16-CVS Digital Film Scanner System

The following is a questionnaire about digital 16mm film transfer services. Your answers to these questions will allow VIC to offer a realistic budgetary quote for the digital transfer services that you desire.

VIC Home Page

 

Email Address (Required)

 If you do not enter your E-mail address we will be unable to contact you.

Name 

Definition of Questions

Questions: 

Answers:

How many rolls of film do you need to digitize?
How many image sequences per roll of film?
How many frames per sequence are to be digitized?
 
Are these sequences from one filming
session or several different sessions?

ONE

SEVERAL

If multiple sessions, is lighting artificial, daylight or both?

ARTIFICIAL

DAYLIGHT

BOTH

Color or monochrome?
COLOR MONOCHROME BOTH
Are original film images negative or positive?
NEGATIVE POSITIVE BOTH
Is color correction desired? If so, correction is by  sequence only.
YES NO
What is your preferred media type; CDROM, DVD, other?
CDROM DVD

OTHER:

 
What image resolution is desired?
 
a. Monochrome: Maximum is 1534 x 1024 or 767 x 512  pixels per image, 8-bit gray scale, or 10 bit with SVS format.
 
b.  Color: Maximum is 1280 x 960 pixel per image frame, or 640 x 480,  24-bit color.
 
Do you have a preferred file format?
 
AVI, MPEG2, Raw Binary, sequence of TIFF or JPEG images.  Or, the SVS native format in monochrome or color.
AVI MPEG Raw Binary
TIFF JPEG SVS
Other:
 
Are you willing to use lossy compression in order to reduce the total data volume? If so, AVI encoded with DIVX, Intel Indeo codecs etc.  Also, MPEG2.  These are available at additional cost.
YES NO
 
Are you willing to split or span sequences across files on two or more media, in order to stay within the 2GB limit?
YES NO
 
Other questions or comments:

The SUBMIT BUTTON is at the bottom of the form


 The following definitions, explanations and limitations may be useful

Film Roll:  
One continuous reel or spool of film; 100’ to 1200’
 
 
Sequence:  
One contiguous set of images. There may be multiple sequences on a roll or a storage media unit, or a single long sequence may be split across multiple rolls or storage media units.
 
CDROM:  
Storage media with a maximum capacity of 700MB
 
DVD:  
Storage media with a maximum capacity of 4.7GB, relates to 2-hours of MPEG2 video.
 
AVI:
 A Microsoft file format. It can store imagery uncompressed, or using various "codecs". Imagery can also be stored compressed. This file format is poorly documented. Most file access functions rely on Microsoft library routines to read/write files. Codecs are often proprietary & undocumented.
 
MPEG2:  
An industry standard format for streaming video and inherently uses lossy compression. Certain Key frames are compressed using lossy compression similar to JPEG.  Other frames are compressed, as the difference between the key frame and the current frame. 
 
There is usually no file header indicating the number of frames in the sequence. MPEG2 does not normally support random access to a specific frame in the file and is not suitable for data analysis applications.  This is due to its extremely slow random access speed.
 
Raw Binary:
Imagery is stored pixel-by-pixel, row-by-row, frame-by-frame. No compression means large file binary: sizes, but no loss of data. It’s an easy format to document and read.
 
SVS Format:  
A new format, combining both images and user defined header or meta data on each image frame. SVS files are integral and cannot be accidentally separated.  SVS also stores 10-bit monochrome imagery, resulting sub-pixel resolution for accurate data anaylsis applications.
 
Maximum Random Access File Size:  
2.14GB. While files larger than 2GB can be read sequentially, the ‘C’ language random file  access function cannot access files larger than 2.14GB

 

We recommend storing imagery in a raw binary format, with no more than one sequence per file. We further recommend limiting file sizes to less than 2GB and splitting sequences into multiple files if necessary to achieve this goal.

Full color resolution, uncompressed imagery corresponds to 580 image frames in one file as a 2GB file limit. That is: 1280 x 960 color (3 bytes per pixel). Full monochrome resolution, uncompressed gray scale imagery allows 560 frames in one 2GB file. This file limit corresponds to 1534 x 1024, 2 bytes per pixel or 16-bits.  However, only 10-bits are accessed. More image frames can be stored with lower resolution and /or if lossy compression can be used.

 

Top of Page

 

Last Update 8-13-02