simply no way available prior to this to make an acceptable copy of the movie. Hollywood has had a big problem on their hands with this sort of thing for a while; preservation was a distant afterthought for years and now they're frantically rushing to save these movies before the prints completely deteriorate and we have nothing left.
Remember, there's no original print left of Citizen Kane, widely considered the best movie ever. We can't let that happen to every movie. I think any type of scanning project like this - film, drawings, portraits, photography - is noble when you consider how the original media can simply crumble to dust, losing the art forever.
Besides, this sort of thing keeps Apple rolling in the dough, eh? I don't see any Microsoft products listed here, so it seems like the regular crowd here should be happy with that sort of thing. *shrug*
AAhhh (Score:2)
You cant even imagine a beowulf cluster of those?!
Re:What are the Macs for? (Score:2)
Then a single frame requires:
4096x3112x3(channels)x(2 bytes per channel)
= 76480512 bytes (76 Megabytes/frame).
Presumably there are some run-length encoding formats to reduce this.
Assuming 24 frames/second for a 90 minute movie, you need to store/process:
24x60x90 = 129600 frames.
From the article, the company are automatically cleaning up each frame of the movie (getting rid off scratches,
Common misconception (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Common misconception (Score:2, Informative)
actually, its you who is wrong. (Score:4, Interesting)
So to get 4000 lines per inch, you need a lot more dpi, most likely 8000.
Re:actually, its you who is wrong. (Score:3, Informative)
FWIW, most color negs run 60-80 line pairs per millimeter (1500-2000 lpi). Ektar 25 color neg claimed 125 line pairs per mm, comparable to kodak's Tmax b&w negative films. Kodak TechPan - a high contrast technical film - can be shot at 25-40ASA and developed in a special low contrast developer to yield (IMHO be
Imagine.. (Score:5, Funny)
But what about the sound? (Score:5, Insightful)
Great, so he's doing optical at 4000 lines per inch.
But what about the sound? Is he using non-compressed 24-bit samples at [at least] 96KSS [kilo samples per second]?
Your ear is a vastly more sophisticated sampling device than your eye; I don't know of a single sound compression technology on the market that can fool the human ear.
It would be a real tragedy to go to all that trouble to make good digital copies of the optical prints, only to try to cheat on storage space by downgrading the soundtracks to one of these abominable undersampled, compressed audio standards.
Re:But what about the sound? (Score:2)
No, I hear you and I'm with you. I guess the 6+/- Gb ceiling on today's "versatile" discs will leave high quality sound by the wayside. Featurettes on Haley Joel Osmont are more important :P
Bring the Blue Ray!
Re:But what about the sound? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:But what about the sound? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:But what about the sound? (Score:5, Insightful)
Um, no it isn't. Your eye is vastly more sophisticated. Is it easier to recognize people by their faces or thier voice? Even musical instruments, is it easier to tell what kind of instrument is being played by looking at than listening to it.
And there isn't any technology that can "fool" the eye either. When you look at a picture, you don't think it's real, you know it's a picture. Just like a recording, except a recording can come a lot closer.
Super-hardcore audiophilia is a bit of a religion.
"fool" the eye (Score:2)
Umm, have your heard of optical illusions. You may have seen your local magician perform some of these. If not David Copperfield performs regularly.
Seriously, There is a difference between what you see, and what you know. You know David Copperfield didn't make an elephant disappear, but to your eyes, it did.
Re:But what about the sound? (Score:2)
Actually, a lot of times it is easier for me to recognize people by their voices rather than their faces. I can be really bad at remembering faces sometimes, but I have had more than one situation where I remembered somebody by the way their voice sounded and the way they spoke.
But I think I'm just a freak...
Re:Pointilism (Score:5, Insightful)
Artists have known since at least the time of Rembrandt [i.e. almost 400 years] that the human eye can be fooled into seeing what it wants to see; in the case of Rembrandt and his pointilism, the eye [or the part of the brain responsible for processing data collected by the eye] merges small dots of color into a larger whole that it would prefer to see.
You've just described compression. A particularily artful, beautiful form of compression (especially Monet,) but it's compression nonetheless. You just proved point the previous poster made: nobody is going to be fooled into believeing that a pointilist painting is actually a scene taking place in front of them. You may admire it for its beauty, for the technical and artistic prowess required to render it to the canvas, for any number of reasons. But it's not a "perfect" rendition; if you 'believe' you're at the seashore any more or less than you would by staring at a photograph of the seashore it's an emotional decision, not a rational one. And you certainly wouldn't settle for seeing James Bond rendered in a pointillistic style for two hours, not when you know you can see it in all of its Technicolor glory in the next theatre over. It's different -- it's an art form.
Now, there's almost nothing artful about audio compression. (I say almost because there are artists applying all sorts of distortion to their sounds to create new ones, including overcompression.) For the most part, the distortion caused by compression is just a nasty side-effect. But the ear is indeed "fooled" by the compression. When you listen to a compressed audio stream, you hear music. It may be poorly reproduced, tinnily digitized, and companded down to the level of a phone line, but you still hear the music behind it. That's "fooling" the ear -- at least as much as pointilist art "fools" the eye (and without the art.)
Anyway, setting all "golden ear" arguments aside and getting back on topic, I very seriously doubt they'd use compression at all on the audio. The imaging they're doing on each frame is lossless (each frame is probably around 40MB RAW), and this guy didn't get funding for 800 Macs by being stupid and cheap.
Either arguement (Score:3, Interesting)
Same if you were rendered deaf... even if your eyes could be fooled other senses come into play.
Senses run more as a mesh than individually. In many cases, sound is also accompanies by a touch sensation, and a visual one. The same for
Re:But what about the sound? (Score:5, Interesting)
While this is not my field, I have observed the audio track on 35mm movie film often times is encoded in the negative. So 4000 lpi and 18mm per 1/30 of a second. 540mm per second or 21.2 inches/sec. 21.2 * 4000 = 84.8KSS Unknown bit width.
This figure is aproximate and doesn't take into account the fact that the audio track extends in the blank space between the frames. My point is if the audio is encoded photographicly, it can be extracted photographicly.
Re:But what about the sound? (Score:2, Insightful)
Anyway we are talking of scanning camera negative and the sound had never been on the camera negative.
Can I use this for porn? (Score:3, Funny)
Nice article, but... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Nice article, but... (Score:2)
The screenshots are there, they just haven't loaded yet.
old tech (Score:4, Interesting)
You digitise your originals, then "offline" edit with your scaled down versions on a PC/mac. Once you have everything editied to your liking, you get back on the big, expensive "online" system and it can build your film - even going to the point of writing out your 35mm print.
The news here I guess is that they are using this technology to archive old films. I still don't see where the 600 macs fit in however.
WOOOO (Score:3, Funny)
Future-proof -- until your storage array dies (Score:4, Insightful)
Some back-of-the-envelope calculations assuming a 4000x4000 image, 24 bit color (too low?), lossless (optimistic) 4:1 compression and 24fps show that a 2 hour movie takes up over 1.8TiB.
Is it just a box of 300GB tapes, or do they have something even cooler?
Can you imagine the restore times for a movie from tape...
- mib
Re:Future-proof -- until your storage array dies (Score:3, Informative)
Here in the shop where I work, we have 1.5 TB of storage space, sitting in 2' of 19" rack space...
Disk storage is NOT an issue for something like this...
And for all you people who are asking what the macs are used for, it's to process the scanned frames.....
Re:Future-proof -- until your storage array dies (Score:3, Interesting)
Very few places in the computer world hold a candle to the TV and Film world.
apple/pro (Score:3, Insightful)
Wow, whats up with the NY Times? (Score:5, Interesting)
It confuses horzontal and vertical resolutions left and right, mixing the 4k horizontal resolution of a 4k scan with the 1080 vertical resolution of HDTV and extrapolating silly figures from the result, as one example.
4k scans of film aren't uncommon, although this might be the first time it was done for archival purposes.
No matter what the article author says, you'll see zero difference between a 4k, or 2k scan on a DVD transfer. A 2k scan is aproximately HD resolution, so there would be a benefit for HD formats to have a 4k scan, to eliminate noise, etc.
The article was also unclear why such horsepower is needed for such a mundane process as scanning and storing film. Thats a problem thats been solved for a decade or more by the film industry, where working with 4k frames is commonplace.
Re:Wow, whats up with the NY Times? (Score:2)
One word: time. You can't speed up the scanning process without buying another scanner, and the time overhead it takes to dump the data to storage is negligable. But they're fiddling around with gf/x for each frame -- removing spots, evening out the color, etc. That takes processing power.
Re:Wow, whats up with the NY Times? (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh, I don't know, let's try reading the article, shall we?
He then processed the images with his film-restoration software, which he'd programmed onto some Macintosh G4 computers. (The effort took months, as the faster G5's weren't out yet.) The processed picture was clearer, sharper and more detailed still. He could see every divot on the turf. What had once looked like a smudge in the ba
Compression and color dynamic range (Score:5, Interesting)
On the consumer side, putting a wide screen high-res video track on a DVD is one thing, but making that video (plus audio and subtracks) fit within 4.7GB (if you want to keep it all one disc)*and* having it play back reasonably well on the average consumer-level DVD player (which can only handle around 7Mbs bitrate) means you have to compress the hell out of each track which means reducing the quality of the picture with compression artifacts. So it seems to fully appreciate a high-res film-to-DVD transfer you'll have to have a nearly uncompressed DVD transfer (very little MPEG2 compression applied, probably spanning 6 discs or more) and a high-bandwidth DVD player that can handle a very high bitrate.
Re:Compression and color dynamic range (Score:2, Informative)
One has to understand that the density of a negative film stock is not linear to the intensity of light it received, but linear to i^some_gamma_value, where i is the intensity and some_gamma_value is roughly a constant that
Re:Compression and color dynamic range (Score:2, Interesting)
Since the scan is on the untimed camera negative rather than a timed print there is little chance that it uses a 24 or 32 bits depth. "Talking" of untimed negative the article completetly forget to mention that the raw scan will be pretty unwatchable and need a lengthy color timing process. There is a bonus in the Seven 2 DVDs edition showing how the scanned camera n
Thats a whole lotta... (Score:3, Funny)
The size of the original (Score:5, Interesting)
I suspected we would need to start making 4K digital safeties of film as a standard practice at some point. Hi-Def telecines are good as telecines, but not for archiving.
Snow White (Score:5, Interesting)
Disney took the original camera negative, hand cleaned it frame by frame, and then scanned it one frame at a time using a specialized Kodak hi-res 6000 line scanner. If you have ever seen one of the pre digital restoration prints in the theatres and then see the DVD you will realize the miracle this restoration is.
http://www.kodak.com/US/en/motion/newsletters/i
Old News... (Score:5, Informative)
Here's the link:
http://www.apple.com/pro/film/lowry/ [apple.com]
Warner Brothers is doing something even better (Score:3, Informative)
The net result is a version that is vastly superior to the originals.
(Posting as AC so they don't have me killed.)
DVD's (Score:3, Funny)
some tech details... (Score:5, Informative)
xe-advanced uses a 10k capture device that allows overscanning and subsequent downsampling from
8k(8192) to 4k. the 4096 pixels is the horizontal res. from perf-to-perf, and is nothing new(i've been
doing 4k since ~1995). the reason for 4k at the moment, is that 4096 pixels across is just _below_ the
grain of commonly used Oneg/intermediate stocks. using higher resolutions is a waste of processing
time and disk-space when your scanned resolution is higher than the source(this applies to t-grained
(tabular)films as well.)
anyway, you shouldn't see any pixels unless the color calibration is sub-optimal, you're looking at a digital
projection or there were hardware probs.
kodak(cinesite) has had "dust-busting" on their menu for quite a while now, although it was originally
done by hand, by artists using high-res paint programs(photoshop/matador, etc).
as correctly noted by another poster, the scanner is run by a linux based machine. the previous version
of their scanner used an SGI o2 running IRIX. see: www.imagica.com
Kodak used to make a commercial scanner(the cineon genesis scanner) that i believe is no longer avalable.
another scanner to look at is the Oxberry Cinescan.
this is the week to look for info as it's NAB time; new products and updates are typically announced there.
2 - color: the dynamic range of film is described in logarithmic terms(due to the sensitivity function of the
emulsion-processing chemistry) so it is appropriate to record/store using a log-based imaging format.
in this case, a 14bit DAC is used to generate 10bit log/pixel color data stored in the industry standard
Cineon format(created by Glenn Kennel @kodak and subsequently adopted industry-wide. see FIDO, Cineon)
10bits log is equivalent to 14 bits linear and covers approximately a 10-stop range or a density
range from zero(or film base) to somewhere around 2.048D to as much as 3.0D depending and the
scanner and recorder.
3 - lowry and warner: lowry and warner are both working on restoration systems. warner has a large library of
SE(sequential exposure) shows that will need duplicate archives and cleaning for DVD releases. SE is a method
for recording the RGB channels on individual-sequential frames. this process retains color integrity by
maintaining channel separation as long as possible avoiding channel bleed/crossover. lowry is using
the Macs to do the image processing; a feature-length film can be very, very large(90min x 24fps x @4k)
since each image can be ~50MB each - lots of disk space and processing time. as previously mentioned,
warner has a system which resizes/aligns each channel in a logical frame, resulting in a very clean image
with no(virtually no) fringing or edge artifacts due to sep misalignment. this is normally not an
issue with SE as each sep is on a single piece of film. for three-strip technicolor, the alignment is
more critical as there are three individual pieces of film that were run through a special camera(the
Technicolor camera) which i believe has a patent... for an interesting site with info on SE(w/pictures) goto:
thedigitalbits.com/articles/robertharris/harris07
4 - some resolutions:
HDTV - 1280x720 or 1920x1080
NTSC - 640x480(4:3)
PAL - 720x486
film - 2048x1536(1.33:1 AR)
4096x6144(vista-vision 8-perf)
i can expound more if additional details/info is needed.
Re:Let me see if I have this right... (Score:5, Insightful)
I would imagine that, as with anything else that has components that can be categorized as either "good" or "popular", sales of the "popular" stuff will subsidize the production of the "good" stuff.
Face it - they're going to sell more copies of "Dr. No" with Ursula Andress [imdb.com] wearing the New & Improved High Resolution Digital Bikini than they are of Singin' in the Rain, starring Gene Kelly [imdb.com] and the Incredibly Vivid High Resolution Raindrops.
Re:Let me see if I have this right... (Score:2)
Wait, if they scan in Singin' in the Rain in some uber high resolution you'll be able to see the rain is really milk, ew no thanks!
Goldfinger (Score:2, Funny)
Re:careful... (Score:3, Informative)
If you'd read the article, you would have found that this was an official project. It's MGM that wants this done.
Re:Jack Valenti's not pleased (Score:5, Interesting)
Seems authorised to me. The other movies mentioned, are MGM productions as well.
Singing in the Rain [imdb.com]
Casablanca [imdb.com] (1942)
Once Upon a Time in the West [imdb.com] (MGM/UA)
Re:Piracy implications? (Score:5, Insightful)
Who's gonna bother to steal it (it being hundreds of gigabytes) and then downscale it to regular resoluiton for hours just to have something at the same quality that's available at blockbuster for $5?
Or are you implying that people would like to download the original and store it on a terabyte disk array?