The 8K Association has provided another update on the status of 8K film scans, after revealing earlier this year that Warner Bros. had already completed the lengthy process on around 20 of its movies. In a recent post, the association referred to its ‘From Classics to Cutting Edge’ panel that took place at this year’s CEDIA, which saw Executive Director of Technical Strategy & New Format Integration at Warner Bros Discovery Miles DelHoyo bump up the number of 8K scans completed by WB to the 35-40 range.
“DelHoyo explained that at WB, the 8K effort is mainly concentrated around preservation rather than on distribution,” summarizes the 8K Association’s Bob Raikes. “The aim is to scan the full catalog in ultra high resolution at 8K (or even higher) to capture all the content that is in the original. Once this is in a digital medium, the precious film negatives can be simply retained for posterity, while the digital version is used for future distribution needs. So far, most of the delivery work has been on 4K HDR content but he said that an 8K version could be released later. The firm is getting as much content as possible into the archive in 8K.”
Scanning film to 8K is a lengthy process that takes about three and a half times longer than scanning to 8K, revealed DelHoyo. Meanwhile, VP of Post Production Original Content & Image Capture of IMAX Greg Ciaccio was also in attendance. IMAX has been working on 8K since 1972, explained Ciacco.
“Ciaccio said that the resolution of the large IMAX film format could be as high as 18K and the firm had an old Northlight scanner that was past its prime, so it invested in a Lasergraphics Director 13.5K scanner. He described the scanner as ‘The best out there – and the only one that really works’.”
The full ‘From Classics to Cutting Edge’ panel from CEDIA can be viewed above.
