Digital Intermediate - Milestones

Milestones

• 1990 – The Rescuers Down Under – First feature-length film to be entirely recorded to film from digital files; in this case animation assembled on computers using Walt Disney Feature Animation and Pixar's CAPS system.
• 1993 – Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs – First film to be entirely scanned to digital files, manipulated, and recorded back to film. The restoration project was done entirely at 4K resolution and 10-bit color depth using the new Cineon system to digitally remove dirt and scratches and restore faded colors.
• 1998 – Pleasantville – The first time the majority of a new feature film was scanned, processed, and recorded digitally. The black-and-white meets color world portrayed in the movie was filmed entirely in color and selectively desaturated and contrast adjusted digitally. The work was done in Los Angeles by Cinesite utilizing a Spirit DataCine for scanning at 2K resolution
• 2000 - Sorted - The first feature length, color 35mm motion picture to fully utilize the digital intermediate process in it's entirety from inception to completion. The Alex Jovy film was produced at Wave Pictures' digital intermediate film facility in London, England. It was scanned at 2K resolution with 8 bits color depth per color / per pixel using a pin registered, liquid gate Oxberry 6400 Motion Picture Film Scanner and recorded onto Kodak 5242 color intermediate stock using MGI Celco Cine V Film Recorders. Digital visual effects and color correction were done using a Discreet Logic Inferno. Sorted premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May of 2000.
• 2000 – O Brother, Where Art Thou? – The first time a digital intermediate was used on the entirety of a first-run Hollywood film which otherwise had very few visual effects. The work was done in Los Angeles by Cinesite utilizing a Spirit DataCine for scanning at 2K resolution, a Pandora MegaDef to adjust the color and a Kodak Lightning II recorder to output to film.
• 2000 – Chicken Run was the first feature film in Europe to use the Digital Intermediate process, digitally storing and manipulating every frame of the film before recording back to film.
• 2004 – Spider-Man 2 – The first digital intermediate on a new Hollywood film to be done entirely at 4K resolution. Although scanning, recording, and color-correction was done at 4K by EFILM, most of the visual effects were created at 2K and were upscaled to 4K.
• 2008 – Baraka – The first 8K resolution digital intermediate by FotoKem of a 65 mm negative source for the October 2008 remastered DVD and Blu-ray Disc release. The scan produced 30 terabytes of data and took 12–13 seconds to scan each frame, for a total scan time of over 3 weeks.