Telecine is Dead!

Moore's law in computing performance and storage capacity has made the traditional telecine model obsolete.

In recent years, the Digital Intermediate (DI) process has transitioned from the use of video-based telecines (e.g. Spirit, Cintel) to the use of file-based film scanners (e.g. Lasergraphics Director, ARRISCAN, etc.).

This transition has been driven by the higher image quality of scanner technology coupled with the explosive growth of computing and storage.

Telecine Image Quality is Inferior to Scanners

High quality DI scanners like the Lasergraphics Director scanner do not scan the film in real time. For example, the Northlight scanner scans at less than 1 frame per second, the ARRISCAN scans at rates ranging from 4 to 8 frames per second, and the Lasergraphics Director scans at 11 frames per second.  The reason for this non-real-time scanning speed is simply this: QUALITY.

Real-time scanning was required in the old days when the only viable image "pipe" was a real-time video channel. In those days, everything had to be sacrificed for speed. As a result, telecines generated real-time video at the expense of noisy and highly unstable images (all telecines are edge-guided which causes extensive weaving).

With the advent of the Digital Intermediate (DI) age, the low quality of the telecines was replaced with the dramatically higher quality of DI scanners (e.g. the Lasergraphics Director, ARRISCAN, Northlight, etc.).  These scanners do not need to output real-time video. Instead, they generate data files. As a result, these scanners can take the time to generate significantly superior images that are very low-noise and extremely stable.

Real-time vs. Reel-time

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The real-time or near real-time speeds of telecine equipment do not compensate for the actual time spent grading, which requires constant starting, stopping, and rewinding — effectively marrying the colorist to the telecine.

Scanning the film once to high resolution files divorces the colorist from the ingest device allowing the grading to occur in "reel-time" (offline and concurrently). In this regard, scanning is faster than telecine.