HBO readying films for HDTV.......................................
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HBO Dusts Off Programming Library for '98 HDTV Launch
By Jim Barthold
HBO's launch of high-definition TV set for mid-1998 will force the network to transform its entire library of film titles to the new format - an effort that has led "a large number" of California-based film labs to test film transfers, according to Bob Zitter, the pay service's senior VP-technology operations.
"The most expensive part of this whole thing and the largest magnitude for HBO is having a lot of theatrical motion pictures transferred to high-definition format, since no one is really doing that today," he says.
What's more, anyone who believes that HBO's transition to HDTV will be easy due to the heavy use of theatrical releases don't understand the tedious process needed to transfer films to the high-definition format, he adds.
"What people have been saying publicly for a long time is, 'Oh, it's easy for us to start HD because we're going to start it with film product,' " Zitter says. "That's a relative term. It's easier and less expensive than doing it in video, where you have to have 12 HD cameras and HD slow motion and HD video tape. All you have to do is transfer film. Relatively, it's easier. But it's a brand new process."
A two-hour film can take as long as a month to be properly transferred, Zitter notes.
"The people who do it are some of the highest-paid technical people in the television and film business," he says. "What makes it difficult is a process called color correction. When you transfer film to videotape to display on television, the colors need to be adjusted to look the way you want them to on a television set."
A colorist, often working with a film's director, adjusts the colors of that film on a scene-by-scene basis. Film color is adjusted on a frame-by-frame basis for commercials.
"What makes it difficult and very expensive for us is [that] it's been done already [in NTSC format] for all but future films," Zitter says. "We have to go back and retransfer every motion picture that has already had a transfer made. It's going to take months and months of time before we launch the service."
While a few technology bugs are still being worked out, Zitter is confident that the HD service will launch on schedule by the middle of next year. "Seventy percent of our program schedule, roughly, consists of theatrical features and movies that are made for HBO," he says. "That will all be HDTV. The balance of our schedule, which are other HBO original programs, will not be true HDTV initially."
Still, viewers with HD televisions will get a better-than-normal picture because the programming will be upconverted to a higher digital standard, Zitter points out. As the number of HD sets grows, HBO's original programming will increasingly migrate to high definition, he adds.
(November 3, 1997) |
