At NAB, Swedish post specialist Digital Vision promises a speed bump of up to 10x with the forthcoming v3.5 release of its data-centric film finishing product, Nucoda Film Master, and says it will be showing previews of v4.0. It’s the technology demos it’s showing people that are sparking the most interest.On the workflow side, the Stockholm-based company is putting a lot of R&D effort into creating an encoding and mastering environment that lets clients see content on the platform it will actually be delivered on. Its theory is that creating a universal master and building deliverables from it is going to trip you up somewhere along the line as you have already committed to grade, compression, grain and aperture correction. There isn’t an undo button in the world that’ll take you back from that, no matter how bad the blacks look on an iPod screen. So, it’s working on retaining the master in 16-bit or 10-bit log with appropriate metadata and recalibrating spacial and pixel resolution to different delivery targets from within there.The company also has high hopes for a newly developed technology—currently dubbed Ragnarök—that could dramatically improve dust-busting speeds by using motion estimation to add both features and grain from adjacent frames over entire areas. Digital Vision reckons this could remove up to 90 percent of dust and dirt without artifacts as part of an automatic process. According to Norse mythology, Ragnarök is the end of pretty much everything in the universe. If Digital Vision’s version can just mean the end of the time and tedium of operators having to trace around individual hairs etcetera, then it may be onto a winner.
Written by Andy Stout
