AMERICAN
ZOETROPE
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Harris Leibowitz, who runs the Digital Telecine suite at American Zoetrope.
At the heart of the Telecine suite, the Mighty Phillips Telecine, which provides 4:4:4 transfer from a variety of different film stocks and audio formats.
Apocalypse Now was one of the first DVD projects to come out of the American Zoetrope DVD lab.
Standing in the
Past and the Future
"Francis always says that he has one foot in the past and one foot in
the future," said Stein as we walk down the halls in their newer building.
"We kind of respect and enjoy that, and apply that to the tools that
we use here." Francis has long been a champion of new technologies,
from new types of editing systems to being a pioneer in the use of video
dailies during film production.
"One of the reasons we have a telecine suite is Francis needed video dailies at a time when the world had never heard of video dailies," notes Stein. "He figured if labs or service bureaus won't do it, then he'd do his own in-house." A famous example of Francis Coppola's pushing technology to its limits occurred during the film One from the Heart, Francis directed all the action from a huge silver trailer (The Silver Fish) that had multiple video monitors, which fed the output of the film cameras to him simultaneously.
Stein points out that one of the niche markets that the Telecine also serves is converting release prints for DVD output. "There are a number of people who don't have access to original film or sound elements, possibly because the films are foreign or obscure or whatever reason."
Using a Dolby Laboratories digital surround sound decoder projector reader hooked into the telecine, Zoetrope can take an SRD, Dolby encoded 35mm release print and "through the miracle of a Dolby Cinema processor, a DA-88 tape deck, and some other tricks we can pull a 5,1 surround sound mix from the release print for use in a DVD." Stein notes that they can do the same for DTS encoded films using their DTS decoder CD-ROM player - work that most telecine suites typically don't do.