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Titan AE Distributed Digitally
Jett sent us something interesting about Titans AE (a film that looks so cool, I just hope it doesn't suck). Apparently they are transmitting it digitally over the Internet from the studio to an early screening at a tradeshow. It will never touch film, and it'll mark the first time that a hollywood movie will be shown in a real theater, transmitted over the net, and never touching film. Not real time, tho -- it's getting downloaded first: 800x faster then a modem, 4 hour download time, so that's what, a terabyte?
I mean, given the studio's thing, I betcha it will be, even though it's over a private line...
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DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
When I first read this article I didn't see that it was actually going over the internet, although it does sound like a VPN. Somehow on first read I missed that. So please don't flame me to read the article :)
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DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
For the Atlanta screening, the 90-minute movie will be projected after it has been downloaded from Burbank rather than shown simultaneously with its transmission over the Internet. ''Real-time'' projection is effectively prevented by the sheer size of the computer file containing the movie -- 50 gigabytes, which is roughly 20,000 times larger than a typical MP3 music file, Schroeder said.
Around 50 gig in less then 4 hours? Gotta love that.
www.linux-skunkworks.com
I wonder if they're pleased with this. "Look, full length movies CAN be downloaded over the net (though your honor, please disreguard the need for the specialized connection/equipment/etc)."
One of the major production costs of distributing a movie is making the copy of the movie. Say, $2K a copy for 2000 theatres and you start talking about real money. Digitally transmitting the film directly to the theatre saves this cost, as well as other benefits. Can you imagine a film with an offensive scene being instantly edited and redistributed for the next day's showings?
"Stop whining!" - Arnold, as Mr. Kimble
I live in Atlanta...hope my pr0n bandwitdh isn't affected.
I read this same story from a different paper (I don't recall offhand, otherwise I'd add a link) and one thing that story mentioned was the above quote - and the fact that movie studios were balking at it.
Essentially, what this does is shift cost from the movie studios (putting the movie to film and shipping it everywhere) to the ordinary theaters (cost of new projectors, maintainance on fancy new computers). The owners of the aforementioned ordinary theaters were not pleased about this.
All said, I think it's a great thing to see distribution go digital, but - unfortunately - there's always a downside.
-Denor
Geez, I wish he had put this up in his story...
Afterearth.com
The imdb link is
us.imdb.com/Title?0120913
Unfortunately the official site requires Flash AND Quicktime, so I can't see the darn site here at work (On my Sun Ultra60)
LongTail SSH Brute Force analysis tool is here!
hello i cant wait to see this except i live in zaire. here we only have a 1200 baud uucp link to the itnernet so by my calculations i should see the film by early 2008. it will be good.
sihg boaj
Interesting. Is there really any benefit from transmitting this rather that shipping cell? Security? Or is it just a PR gimmic?
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I have been anticipating this movie since my son and I saw the first trailers for it last year (think when we saw Iron Giant). Looks really cool, and I'm taking my son to see this the first weekend it comes out. (yah, I get burned once in a while seeing something before friends give me their recommendation, but usually it works out)
On a side note, ever notice how the movie studios release different trailers and teasers that paint different pictures of the movie? The first 15-second teaser showed mostly space shots and had classical music. Then the next one I saw on TV showed the animated characters with a song by Creed. The latest one I saw in the theater seems to focus more on the evil aliens and has what sounds like the soundtrack from that James Spader, Kurt Russel, Egyptian-like Movie (uh... oh yeah -- Stargate).
This seems to happen all the time. You see a trailer for a movie with a certain mood created by the clips and the music. Then you get to the theater and the soundtrack is all different from what you were expecting. I've had conversations with my wife about this -- do they plan this to set expectations based on how individuals associate with music they recognize? I can't remember any movies I've seen (maybe except some Disney flicks with Elton John tunes) where the trailers had any of the actual score.
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
One of the recent computer animation films (Toy Story 2, perhaps?) was shown entirely digitally at the Odeon in Leicster Square, London.
It all went pear shaped and they had to revert to film, apparently.
Anyone know what i'm talking about? Links?
...j
While you won't get the scratches and spots on a digital projection, you also won't get the same color gamut and saturation. I'm hopeful in the long run, and I look forward to actually get a look at it for comparison, but it's hard to imagine it's superior to film already.
Right now film has excellent color and saturation, but is hampered by fragile media and 24 fps / 72 hz refresh. If they can get the colors right, and increase the frame rate, that would be a real breakthrough.
-- Jeff Paulsen
I hope they do the same with Titan AE in the theaters that today have digital projectors.
I was totally and completely blown away by it. Digital projection is to film what CDs were to cassette tapes. Once you've seen it, seeing optical film is just so... flat.
The Starwars showing sucked. The resolution was poor at best (1024x768 stretched wide-screen, from what I remember), it flickered and was full of motion artifacts. Think AVI circa 1995.
I saw Dinosaur at the Arizona Mills theater in Arizona two weeks ago in a 100% digital screening. My jaw dropped when the green "this preview is approved for all audiences" screen popped up. Its that amazing. No hint of flicker, no hint of pixelation, no motion artfacts, perfect focus. It kept getting better and better (the previews were digital, as well as the movie). You don't appreciate how annoying a 24hz flicker is until you see a movie without it.
I'm not sure the resolution on TI's projectors, but it was at least HDTV resolution (1920x1080), and it was clearly not interlaced. I couldn't see any pixels until the credits were rolling, and you could see them on the curves of the letters where it was bright white on black. Other than that the image was nearly perfect.
Rumor has it Dinosaur is showing here in MA out in Framingham. I'd recommend anyone who can see it on a digital screen see it. The movie isn't half bad, and experiencing digital projection for the first time is like seeing an IMAX film for the first time.
Toy Story 2 was shown in Orlando at the Pleasure Island 24 cineplex in an all-digital theater. It was the first feature film that was digital from start (the computer) to finish (the screen display with a big DLP projector). It was also shown at some other places that had digital projection systems.
I saw TS2 in both formats, and the digital version was much sharper, had better color saturation, and had *no* defects.
I saw Star Wars: The Phantom Menace in a digital theater. They set up two theaters with digital projectors to demo the technology. Essentially, it's a lot like watching a DVD on a projection TV. The difference is that the projector has many times the resolution, and the player has many times the amount of data. If you looked back at the projector, you saw the three separate RGB lights.
So was it better than film? Not much. Jar Jar still sucked, but there were absolutely none of the glitches you see (or hear) with film. If you happen to be viewing a film with a new print, it's about the same, but if you're viewing a film that's been showing for a week, you'll notice a lot of wear on film.
Oh, and they had some guy come out and talk about the technology before the movie. I believe he said it was on an 800GB raid system. So if they're putting Titan AE on a 50GB disk, they've done a lot more compression. Either that, or some of the numbers are wrong.
I'm working on a digital film right now.. It's low-rez -The frames are 1k images (roughly 2 megs a frame) this is far lower than standard film rez.. By my math:
2 megs a frame x 24 = 48 megs a second/2,880 megs a minute
- so unless this film is just over 17 minutes long, it must be compressed- I'm just wondering what kind of compression they are using, and what the hit to quality is like - Unless my math is way off..
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air and light and time and space
This is one of the few cases where copyright has a good effect. Only the copyright holder can permit the editing of their movie, and hopefully they will refuse to do so.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
It's not going across the Internet, just across "a typical fiber-optic network."
According to the C|Net News.com article:
"Qwest will use a private connection to send the file, alleviating the possibility that hackers could disrupt the transfer of the movie."
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These aren't all firsts. I saw The Phantom Menace at the AMC Burbank 14 on June 19, 1999 projected digitally. It was a special presentation (I still have the badge with next strap I got for it) and used the Texas Instruments DLP Cinema technology.
Here's an excerpt from the back of the badge:
"Welcome to the future of Cinema
Texas Instruments is proud to present the first all digital showing of Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace(tm). Digital projetion replaces film projection for the first time ever in movie theatres equipped with DLP Cinema(tm) technology."
After the presentation, I got to look at an example of the heart of the projector, and it was about the size of a large CPU with thousands of small mirrored surfaces on it.
The only thing this Titan AE presentation might be the first of is Internet delivery of the source, but the rest of it has been done before.
The movie, set a thousand years in the future, features the voices of Matt Demon and Drew Barrymore as a pair of teenagers on a quest to save mankind after Earth has been destroyed by alien attack.
Matt Demon? Paging Dr. Freud!
Much Love,
"S"HM
*****
(I refuse to spellcheck out of contempt for your belief system)
First, film projection has a 48Hz or 72Hz flicker rate, not 24Hz, depending on whether the theatre owner installed two-bladed or three-bladed shutters on his projectors.
Second, Dinosaur (and, next, Fantasia 2000) is showing in DLP in several theatres, including the GCC Framingham 14 in MA (screen 9, the largest house). I saw it in DLP and saw the Star Wars screenings in DLP last summer in Secaucus, NJ. I was significantly less impressed with Dino than SW--Dino had way too much video-style edge-enhancement applied to the image, which made the picture "look" sharper than it otherwise would, despite the fact that it made the picture look "wrong" and the resolution of the DLP matrix is substantially lower than 35mm film.
And who is going to pay for all of this equipment? Many theatres are still using Simplex and Century 35mm projectors that were built 40 years ago and still work beautifully when used with new lenses and adequately-sized lamphouses. Why should they go out and spend $100-400k (depending on whom you talk to) for a new machine that doesn't let them do anything more than they are doing right now for a small fraction of the cost?
I do believe that DLP (or some similar technology is the future of film exhibiton, but I'm quite confident that it's "not there yet" in terms of image quality or cost effectiveness.
I'm sick of looking at avi's and mpegs with blocky flecks of color from compression, when are movie theatres going to fix this? Oh, wait... :)
Qwest has done far better, as talked about recently on slashdot in "Qwest Achieves 100-Mile IP Round-Trip At 40Gb/sec"
My only question is why is it going to take 4 hours? If Qwest has been able to do so much better than that in field trials, why aren't they using this opportunity to show their technology in the Real World(tm)? Especially since they claimed in the press release:
More than 750 studio quality streaming video channels can be transported simultaneously
So why can't they do just one in less than 4 hours?
BTW, Qwest had another press relese today about their record breaking speeds.
"I got a half gallon of Jack, and 2 dozen Ant Traps. I'm about to get wild." -me
Anyone happen to remember the name of this design?
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
>The biggest problem with MaxiVision, as far as I
>can tell, is that anything digital is
>automatically *better* in most peoples eyes,
Well, I can't speak as to the quality of maxivision, having never seen it myself. What I *CAN* say for certian is that the digital projections we have NOW are far superior to analog celluloid NOW.
The problem with Maxivision, though, is dreadfully sluggish development. Maxivision is a relatively recent innovation in the analog film industry. But just HOW LONG has celluloid stagnated at the same old 35mm, 24fps, jittery, easily out of focus, rapidly detiorating film stock, tech level??? Seventy YEARS? LONGER?
Meanwhile digital projection can be expected to advance according to some variant of Moore's Law (ie, improvement will be exponential, but the interval might not necessarily be 18 months).
So assume that Maxivision is twice as good as digital NOW (and therefore at least four times as good as standard celluloid NOW). Epidode 2 is due in summer 2002 IIRC. By then, Moore's law will have gone through one and a half iterations. The digital print will, by that time be only marginally better than a Maxivision print.
So, to make the math easier, lets assume that Maxivision actually offers a little better than 2x digital NOW, so that digital will just have caught up by Episode 2. Episode 3 is due in 2005. That's time enough for TWO FULL ITERATIONS of Moore's Law. That makes a digital projection of Episode 3 FOUR TIMES BETTER than the equivelent Maxivision print!
Now, I KNOW that Moore's law doesn't necessarily correspond directly to a doubling of actual *performance*. And video processing and decoding might not keep the same 18 month interval of microprocessors. But the point still stands. Digital image technology advances on a (very steep) exponential curve, while analog film technology has advanced only linearly (and with a VERY SHALLOW slope as well).
For whatever advantages Maxivision might have NOW, it just can't keep up.
john
Imagine all the people...
It's also worth noting that the independent film The Last Broadcast (oft compared to Blair Witch) was also distributed digitally last year to about 10 theaters across the country. I saw it in one and it rocked. from their website (http://tebweb.com/lastbroadcast/): The Last Broadcast was one of the first feature films to be cut entirely on a consumer-desktop PC. Using Adobe Premiere (and other audio/video processing software when needed), the filmmakers were able to create a broadcast quality image at a low price. In October of 1998, it made history when it became the first feature film to be theatrically released digitally via satellite to theaters across the U.S. ... no celluloid!
Yes, I was fortunate enough to live near one of the theaters that was showing Toy Story 2 digitally. I saw it on a standard film projection screen first, and saw the digital version a week or so later...
So, what you are saying is that digital projection is a better format for showing digital cartoons.
Not a very compelling argument.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Really? Promise? You are correct though. I am so dumb. Should have checked the article again instead of just using the 300,000 number and assuming one download per account since the article was very clear it was downloads they were monitoring:
I am clearly no match for your dizzying intellect.
carlos
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As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
Toy Story 2: A cartoon that was originally intended to be produced for a strait-to-video release.
_Of course_ TS2 looked perfect in digital! It was a perfect reproduction of a digital cartoon.
In TPM, the grass on the battlefield had to look like grass, not cartoon grass, real grass. You noticed the digital artifacts because you were actually looking at what was supposed to be an image of something. When watching the Toy Story movies, you _know_ you are watching computer animation, so your expectations are lower. Sheesh!
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
We don't have Free Software (in either sense of the word) because people decided to "liberate" copies of the commercial stuff.
i ndex.html - I highly recommend reading at least the first part of this essay; it addresses the very real implications of the current "malicious until proven innocent" approach that we have been obligated to take with copyright protection.
We have Free Software because ordinary software users (who also happened to be coders) like Linus and Alan and RMS and ESR and the wonderful BSD folks (even Theo) and Larry and Tom and Rusty and many others put their code where their mouth was.
That's really the only way Free Media will succeed, too.
Media "by the audience, for the audience and of the audience" will only succeed if the audience makes its own art. Napster-style appropriation gets us nowhere.
The one thing that we _will_ have to overcome is the idea that artists must either be paid for their hour of work continuously for the rest of their natural lives[1] as the resulting work is used, or not paid for it at all.
Before I get shouted down, I will say that I speak as a visual artist, coder, musician, and writer.
There is a middle ground.
It is becoming increasingly feasible for us to be paid for the work we do itself, like any other profession, rather than having to stand as perpetual toll collectors to the fruits of our labor.
We're not there yet, but self-publication things like the (ill-named, IMO) "Street Performer's Protocol"[2], group comissions, certain types of subscription arrangements, and other systems that do not trample on the freedoms of the audience are becoming increasingly feasible.
The requisite payment/micropayment and audience-gathering systems are are beginning to fall into place.
We ought not to treat the audience like the enemy, and I think it is possible that we may not have to anymore.
I, for one, plan on putting my art where my mouth is.
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[1] Copyrights on works published today run 96 years for publications by corporations or those published under a pseudonym, or 120 years for individuals otherwise. If the legislative decisions of the last four decades are any indicator, they will be retroactively extended even further.
[2] http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue4_6/kelsey/
DNA just wants to be free...
I'm just baffled why people think that a digital cartoon is a good litmus of whether digital film projection can replace film.
Show me something along the lines of "Lawrence of Arabia" on a digital prjector, and we will have something to discuss. Until then, all you are saying is that computers are good at rendering computer-generated images. Do you follow what I'm trying to get across here?
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
The area for the CSS keys is already burned out on any DVD-R blanks you could buy on the open market, meaning the resulting discs would not play on most (all?) DVD players.
DNA just wants to be free...
Arguments continue over encryption, billing, standards, resolution, etc. A big question is whether the movie industry wants to go higher than HDTV 1080p x 24fps. (Some of the stuff shown so far isn't even 1080i). Nobody is happy about compressing video for theatrical presentation. There's also the worry that in a few years, after all the theater gear is installed, the technology will be obsolete.
Anyway, Dinosaur is showing in digital projection using the TI moving mirror array projectors at a few major theaters. It looks good compared to 35mm 24FPS. But IMAX is far better.
Perhaps we could devise a test suite of ~5 films (or clips) that would really test the capibilities of any given playback medium. TS2 plays to the strengts of digital projection, to be fair you'd have to include somthing that shows it's weaknesses, as well as clips that show the strengths & weaknesses of film
"The axiom 'An honest man has nothing to fear from the police'
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
I'd be willing to bet my firstborn that they will also truck a copy of the movie over there on HDD's just in case the download craps.
~GoRK
...it's getting downloaded first: 800x faster then a modem, 4 hour download time, so that's what, a terabyte?
No, they said it was 50 Gbytes. 50 Gbytes * 8 bits/byte = 400 Gbits
400 Gbits / 4 hr = 100 Gbits/hr
100 Gbits/hr / 3600 secs/hr = 1/36 Gbits/sec
1/36 Gbits/sec ~= 28Mbits/sec
Hmm...somewhere between a T1 and a T3...
I am an InfoSec consultant IRL; and in the course of my job, I've occasionally stumbled across some interesting tidbits (which credit-card companies use repeated-XOR encryption, which HMOs keep medical information secure with DES, etc). I have heard reports, but have not been able to verify their accuracy, that at one time Russia's Strategic Rocket Forces were using 3DES (with three independent keys) to secure their nuclear-launch codes.
If true, that suggests a very high degree of confidence in 3DES.
I've got to say that 3DES isn't my favorite algorithm, but properly implemented, it's an extremely secure algorithm. Unfortunately, many software DES implementations manage to screw up the DES spec (probably, I think, due to the infernal complexity of DES).
There's a lot of discussion over whether digital or analog is the better medium to use. I want to point out a few things most people are missing.
It is true that, in theory and all other things being equal, analog gives you better reproduction. Digital (by definition) requires you to sample a signal periodically. Changes occur in discrete steps. Analog gives you smooth transitions, as it isn't limited to a particular rate of sampling.
However, digital has other advantages that, IMNSHO, outweigh the advantages of analog in practical use.
First, digital can be reproduced, stored and retransmitted, without limit, without experiencing any signal degradation. Digital signals can also be encoded with redundant data for error correction. Digital media is also generally more resistant to physical degradation from repeated use then analog media (although that is more by accident then through conscious design).
The end result is that while, in theory, an analog signal offers better reproduction, a digital signal will often have better quality, because analog media tends to get worn out quicker and more easily then digital. This is why I like CD over vinyl records; CDs don't pop and hiss like my records used to. This is why I like DVD over VHS; DVDs do not degrade with multiple viewings.
With proper care, you can generally prevent analog systems from degrading in this manner, but neither I, nor your average movie theater teenage projector jocky, treat media that well.
One other thing: The analog purists argue that digital is inferior because digital is sampled. It is interesting to note that motion video of any type is already sampled: What we perceive as motion is really a series of still frames. If a sampled signal is automatically disqualified, then all motion video is disqualified.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.