Mti Film, LLC

Donald Geman

Kevin Manbeck

Stuart Geman

Chengda Yang

Jay Cassidy

Donald McClure

Michael N Orton

A system and method for automatically adjusting color parameters during a film-to-digital transfer. An operator uses standard telecine equipment to preview scenes in order to determine a natural clustering of fields or scenes. Each cluster is processed separately. All the fields in a cluster are treated as one unit in the sense that color adjustments for the cluster are based on the cluster color histogram, which is computed by aggregating the colors from all pixels in the cluster. Constraints are specified for the cluster. Variables of a constraint may be automatically specified or determined by an operator based on observing sample frames from the cluster. In addition, the operator can nullify a constraint if desired. Within each cluster, the system adjusts red, green and blue intensities of the digitizing device, gains for each of these color channels, and other parameters. The system first determines which settings respect the constraints and then optimizes the solution. The solution is optimized such that the digital color distribution is as faithful as possible to the film color distribution subject to the constraints. This is achieved by adjusting the settings to maximize the entropy of the empirical, digital color histogram among all settings respecting the constraints.

Automated color control in film-to-digital transfer

A method, system and computer program product for color conforming video material at a given resolution is provided. The given video material is first converted to a lower resolution version of the same material. Then a color corrected version of the lower resolution version of the video material is obtained. A computer then analyzes the lower resolution version and the color corrected version of the lower resolution version in the same three dimensional color space to determine suitable color values for a color conforming version of the video material at the given resolution.

High resolution color conforming

A method and computer program product for reformatting at least a portion of a digital source image. The digital source image has a number of pixels defining an original format which is to be converted to a destination image in a new format having a number of pixels. The number of pixels of the new format is greater than the number of pixels in the original format. A gradient is estimated at a point within a window which encompasses a plurality of intensity values from the source image. A polynomial is then used to determine a value for the point in the new format within the window. The polynomial is based in part upon the gradient. Values are then determined for additional points in the destination image by selecting a new window and repeating the acts of estimating a gradient and using a polynomial to determine a value.

Format conversion

A method for determining labels for video fields by identifying the state of the field is disclosed. Some examples of a video field's state include the origin of the field as film or video, its relative location with respect to edit points, and in the case of film-originating material, the location within the standard sequential pattern which results from converting film to video. To determine the label of a video field, the conditional probability distribution for a particular sequence of states given the entire video sequence is calculated. This may be optimized by using dynamic programing to maximize the conditional probability function and thus the labels. To determine the conditional probability, first the joint probability distribution is determined for the observed video fields and the states. This joint probability is calculated by creating a data model and a structure model for the video sequence. From the joint probability distribution an equation representing the conditional probability of having a particular sequence of states given a particular video field is determined. By maximizing this distribution over all states, which may be performed through dynamic programming the most likely state is determined which is consistent with the given video sequence data. Once the states are determined, labels corresponding to the states may be inserted within the video sequence.

Video field labeling

A method for reordering an edited digital video sequence composed of digital video fields from multiple sources is disclosed. When the digital video sequence is reordered temporal cadence is provided which will allow for the conversion to a digital film format through a reverse 3:2 pulldown. Let F &equals;(F ,F , . . . ,F ) be the given edited sequence of video fields. In one embodiment, the method calculates an instruction set which is then used to transform F into a new sequence of video fields, denoted F , where most of the fields in F come from F and the remaining fields are &ldquo;upconverted&rdquo; fields from F . This reconstitution of F is obtained by optimizing a set of instructions based on various constraints which express the characteristics of the pattern AaBbBcCdDd. By assigning a cost to each violation of the constraints, and to each disruption of the natural flow of time, and to other undesirable properties, a real-valued function is constructed. This real valued function can then be optimized through dynamic programming.

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Amherst, MA, United States of America

Donald Geman