Cinnafilm

Cinnafilm Incorporated is a software engineering company headquartered in Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA. Prior to April 2007, the company was called Digital Alchemy, LLC, and was initially a small research group. Cinnafilm uses parallel processing research and development to enhance the speed and capability for complex video image processing.

History

In 2003, Lance Maurer, an aerospace engineer and independent filmmaker, founded Digital Alchemy, LLC, to create software-based image enhancement tools. In early 2004, Digital Alchemy engineers began employing their methods atop Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) due to the parallel processing capability. Parallel processing of this capacity was only available in larger render farms and supercomputers, so GPUs represented the paradigm shift required to make real time processing a reality for single workstation solutions. In 2005, Digital Alchemy demonstrated its film simulation and resampling algorithms using standard definition video in real-time.

In 2007, Cinnafilm Incorporated was created with Digital Alchemy investors becoming shareholders in the new entity. Cinnafilm continues to remain privately held.

In 2008, Cinnafilm launched their first commercial product, the HD1, at the NAB show in Las Vegas. HD1 was marketed as an extremely accurate film simulation tool for resampling HD images in real-time on a single workstation equipped with commodity hardware. The HD1 was replaced less than a year later with a more advanced and flexible software solution, which in early 2009 was brought to market as “Dark Energy” running on “Pixel Strings”.

Partnerships

Digital Film Central

In 2008, Digital Film Central (DFC), a Vancouver, BC based Post Production and Digital Intermediate (DI) service provider, recognized the capability of the real-time processing of HD1 and quickly forged a partnership with Cinnafilm to develop additional functionality. The two modules which came from this partnership, Optimize (Denoise/Degrain) and Clean (Dustbusting/Single event restoration), were introduced when the HD1’s successor, Dark Energy, was released.

ARRI

Following the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) trade show in 2009, a reseller agreement was announced with ARRI, USA Inc., a subsidiary of the German camera manufacturer ARRI Film & TV Services GmbH, offering Cinnafilm’s full suite of applications rebranded as “ARRI Relativity.” The Agreement allowed ARRI to market, sell and support the software globally through their established, worldwide, sales and support channels. The benefit from the ARRI partnership was immediately felt by filmmakers and content owners, whose libraries contain images captured on the Super 16mm film format. As mentioned in the “Handbook for HD Production” (ISBN 3794908058), ARRI Relativity is a “crucial factor in getting Super 16mm content accepted in modern [television broadcast] workflows.”

Quantel

Cinnafilm announced a new partnership with Quantel at NAB 2010 to develop Dark Energy image optimization plug-ins for the Pablo color-grading and iQ digital intermediate systems. These plug-ins are expected to be ready for purchase at IBC 2010. In addition, Cinnafilm also announced a deepening partnership with NVIDIA, whose graphics cards have been used for Cinnafilm’s world-class engineering efforts since early 2004.

Technology

Cinnafilm has two primary development threads: The Pixel Strings processing engine, and Dark Energy software. Pixel Strings is a patent-pending, motion-based video processing engine running at greater than real-time speeds for images up to 2k in resolution and near real-time speeds for resolutions greater than 2k. Dark Energy software is a modular application that runs on Pixel Strings; and is designed to provide benefits such as De-noise, De-grain, Restoration, Film Simulation, Format Conversion, and Retiming solutions for file-based moving images.

Pixel Strings

The ability to track each and every pixel accurately equates to substantial control over the manipulation of moving imagery. The mathematical matrices required to process and statistically leverage this information properly requires considerable computational expense. The Pixel Strings processing engine was created for this purpose and leverages multi-threading on graphics cards to achieve the results in an astonishingly short time frame. Pixel Strings allows for:

• Motion-compensated and motion-predictive image processing
• Temporal and spatial modification of imagery
• Massive data set handling
• Eliminating the need for expensive/proprietary hardware typically used in SDI-based equipment by leveraging commodity hardware made by large component manufacturers such as Intel and NVIDIA

Dark Energy

Dark Energy is Cinnafilm software, a modular tool suite which enables users to perform complex video optimization and conversion tasks at speeds greater than real-time. In short, Dark Energy contains all of the video engineering applications that run atop the Pixel Strings engine. A brief description of the different modules is provided below:

• Dark Energy Optimize (Also sold as ARRI Relativity Texture Control): Controlling the level of film grain and digital noise is the focus of the Optimize module. Spatial-temporal filters are chosen and/or combined to improve the clarity and quality of images without the usually attendant loss of sharpness.
• Dark Energy CleanSP (Also sold as ARRI Relativity CleanSP): Imperfections in film scans such as dust, dirt, fibers, and scratches render video images unacceptable to producers and cinematographers. CleanSP uses a neighborhood of motion-predicted frames to determine which part of an image is an imperfection and which part constituted the original. Frames are fixed by automatically “painting in” detail from neighboring motion-predicted frames.
• Dark Energy Convert (Also sold as ARRI Relativity SpaceTime): Through motion-compensated analysis, Dark Energy converts any old frame rate to any new frame rate. The limitation to the frame rate conversion depends on the quality of the original frame’s motion data as analyzed by the Pixel Strings engine. To limit imperfections, Convert uses quality metrics to engage fallback mechanisms in sub-regions of the image. The sub-region can happen anywhere motion data is inconclusive. The Convert module has additional applications because of the high level of motion information collected. Features such as scene cut detectors, pull-down removal, video de-interlacing, and mixed footage normalization are also provided in Convert.
• Dark Energy Retime (Also sold as ARRI Relativity Retimer): A similar module to Convert, but with additional user interactive controls to specifically address the video retiming market. This is combined with slug insertion (blank space) and pitch-shifting features to ensure that all retimed projects (±10% retime range) maintain maximum quality.
• Dark Energy FilmSim (Also sold as ARRI Relativity Film Simulation): In order to create realistic film grain, an understanding of the chemical processes invoked during Mylar development is required. Cinnafilm has accurately modeled the chemical processes film undergoes and has created a module which precisely mimics those processes with settings for grain correlation, grain size, grain density, grain color, and appropriate levels of randomization. Any size of grain can be emulated, ranging from 8mm to 70mm.

Additional Applications

In-depth video-analysis is required in multiple market verticals. Surveillance, Object Recognition, and Object Tracking are practical applications which require extremely fast motion-compensated and temporal analysis of the image sequences. The Pixel Strings API has been created for companies to leverage the raw image analysis power of Pixel Strings, as a companion to or with their own image manipulation/tracking/recognition/surveillance algorithms, to achieve accurate and rapid results.

Timeline

• 2003 Digital Alchemy, LLC begins work on software-based toolset to convert “digital video to look like film”
• 2004 Digital Alchemy engineers begin researching graphics cards to utilize pixel-shading technology to perform video-analysis
• 2004 First prototype video-analysis engine developed running on CPUs
• 2005 Video-analysis engine code ported to GPU
• 2007 2nd generation GPU-based video analysis engine developed
• 2008 Real-time HD image barrier broken for grain simulation and format conversion creating a fully functional film simulation tool for all digitally acquired footage; HD1 marketed
• 2008 Partnership with Digital Film Central to create additional tools to augment Film Simulation capability of HD1
• 2009 Cinnafilm Dark Energy released with 5 modules: Format Conversion, Grain/Noise Reduction, Dust Busting, Retiming, Film Simulation
• 2009 OEM partnership with ARRI, Inc. announced
• 2010 OEM partnership with Quantel Ltd. announced
• 2010 NVIDIA partnership announced

External links

• Cinnafilm Home Page
• Digital Film Central
• ARRI Relativity Webpages

References

“Handbuch der HD Production” Andreas Vogul, Peter Effenberg. ISBN 3794908058, EAN: 9783794908059, Libri: 8113505
Digital Film Central Partners with Cinnafilm
ARRI Announces Partnership with Cinnafilm
Quantel & NVIDIA Press Release