Tinted

This big scary machine looks like an old IBM tape drive, but it's not. It's called a Spirit DataCine. It is a modern version of what is called a Telecine device. This is properly pronounced "tella sin-ee". A Telecine is a machine that transfers film to video (hence the name Tele - Cine). These machines have been used for years to allow movies to be seen on television. The frame rate of movies is 24 fps, while TV ranges from 25 to 30 depending on what country you are in. This difference is bridged by the Telecine which literally photographs or scans the film and transfers the individual frames into video fields for transfer to various video formats. Telecine machines typically work in real-time, so they transfer very quickly.


In the old days, the Telecine would "film" the film and write it immediately to video tape. With the Spirit DataCine though, the data can be saved to external hard disc drives for intermediate editing, and then re-transferred onto film or video. The implications of this are huge for movies, when this technology was introduced in 1996 it became evident that a new type of film editing was possible, and the "digital intermediate" was born.


The first film to use a digital intermediate created by a DataCine was Pleasantville in 1998. The colorization effect that movie uses would have been very difficult to do without using a digital intermediate.


The second movie to use this technology was O' Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) where the Coen brothers used it to adjust the color timing of the whole movie to give it the fade-to-color dusty look they wanted. The flood gates have been open ever since, as film after film has come along to take advantage of the possibilities of recoloring and intermediate editing.


Criterion has one of these $1.5 million beasts, and they use it to perform digital restorations on film that would have been much harder to do working on the actual negatives.


So if you've ever wondered why movies "all of a sudden" started using all kinds of various color tints and color fade effects (for example, each story line of the excellent movie Traffic is tinted a different color), you can blame the DataCine.