DIAMANT - digital film manipulation platform

Abstract

Summary form only given. We are developing a platform for the cost-effective manipulation of digital film. The DIAMANT platform integrates commercial off the shelf (COTS) hardware components with the developed middleware. On top of this platform different film manipulation applications can be built. The developed pilot application is digital film restoration. The main challenges for a software based digital film manipulation system are software and hardware (HW) related. HW related ones are the high amount of data (terabyte) caused by the high resolution of digitized film, the high computation power required for manipulation of these data and the integration of film and video I/O devices into the system in a way that they can be directly controlled from the desktop. SW related issues are the handling of digital film data (image sequences) in the system, the definition of manipulation tasks (manipulations/modules applied on an image sequence) and the development of human computer interaction techniques for sophisticated manipulation modules. Primary platform design criteria are to be scalable in terms of mass storage and computation power, to exploit the available hardware resources optimally, to be open for the integration of third party manipulation modules (plug-ins for special requirements) and to provide a platform that can be generally used for development of digital film manipulation applications, where it is only necessary to develop the application specific graphical user interface (GUI) on top of the available DIAMANT platform. (3 pages)