National Geo walks Hi-Wire for HD transfer - Post News - film archives of the National Geographic Society - Brief Article

Post, August, 2002 by Matthew Armstrong

MINNEAPOLIS -- In order to preserve the quality and improve access to its stock footage library, National Geographic (ngtlibrary.com) has commissioned Hi-Wire to transfer its film archives to high definition. Hi-Wire (www.hi-wire.com), a full-service post production facility, has been working with the HD format for almost four years.

Executive producer/founder Larry Sexton approached the library to see if they were starting to get requests for HD. "We didn't want to put the cart before the horse, but we brought them out here and did a test," he explains. "They saw the quality and agreed that this would be a great idea for them to both maintain quality and manage their library."

The first part of the project included the transfer of 70 panda shots to HD for the Memphis Zoo. Hi-Wire then began transferring the most library's most sought-after footage. It aims to transfer the entire library about 500 hours of footage or 12 million feet of film, within three years. Hi-Wire's colorist Oscar Oboza has undertaken the bulk of the transfer work thus far, but Hi-Wire will soon hire a colorist to work nights.

Using the Thomson Spirit DataCine with a da Vinci 2K, Hi-Wire is transferring the film footage -- 16mm, Super 16mm, 35mm and Super 35mm -- to 24p HD and making a 30 fps HD clone. The studio is also making Beta SP window burn copies with matching time-code so the library's researchers can search and retrieve the footage and then quickly compile a reel for clients. In the future, says Sexton, low-res versions of the entire archive will be available on a storage network for easier search and retrieval.

Since the same transferred footage will eventually be used in a variety of different ways, Hi-Wire is careful in its color correction. "We're balancing out to a neutral area," explains Sexton. "We don't want to over saturate the colors, we don't want to blot out the whites or crush the blacks. We're just going for the mid-range so a client can put together a bunch of different shots from the archive and do the same color correction on them to get them to match. Our goal is making it easy for the end user -- so they can choose not to color correct the footage and it will be uniform enough that it would match. If they want to color correct it, they will have plenty of range to work with."

So far, most of the footage has been from the l970s to the present, but as the work progresses Hi-Wire will start working with footage that dates back to the early 1920s. "We still have to figure out how we're going to tackle the old footage that's on nitrate-based film, because it's very flammable," notes Sexton.

With the quality of HD offering a viable archival alternative to film without the tendency of degradation, Sexton expects to see more and more stock footage libraries transferring their film archives to HD. "It's a natural fit for these libraries to go to HD for many reasons," says Sexton. "For us, we now have a model that we know works to help launch these companies into HD. We fully expect this to be a growing business."