CORAL SPRINGS, Fla. -- Dec. 19, 2007 -- da Vinci Systems today announced that the University of Rome‘s Centro Teatro Ateneo has installed the company‘s Revival™ image restoration system with the dual purpose of training graduate students in specialized post-production work on videotape and in restoring and digitizing the university‘s audiovisual archive.
The Centro Teatro Ateneo is a renowned international venue for the study of both video and theatre. Since 2001 the center has offered a degree in digital arts. The center‘s specialized post-production coursework is the first of its kind in Italy, including both the aesthetics of film and hands-on technical training. Graduates will be prepared for jobs restoring video at public and private broadcasters. In addition, faculty anticipates that the Revival-based workflow they have developed for restoration of their archive will serve as a prototype for institutions facing the same challenge.
“We selected Revival because of its flexibility in working with various formats, in particular with TARGA files, which are common in our archive,” said Ferruccio Marrotti, a professor at the university. “Our students come to us with quite an advanced background in video post-production, and they find the Revival interface to be user-friendly and its features easy to employ.”
At the Centro Teatro Ateneo, Revival runs on a dual-core Intel® Xeon® processor interfacing with an Apple® Mac® Pro workstation. Student trainees use the Mac Pro to grab video frames and edit the chroma values before transferring frames requiring additional work to Revival.
Revival‘s high-speed processing algorithms automate some restoration work including dirt/dust removal, grain reduction, aperture correction, noise reduction, and image stabilization. Revival also can function in interactive mode to fix individual frames. For these operations a “Region of Interest” (ROI) is selected and the brush tools -- Reveal, Luminance, Clone, and Paint -- are used. Splice damage, scene cut errors, and cadence issues can also be reviewed and repaired interactively. There is a color module for RGB lift, gain, and gamma adjustments, as well as da Vinci‘s PowerWindows™ for secondary color corrections.
“As a cost-effective and efficient film or video restoration system, Revival is particularly well adapted to restoration of a large archive like the one at the Centro Teatro Ateneo, an archive that includes both historically and artistically significant content,” said Bill Robertson, general manager of da Vinci Systems. “We are pleased that Revival, once again, is playing a key role in preserving cultural heritage.”
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About the Centro Teatro Ateneo
The Centro Teatro Ateneo is an internationally renowned university research center focused on film and theatre. Luminaries who have taught at the center include Eduardo De Filippo, Martha Graham, Jerzy Grotowski, Peter Brook, and Dario Fo. Currently on the faculty is Academy Award™-winning sound designer Walter Murch. Since 2001 the center has expanded its scope to include digital arts.
About da Vinci Systems®, LLC
da Vinci Systems, a JDSU company, is the leading provider of color enhancement and image restoration products used in post-production facilities worldwide. Incorporating the company‘s Emmy® Award-winning technology, da Vinci‘s products support SDTV, HDTV, data, and digital film. Since the introduction of the company‘s first color corrector in 1984, da Vinci has been a front-runner in the field of image enhancement, shaping color enhancement into the vital role it holds in post-production today. The company is headquartered in Coral Springs, Fla., with offices in Los Angeles, New York, London, France, Germany, and Singapore.
