How do movies become mpegs?

H

Hiyruu

2[H]4U
Joined
Jul 28, 2001
Messages
3,611
I know when they record it that it's on a reel of film, so how does that then become mpeg2 for DVDs?

Also if you just took the raw film off the reel and made it digital (uncompressed), how large would that file be?

Say the DVD was 4.6 gigs, but the raw uncompressed video would be like 460gigs, wouldn't it?
 
When an .avi and .mov love each other very much...

Seriously, I assume that the film is just played back on something that digitizes it, and compresses it, maybe similiar to a VCR playing into a video capture card? I do know that uncompressed movies are huge, I've heard 300GB for a totally uncompressed movie with sound was average.
 
Originally posted by tdg
When an .avi and .mov love each other very much...
Click to expand...

LOL. :D

Most movies these days are digital already. They take the footage out of the camera and turn it into uncompressed video, for post production, which is done in the digital studio. Makes cutting/pasting scenes, transitions, etc.. much faster than old style. So they already have a digital copy. It's probably huge (I have no idea how big, but I'll belive 300GB, since it is uncompressed, or nearly uncompressed)

More and more movies are shot on digital film as well now, I know Star Wars EP1 was one of the fist, but I'm sure many more since then. This means they don't even have to manually digitize it, it's done straight out of the camera. (like your DV camcorder, except much nicer lenses, CCD's etc..)
 
While watching one of the appendices for the extended versions of LOTR (ROTR or TTT) , one of the people said that they would use iPods to transfer different parts of the footage between buildings several blocks apart. This would occur several times a day during the post production.
 
There have been a handful of completely digital- ie never saw tape/film/analogue anything- films released here and there, Europe mostly, arthouse/independent type affair.

For a while, even when that was possible, it was considered 'taboo' and not done... then a few did it and it's increasingly likely that there will be mainstream films at some point in the not too distant future that will be the same.

Problem is in changing the cinema infrastructure over- film and digital obviously aren't projected the same way.

Anyhow, that aside... here's an article on film scanning:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/science/wonderquest/2001-12-19-digital-film.htm
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top