Seeking a final resolution
Of all the reader suggestions for what I should do with my little film Steve Jobs — The Lost Interview, not one involved showing the movie in theaters. Yet that was the first thing that came to my mind. How old media-like of me and how new media-like of you. So we’re opening November 16th for a short run in about 20 U.S. theaters. These are mainly Landmark Theaters, but some others are now coming on and we’ve even had inquiries from Europe and Asia (keep them coming, please). The idea came to me late at night so I e-mailed Landmark owner Mark Cuban who replied in five minutes. proving insomnia has its virtues
Seeing a movie in a theater is a social experience, where most other viewing options generally aren’t. I remember where and when I saw many films that were important to me from Barbarella (it wasn’t the movie but the girl I was with) to Star Wars (it was the movie), mainly because I saw them in theaters with my friends. It’s just not the same watching on YouTube, which is exactly why I decided to start with theaters.
Those who want to wait and see the show online will probably get their chance to do so since I don’t expect a long theatrical run. There will be many ways to see this interview, but theaters come first.
And did I mention that getting a writing credit for a film opening in theaters finally qualifies me for group health insurance through the Writers Guild of America? I haven’t been eligible for group health insurance since 1994.
Other than confirming when and where the film is opening (below) I want to cover the technology involved in turning an old VHS tape into a movie fit for showing on big screens.
Triumph of the Nerds was shot on PAL Digi-Beta SP, a format very advanced for 1995 but obsolete today. It’s true digital with 4:2:2 encoding and a screen resolution of 720-by 576 lines at 25 frames-per-second (remember this was originally shot for European consumption). Taking this to film wouldn’t be that hard, actually, given the number of features that have been shot on DV beginning with the Blair Witch Project. It’s not great but it’s not bad, either. But the tape we have isn’t Digi-Beta or digital at all — it’s analog PAL VHS with only 288 vertical lines, not even Digi-Beta’s 576, much less HD’s 1080. And that’s our goal for this film — 1080 vertical lines.
Home movie footage is used all the time in feature films, but it’s usually supposed to look like home movie footage and ours isn’t. Fortunately ours was shot and lighted by professionals and it shows. The VHS dub we have was done on professional equipment and it is likely that the tape was never even played after being recorded, though there are two very obvious instances of tape stretch in the piece — places you’d normally just cut around except we’re on some media honesty kick and determined to share the tape unedited, so we’ve had to work hard to improve those stretchy parts.
Once we had the master tape in the best possible shape it had to go through any number of steps including de-interlacing, de-noising, color correction, and resolution enhancement. The last is the most interesting but it turns out the first is most important because there are right and wrong ways to de-interlace video.
Video is interlaced at all because that’s the way it had to be done in the early days of television with slow TV set phosphors (remember that white dot in the middle of your TV set when you turned it off?) and equally slow camera tubes. So an analog TV frame, whether it is NTSC or PAL has two fields that are recorded sequentially then rendered together as an interlaced signal with a line from Field A followed by a line from Field B and so on. Converting this interlaced signal to the progressive scan used on most HDTVs (and computer screens) requires de-interlacing, which most often means throwing away either Field A or Field B then doubling the lines of the surviving field.
No-can-do for us, though, because that would drop our 288 lines down to 144 lines, from which I am sure we’d never recover. And to be honest no-can-do for most other professional de-interlacing since we now have smarter ways to do it, the point being to not throw away any information.
The general technique is to first make the video look less bad and then make it look better. The former comes through de-noising (removing artifacts that are obviously not part of the original signal) and color correction (making the colors look right or, if not right then at least the way you think they look the best). The latter comes through a process of temporal interpolation that is usually called Super Resolution.
Remember your neighbor who got a home equity loan to install a home theater and how he bragged about his line doubler? How oh-so 1999. A line doubler scales-up resolution by creating new lines in the frame that are interpolated from the lines above and below. Super Resolution does much the same thing but it creates lines using information not just from the lines on either side but from all the lines and other picture elements in several frames before and after. Typically 4-5 frames are involved and if you think that we are going from 288 vertical lines to 1080 that’s about a 4X increase so we’ll need every bit of that temporal data from those extra frames.
I decided when we started this adventure on October 14th that we’d have to take a shotgun approach to tape restoration, so that’s what we have done, using three completely separate approaches in parallel.
First the folks at Red Giant Software up in Portland, Oregon helped us use their plugins for Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premiere. We first thought we’d be using just Red Giant’s Instant HD tool from their Magic Bullet Suite, but soon learned they have separate tools for every stage of the process including de-interlacing, de-noising, color correction and more.
There’s a hardware approach to the same problem courtesy of an Orlando, Florida company called Teranex. Their $3000 box (the one we used was the Teranex Mini) sucks in video in one format and spits it out in another. A smart Teranex operator knows to do the job in several passes accomplishing the different tasks in a specific order, but the process in each case is accomplished in real time, which is astounding.
And finally, from behind Door Number Three comes MotionDSP of Burlingame, California. MotionDSP sells a $49.95 Windows product called vReveal that does most of this as well as a professional product called Ikena that does it even better for a lot more money. I understand that iKena is particularly popular with certain three-letter agencies for improving the resolution of satellite images.
Which worked best for our little film? We won’t know for a couple more days when we have a side-by-side comparison and the winner goes out to theaters. So far they all look great.
Steve Jobs — The Lost Interview cities and theaters (so far)
New York – Sunshine
Los Angeles – Regent
San Francisco – Opera Plaza
Berkeley – Shattuck
Palo Alto – Aquarius
Seattle – Metro
San Diego – Hillcrest
Denver – Esquire
Dallas – Magnolia
Houston – River Oaks
Minneapolis- Lagoon
Chicago – Century
Indianapolis – Keystone
Boston – Kendall
Philadelphia – Ritz Bourse
Washington, DC – E Street
Baltimore – Harbor East
Atlanta – Midtown
Milwaukee – Oriental
Bob, just got back from seeing the film tonight in Philly. So glad I made the trek — I left with a feeling, amazingly, not of sadness but of uplift, of cleanliness and clarity, from the quality of the man’s mind. One significant difference between seeing the film and reading a print interview was that I got to have the pleasure of seeing the wheels turning in his mind as he considered your questions before answering them so thoughtfully and eloquently.
I loved what he said about the tremendous amount of craftsmanship needed between a great idea and a great product — and that the process is the magic.
There was a wonderfully receptive audience there tonight — ripples of affectionate laughter at some of his little jabs, and total rapt silence the rest of the time. It was great to see it in a community setting where everyone totally “got it.”
P.S.: I give this film four mice.
I’m wondering whether there will be any theater in the vicinity of Naples, FL, where this film will be showing? I’d love to see it.
This was an awesome film. Would it qualify for Oscar consideration given the limited dates? Not sure of the specifics but you should look into it. A great documentary not only for our time but for all time. I am so glad it was recovered.
That said, I saw it on the last night in Dallas, TX. I couldn’t recommend it to friends. Broader release with more dates would be awesome if you can swing it. Thank you!!
Saw your Jobs Interview Tues. night, FABULOUS! Applause at the end, everyone in Hillcrest teary too.
After the theater run put it on iTunes please.
Thank you for asking great questions and letting Steve answer without interruption.
Bill Kunz
Wonderful movie and the speed (due to the internet) with which you got it into a theater would have pleased Steve Jobs.
But help me put please: what was that quote from Jobs in which he says something like:
“Ordinary does one thing. Genius copies.”
What was the correct quote? Thx.
“Good artists copy. Great artists steal.” Attributed to Pablo Picasso, but there’s no official citation. Also quoted as “Bad artists copy. Good artists steal.” which I think has more wit, because it makes you to think of beginners learning to draw and leads you to expect he will say that by contrast good artists invent original ideas.
From WikiQuote: Compare: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.” —T. S. Eliot, before 1920
American type designer Fred Goudy used to quote himself in print saying “The old fellows stole all of our best ideas.”
Picasso is also credited for the statement “Computers are useless; they only give you answers!” which programmers know is not true.
Thx and thx again to Bob Cringely.
But I am interested though confused about the meanings.
Not quite sure what Jobs or Picasso were driving at as “copying” and “stealing” are along the same vector: using someone else’s work as one’s own.
TS Eliot makes a bit more sense — ““Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.”
My own quote — garbled but that’s what I understood — is the saying runs “Brilliance invents. Genius copies”
The gist is that invention, innovation, the breathless attempt to make something new, is over-rated. Which of course was so very true of Jobs. The really great things are refinements of the work of others and that there should be no shame in copying and improving. “Kanzai engineering” if you remember the Mazda ad.
Then again, maybe I just don’t get the meaning of “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” Can anyone help me? What did Jobs mean? Much less what did Picasso mean? I fail to see much clever or wise about the saying.
The reason I ask about this quote is that I am writing a book — it’s about cities — and one of the points I am making is that “starchitecture” — the hard-on for the startling and inventive — are over-rated and in fact counter-productive to making please where you want to live, rather than just taking part in “brand new.” Interesting cities are built on the repetition of basic forms but with many minor variations. You’ll see when you read the book.
“Good artists copy, great artists steal.”
The idea is, if you copy something, you try to make it appear the same – you’re not really making it your own.
If you steal something, you take it, so you have to face the problem of how to make it yours, of using it so that something gets done. That takes understanding. It’s a bit more like using it than copying it.
Think of things like music sampling vs copying. Or a poem. Can you copy it? Sure. But to steal it, you have to actually get it.
When will you show it in Toronto, Ontario?
BTW this explanation of deinterlacing is wrong:
“So an analog TV frame, whether it is NTSC or PAL has two fields that are recorded sequentially then rendered together as an interlaced signal with a line from Field A followed by a line from Field B and so on.”
The two fields are never “rendered together.” The TV would display field A on odd lines, and then 1/60th of a second later display field B on even scanlines, and rely on the persistence of the phosphors to make them appear seamless.
While it’s true that’s the way it is designed to work and does apply to crt picture tubes, a digital display like LCD or Plasma, may store the two fields that make up the frame and then display them as though they were a single picture, even though the alternate lines are displaced in time.
Hello, Bob.
We would like to show this film at Lumina Theater on the campus of the University of North Carolina Wilmington. I just sent you a message by email, so I hope you will have a free moment to respond.
Best wishes with your film.
Sandra
The BBC developed a hardware solution for this, the PAL Transform Decoder.
No need to “guess” what the colors should be, it extracts them mathematically and produces a true component result from the composite original.
http://www.jim-easterbrook.me.uk/pal/
Thank you for sharing this film, and for getting it to St. Louis. Very inspiring!
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Roger Ebert’s given it 3 out of 4 stars
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20111114/REVIEWS/111119993
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[...] movie. The full interview was thought to be lost for many years, until a VHS copy surfaced. With sophisticated image processing the VHS tape was used to create a movie that was watchable on the large screen of a movie theater. [...]
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