Film Scanning for Commercials in a Digital World

Mercury Post Managing Director Cho, HyunKun and Senior Colorist Nam, ByungWoo

In early 2010, our team here at Mercury Post in Korea started the evaluation process for a new film scanner for our advertising and commercials digital intermediate workflow. We performed a thorough evaluation of all the available scanner solutions on the market and received a number of scanned files for comparing the quality. After our assessment, we chose the Scanity because of its high quality images, high-speed and ease of use. We had also seen the Scanity film scanner in action at the 2010 International Archival Culture Exhibitor (IACE), a Korean exhibition with the goal to raise awareness of the value and importance of records and archives management.

Our target was to upgrade our online commercial workflow, enhancing our throughput, stepping up our team productivity, and upgrading from a legacy solution. Our purchase of the Scanity film scanner was hand in hand with the purchase of a Blackmagic Design DaVinci Resolve color correction suite. Together they replaced a Cintel Millenium II Telecine and DaVinci 2K Plus, and along with a SAN has helped us move onto a disk-based, nonlinear-based workflow. Our content can now be scanned and digitized, edited, enhanced with effects, and archived, greatly improving our processes. We have built a reputation in Korea providing technologically sophisticated post solutions. It is imperative that our inhouse technology and solutions perform flawlessly, streamline our workflow, and allow us to deliver exceptionally high-quality work to our clients.

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In September 2010, we completed an advertising/commercial DI job for Samsung Card, Korea's largest credit card company. Headquartered in Seoul, the Samsung Card has a partnership with Samsung Capital, and is sponsored by Samsung. Samsung Card was established in 1988 as a technical and business company licenced by Samsung Electronics. The Samsung Card commercial was released in Korea on national television and cable in September 2010.

The Samsung Card commercial was produced by Breakfast Film, was directed by Jang Jaehyek, and involved creative director Oh Hyewon with Cheil Communications. The commercial was shot on an Arriflex 535 production camera with 35mm film.

After the Samsung commercial shoot, we received more than 10,000ft. of film from the production company. Our process began by scanning the film on the Scanity at 2K 10-bit resolution at speeds of 24fps. The scanning process took us only about 2 1/2 hours, which results in massive time savings for us compared to our legacy solution. We transferred the Scanity film scans onto our SAN, a hardware array with Quantum StorNext 4.0 data management software. With Scanity, film scans are saved as DPX files, which are immediately available for online editing, offline editing, compositing and grading, and other concurrent postproduction activities.

We were thoroughly impressed with Scanity, as all the scanning was accomplished so smoothly—no moving parts, except the film rollers, were touching the film. Scanity uses a customized Time Delay Integration (TDI) sensor from Dalsa, which captures the complete densities from film with a sensitivity of 50 times higher than CCD technology. The sharpness of the images was incredible and made quite an impact with our client.

In the past we processed our projects using a linear and time-consuming tape-based workflow, which we have now completely eliminated.

After scanning, we graded the commercial material on our Resolve, which took about 5 hours. Since the media was located on the SAN, we concurrently worked on offline editing on our Apple Final Cut Pro for the job.

We dealt with our file-based conforming of an EDL using DPX file sequences in Autodesk Flame visual effects and compositing software.

The Samsung commercial included a number of 3D effects that needed to be integrated with the 2D shots, so we used our suite of techniques and Autodesk tools (Inferno, Maya, and 3ds Max) for modeling, animation, and rendering.

The entire process—starting with film scanning on Scanity, all the way to the 3D modeling—was very efficient and a true team effort. All of the systems worked seamlessly together.