An Inside Look at Creating the DVD for Eight Crazy Nights

by Michael Goldman

According to officials at Post Logic, Hollywood, the processrequired to build the upcoming DVD version of Adam Sandler’sanimated film, Eight Crazy Nights, was complicated, to say theleast.

To create the DVD master, also slated to be used for otherelectronic distribution purposes in the future, Sony PicturesEntertainment (SPE), in consultation with Post Logic, decided not touse the interpositive used for the theatrical release. The reason forthis decision, according to John Persichetti, senior mastering coloriston the DVD project, was the need to make the digital version of themovie "more vivid" in terms of color.

"We screened the answer print, and compared it to the data files,"says Persichetti. "But it was felt we could not get as much color outof the interpositive as there was in the original animation. Sony hadaccess to the original, digital animation work files used on thefeature film (which was actually produced using facilities at WarnerBrothers Feature Animation). We decided that data was a better sourcefrom which to create the DVD master."

This decision to essentially re-build the movie from its originalimage assets, required Post Logic to go back to raw, 2K data files.Those, however, were stored on DVD-R discs, meaning the various piecescame to Post Logic on 257 different DVDs. "They came over to us in fourcrates, a total of 108,339 frames from the movie," explains Henry Ball,Post Logic’s imaging supervisor and senior engineer.

The company began laboriously shuffling that material onto itsnetwork using a DVS HD/2K digital disc recorder, but midway through,Post Logic was able to switch to a Globalstor Infinattach DiscJukebox—a robotic device that automatically loads multiple discsinto the recorder. "That really sped things up, allowing us to get allthe two terabytes of material onto our RAID-protected server moreefficiently," adds Ball.

During this process, Post Logic also faced the additionalcomplication of having to save the TIFF formatted files as 10-bitCineon files, in order to preserve them at the highest possibleresolution, since the DVS system couldn’t read TIFF LZWcompressed files. "To make them all play back at 24 frames per second,we had no choice but to do that conversion," says Ball.

"We also had to re-number all the frames as we went along," Balladds. "Each DVD was broken down into shots that started with frame No.1, so that was an additional step, numbering them sequentially from onethrough 108,339. On these kinds of jobs, the data almost always comesto us on some type of format with greater storage capacity than DVD, sothere aren’t so many original pieces of media, and the framenumbering issue isn’t usually that big of a deal. But in thiscase, that was another major issue to deal with."

The next major issue was the fact that Post Logic discovered as itwent along that there were hundreds of data frames from the originalmovie missing. "This was not a normal situation," says Ball. "WarnerBrothers informed us that all that material had been erased from theirserver by this time, because the data files were only considered aswork material originally, since they were supposed to deliver thefeature on film. Therefore, we had no option but to ask them tore-render the missing frames from the original scene files. In thatsense, we became kind of bookkeepers or accountants for the project,finding which frames were missing and getting them back somehow."

This was a crucial issue, says Larry Birstock, executive VP at PostLogic, because the secondary goal of the project was to build apristine digital archive for Sony of all digital files used to make themovie.

"It’s an important lesson—that companies need to verifytheir archives before storing all their digital files," Birstock says."I’m sure there are many animated films that have permanentlymissing digital frames. But by doing, in essence, a digital-to-digitalmaster of the film, we were, at least, able to discover the problem andhelp them get those files back before it was too late." p>While themissing frames were being re-built, Ball created blank slate framesnumbered to match the missing frames so that assembly of the digitalmaster could proceed—with missing frames replacing the slates asthey became available. Post Logic’s Matthew Johnson spent about20 hours conforming the whole thing together on the company’sQuantel IQ system, matching the digital version to a copy of theoriginal feature, which Post Logic had previously transferred from filmto the digital world, so that Johnson could view both timelinestogether while building the new version on the IQ.

"We were able to work at 10-bit all the way through using the IQ,rather than having an 8-bit limitation on the I/O," says Ball."That’s another important point, because the IQ enabled us tobuild this digital master at 2k, a higher resolution than, to myknowledge, has ever been done for an animated feature going to DVD.Disney has done a few of these for their CG films in the past, butthose were always done at D1 resolution. Since the DVD media is aD1-size format, there would have been no reason to work at a higherresolution back then. In those days, it didn’t make financialsense to try and go any higher, since the cost of storage was so high.Now, the cost of storage has come down. We were dealing with nearlynine megs per frame on this project."

After Johnson performed the assembly, Persichetti performed thecolor correction on a DaVinci 2k color corrector, a process that wentsmoothly, according to the artist. "It was like working on a virtualtelecine," he says. "There was no film, so everything was very clean,no dirt, or anything like that—pristine animation. The color isreally superior to any other approach, in my opinion."

At press time, Post Logic had finished the mastering job, but wasstill finishing up building a complete 2k archive of the film’sdigital assets for Sony.