Film transfer for HDTV

Summary form only given. Motion picture film will continue to be a viable capture and release media for theatrical story telling and television programming. High quality images of long term economic value can be preserved on film for decades. With the evolution of video into higher sampling structures referred to as high definition television, the Eastman Kodak Company invested research and development resources into the improvement of the techniques and hardware for transfer of motion picture film record into digital electronic video and image file representations. This effort created value adding engineering strategies in the fields of integrated circuits, optics and illumination systems as well as applying a systems approach that included film through signal processing. The author discusses the architecture and system components of the Kodak designed and manufactured scanner incorporated in the Philips `Spirit´ DataCine. This equipment is used world wide in the post production services environment for film to video transfer as well as image data capture for creative manipulation. A key value adding accomplishment of the development team was the signal to noise performance of the system, as well as a sampling structure consistent with the video applications in the evolving digital distribution standards. The real time motion scanning was another defining and challenging performance boundary