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Fraunhofer Institute Presents Megacine: Portable storage unit for digital movie production (17/5/2006)

"Great ... cut!" shouts the director of photography, leaning back in his chair with a satisfied smile. The romantic scene is in the can. But the director won't know whether the recorded footage is as good as he imagines until he reviews the day´s shootings (dailies) several hours later. When working with traditional 35-mm film, the crew have to wait for the film to be developed before they can assess the quality of the dailies.

So far, digital film cameras have been no different, with no means of providing instant feedback. The Megacine portable storage unit compensates for this disadvantage, for the digital recorder also serves as a playback machine. Its built-in display allows the film director to obtain a quick first impression of the results of his work without leaving the set. If the quality of the images is not satisfactory, the scene can be repeated immediately. For a more detailed assessment of important details, individual frames can be transferred to a laptop in full resolution.

"The recorder has a built-in display with a resolution of 640 x 480 pixels," explains Siegfried Foessel, the manager in charge of digital cinema projects at the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS in Erlangen.

This allows a preview of the recorded material directly on the set. Other useful information such as the length of the take, the number of frames or the remaining storage capacity can also be shown on the display. The Megacine recorder is capable of storing images in the new Digital Cinema Format (DC) at a resolution of 2048 x 1080 pixels, or alternatively in High Definition (HD) or Standard Definition (SD). It has a total capacity of 1 terabyte - which corresponds to up to one hour of film in uncompressed DC quality or up to eight hours of standard-definition film. The data are transferred to a computer via a FireWire or fibre channel interface.

www.iis.fraunhofer.de

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