The Digital Fact Book - Quantel

Technical gradeA technical grade is a lower contrast scan to include all highlights and lowlights. Technicalgrades are widely used with virtual telecines and DI as they preserve all the useful dynamicrange of film into the post production process.TelecineDevice for converting film images into SD or HD video in realtime. The main operationalactivity here is color grading which is executed on a shot-by-shot basis and absorbsconsiderable telecine time. This includes the time needed for making grading decisionsand involves significant handling of the film – spooling and cueing which risks film wearand damage – besides the actual transfer time. The output of a telecine is digital video(rather than data files).Digital technology has moved the transfer process on. Now, adding a disk store or servercan create a virtual telecine enabling the film-to-digital-media transfer to run as onecontinuous operation. Whole film spools can be scanned in one pass, with useful footageselected by an EDL. In this case the telecine may be termed a Film Scanner – creatingimage files (rather than digital video) that contain sufficient latitude for downstream grading.See: Grading, Film ScannerTThreadingA technique that allows a (computing) process to be shared among several processorswith the objective of completing the process more quickly than would be possible whenusing a single processor. Modern multi-core (processor) PC chips offer the potential fordoing this but most, if not all, commonly used PC application programs are not designedfor this. So, to provide faster processing for multiple tasks, multiprocessing is used wherethe programs (threads) are divided to run simultaneously on different cores to providefaster processing for multiple tasks.Timing and TimerTiming refers to the amount of the separate R, G and B lights that are used to expose filmin a laboratory as a part of the grading process. The term is sometimes also applied to colorgrading during telecine transfers.The timeris one who decides and controls the lights’ timing.See also: Color Timing, Grading, Lights168