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The Future of Digital Cinema
An anonymous reader writes "The New York Times recently had an interesting article on the future of digital cinema. The article talks mainly about the Digital Cinema Initiatives consortium (formed last year by a group of seven major studios) and its work towards establishing a set of standards for theatrical digital projection. DigitalCinemaMag also had an article back in February about the consortium's efforts which included a few more technical details."
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There is no god
Choosier moms choose GIF.
Finally, an excuse for George Lucas to make another seven versions of Star Wars! Man is he going to be happy with this!
I thought the 'Star Wars' digital showing looked very bad.
I saw it at Mann's Chinese theater with a digital projector and I thought it looked awesome
"I can not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presents danger, the solution is ignorance" - Isaac Asimov
But the DMCA won't allow me to make them.
Forget GIF, more choosier GNU moms choose PNG.
It's pretty thin, though. It's probably a better idea if you're going to karma-whore to add some more meat and let it post a bit further down.
I'm totally stoked about the possibilities of Digital Cinema, but my one big gripe is that there is no discussion of going to a higher framerate. Watching film movies the framerate really is annoying, especially in panning shots, everything is just a blurry mess. Now, at the cusp of change, when they are defining a new standard, is one of the few chances to change that. But I don't see diddly about it in the article, and haven't heard anything anywhere about anyone even considering it. What's up with that? Give us quality!!
"I don't know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve."
"Some say a film print is equivalent to 5,000 lines of resolution, but by the time it's been shown a lot, its effective resolution may be no more than 800 lines," Mr. Darrow said.
With today's projectors around 1,300 lines, it seems there's a long ways to go before picture quality or cost make this a viable option for most theaters. As a moviegoer, I really don't care whether the projection is digital or film - picture and sound quality are what's important.
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Here at Techtree.com is an interesting viewpoint about how, if the open source community doesn't take any action, "Microsoft will become the âcontrollerâ(TM) of all digital entertainment you see around you."
He says that the movie industry is already happily using Microsoft's Windows Media 9 for digital theater, and they're lobbying hard to get into many other standards commities.
The columnist also goes on to say "It is inevitable. DRM and Copy Protection will get implemented whether consumers want it or not. The choice of whether we want it to be based on an open technology, or a proprietary technology from one of the âworstâ(TM) purveyors of monopolistic regimes, lies with us, the consumers and the open source community.".
Don't get me wrong, it will certainly be cool for everything to be digital end to end (well, at least to the screen...until they come up with a digital uplink to pipe the movies right into our brains), but will digital cinema help, hinder, or have no effect on the plot of the movies? Meaning, will it make it easier to produce a movie, so more time and energy can be focused on developing the characters and improving the dialog and re-working scenes until the actors get it right?
I hope so...
>Digital Cameras? What about cell cameras
What about digital cinema? Given that that's what the story is about!
Digital cameras are funny, though. $500 for a half-decent one. Think what kind of PC could you get for that? It would include a cd burner, monitor and huge HD. Maybe in a few years they`ll be sensibly priced. I mean, it took 5 years to get to the half-decent resolutions of today.
Am I the only one who doesn't *want* cinemas to move to digital projection? I mean, sure, go ahead and *improve* the quality of the picture and sound, but there's a big difference in quality between a virgin 70mm print (or IMAX) and the blocky (relatively) low-resolution version used by Lucas on AoTC.
Are we going to get stuck watching poor pixelated versions of movies for years?
oh god. just thinking about such a chance.... *drool*
There are also big economic advantages for the studios. They stand to save $1 billion each year if they no longer have to produce and ship film prints...
But digital projectors are much more expensive than conventional ones
I understand that the studios will save money by digital filming, and that each theater will have to spend a lot of money to upgrade to digital... so here's my question. If there are around 5000 theaters in the country, with a total of 20,000 screens (actual numbers would help), and each screen costs $20,000 (seems like much, but OK), why don't the studios purchase the equipment for the theaters? Given $20,000 for 20,000 screens, that's only $400,000,000. If it'll save them $1,000,000,000, why not? Even if each screen costs $50,000, and there are 50,000 screens in the country, that's STILL "only" $2,500,000,000. Given that they're certainly not short on money, it seems like a sensible investment to me.
"It's better to have a gun and not need it than need a gun and not have it." ~ Christian Slater, True Romance
Lower ticket prices ?
better cinemas ?
cheaper consessions ?
better films ?
or just higher profits for cinema companies as they reap the maintence savings from not using analog film projectors
Digital Cinema. NOT Digital Cameras!!!
Sleep is for the Weak
Well, that should make pirating much easier. But I'm sure the studios aren't worried about that.
here
as of 20 June 2003, all Digital Cinema will be done using the animated GIF format...
"... the much less than 2K digital masters for "Star Wars: Episode 2 -- Attack of the Clones"
This explains why AOTC was noticeably pixilated at the particular digital theatre where I saw it - colour was exceptional though.
Here's a bit of info on Finding Nemo, which on the other hand was a digital gem. No noticeable pixilation, and vivid colour.
From others' comments about AOTC YMMV but I don't know why. Does anyone know why different people seeing this saw such a disparity in picture quality?
Esteem isn't a zero sum game
Digital cameras will die when high quality optics become free/very cheap. Until then, the novelty cameras in devices like phones will have plastic lenses and terrible optics in order to cut costs on a feature no one really cares about.
People pay for quality in a dedicated digital camera.
Yeah, well thats what I told him but he wasn't having none of it. All he would say is "adjUHA8JSD 87609oKJLH KLSDUYOIPJlkjKHUYJN" and laugh. I had to shoot the fucker in the knee.
Try this.
Do not read this sig.
It's mostly been considered just a novelty, but maybe digital cinema could usher in an era where more movies in shot and shown in glorious 3D; some theatres could have LCD shutter glasses wired to every seat.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
At a recent trade show, the company demonstrated a new chip capable of displaying a film with a resolution of 2,000 lines.
"The picture was stunning - the audience stood and applauded," said Nick Dager, publisher of the Digital Cinema Report, an Internet trade publication. "Still there was no 'wow' factor there; it was as good as 35-millimeter film, but no better."
Lets see, 2,000 lines being AS good as, and then the savings...
They stand to save $1 billion each year if they no longer have to produce and ship film prints to each of the world's 150,000 screens but instead can transmit them as electronic files through a high-speed data link, or physically deliver them on a hard disk or other storage medium.
No, I couldn't disagree more. Give me that 2,000 line prototype chip, and the billion dollar savings in the first year ALONE I have to say that this is becoming viable in the near-term.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Even if each screen costs $50,000, and there are 50,000 screens in the country, that's STILL "only" $2,500,000,000.
"Only $2.5 billion? But where would they find this cash? If films like Forrest Gump and Spider-Man can't make a profit then where's the money coming from?
What's that you say? Those fims did make money but the accounting figures were just manipulated so as to screw the original writers so that they couldn't get anything from the net profits that they were promised? You mean the people who run the movie business would rather screw people over than pay them the royalties that they're due?
Yet, somehow, you hope that the Hollywood moguls that are so tight with other people's money would spend some of their own cash to benefit others?
Wow, you are naive aren't you?
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
1. how many megapixels does a digital camera need to shoot at to be superior to highest quality analog camera?
2. can question number one apply to digital video cameras?
3. are movies nowadays shot with digital cameras?
I saw Episode II in DLP at Odeon, Leicester Square and at first glance it looked good - there was none of the dirt, scratches or jumping associated with a badly looked after and badly presented 35mm print. But I soon realised that it looked somehow dull - it had none of filmic qualities that bring a life to a print which come from 35mm. It was impressive for an emerging standard, but the quality wasn't quite as good as a well presented 35mm print and there's no way that even touches 70mm prints.
Another point is the digital cinema takes away the skill that comes with projecting a film - go read the forums over at Film Tech and see the care and pride those guys take over the film presentations at the cinemas they work. Those guys know how to present a film properly.
For me it'll be sad day when showing a film becomes a case of clicking "go".
As long as all the integrated devices do everything poorly (which they really do... I don't think you'll find a 3.2 megapixel CCD in a cell phone, and you certainly won't find anything nearly as full-featured as, say, an iPod), I don't think we have to worry about the disappearance of MP3 players and digital cameras just yet.
What matters is not image quality in a test laboratory, but image quality in the local gigaplex. I believe biggest factor determining image quality in current theatres using traditional film is not the technology, but whether or not management gives a damn about picture quality.
For example, take dirty film. There is no reason why film should get scratched or dirty if it is being handled competently. In at least perfectly ordinary local theatre (Showcase Cinemas in Randolph--no, I have NO connection with them except as a satisfied customer) prints run for weeks and weeks and still look absolutely pristine. In other venues, I've literally never seen a showing where the film was clean and unscratched.
So far, I have managed to go to two DLP screenings in the Boston area. In one case ("Ocean's Eleven" at the Randolph Showcase) it looked pretty much the same as 35 mm. Some ways better, some ways worse. Beautifully steady and flicker-free (better) but I had to sit a little further back to avoid seeing visible pixel structure (worse), and it seemed to me the blacks were greyish. Really, about a wash.
The other time... ("Fantasia 2000" at the General Cinema in Burlington)... well, what can I say? The gear was out of commission and they were showing 35mm film in the house that had been designated as showing digital.
Given that the equipment in both venues was probably almost brand-new and hardly used, 50% success in just having the equipment function is not a very good track record.
When operated IN REAL LIFE under the same management as current theatres, using projectionists trained the same amount... how is digital cinema going to hold up? No, the picture will never look scratched, bits being bits, but the media can still get scratched... will there be dropouts? skips? Poorly maintained analog produces a poor picture, but poorly maintained digital can't give you a show at all.
Currently, digital films are loaded off of multiple DVD's onto big, fast disk arrays. How will those fare? Are the disks hot-swappable and will all the theatres have a good supply of spares to swap in if they fail?
Not only does digital projection equipment cost five or ten times what conventional projectors cost, but conventional projectors have service lives that are extremely long--many, many decades. Somehow I doubt this will be true of digital projectors.
Do you really think theatres are going to be anxious to put in projection equipment that is an order of magnitude more expensive, just in order to get a picture that is ROUGHLY the same quality as they get from 35mm? And far, far lower than the quality available from 70mm, common just a few years ago but almost extinct now (the current generation may never have a chance to really _see_ "Lawrence of Arabia" or "2001, A Space Odyssey").
The move to digital cinema is obviously beneficial to studios and distributors, but I'm darned if I see what it does for theatres or theatregoers.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Exactly, but even in the future you can not replace a high quality lens with chips. There will always be professional cameras around for the pros. And even theoratically, no director would like to use his cell phone! Even if some small high quality lenses where invented many pros would like something big and easy to operate!
35mm REGULAR has about 4000 "analog" pixels of horizontal resolution.
A 16 megapixel camera has two discrete greens for ever red and blue CCD cell yielding a sad-ass 16/4=4 megapixel image (or 2000*2000 in theory) though there are no 16 megapixel cameras really, and the best tri-layer camera for 5,000 bucks is almost 2000 across but takes 9.4 SECONDS to save a single image.
The solution : a 100,000 dollar Thomson Viper.
The Thomson Viper can take a 1920*1080 pixel 10 bit (log color compressed) frame every 6oth of a second and stream it out on TWO DIGITAL cables.
Wow! thats a lot of data.
It cannot even store its own data in-camera on that 100,000 dollar system.
How does it work? Mirrors. Little scanning mirrors.
CCD technology will not be able to replace film (35mm) for at least another 5 years, if ever.
And there are alternative single sprocket 35mm standards, and of course 72mm and iMax.
digital photography for film is a sad ass joke!
OK analog lovers aside but think about this the current resolutions purposed are HDTV ish to the point it will be easy enough to downsample to HDTV. I have seen some of the delivery methods purposed and most use satalite for the heavy lifting. There is definatly the posibility of people hooking up dishes and working out the receiver end to then work on the encrypted digital stream itself. I'm allready picturing next day hdtv rez Divx of new releases comming out of the grand caimens (one of those places where it's still legal to do whatever you want with sat signals last I checked). But I'll just be happy if I dont have to see a movie in the first 3 days of release not to have all the dirty film issues to anoy my viewing.
No sir I dont like it.
You mean the Sony Ericcson P800, which does everything you describe, and according to most people, does it well (sans megapixel sensor)?
Definitely not the Nokia 3650 which I have, which has all the features but just can't do MP3 justice yet...
--Dan
NPR had a bit about using digital filing
for TV shows. It didn't save that much money
as i remember. 10% or so. But it was enough
to make a difference.
The summary is that the new technology will enable Hollywood to crush all competition, small and large. Through closed "standards" they will control who can use the projection equipment and what it plays and when. Because no local copy exists, it will all be under the control of the current big movie makers. By using a an industry body like the DVD consortium, they can make sure that no one but them has access to the secret format the projectors use and keep projection equipment so high, no one can afford to have anything but them. So, it will be there way or the highway. No mix and match and no competition except from complete independetnts who will be hobbled by a lack of equivalent quality equipment.
It's the same old story since media was invented, patent, legislate, collude and screw everyone you can. Nasty My prediction is that the DMCA will be used to prevent people from making free projectors the same way it's being used to keep people from modding their xbox or refilling toner cartidges.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Absolutely yes without question.
Which is to say, it probly won't have any effect on the major studios, since the vast majority of their expenses aren't related to film. George Lucas might have saved a million bucks when he shot Attack of the Clones digitally, but at that point who cares?
However, digital processes open up a vast new potential for low-budget films. It will soon be possible to shoot a million dollar film for $100,000, a $100,000 film for $10,000, and a $10,000 for $1,000, with no loss in picture quality whatsoever. It is difficult to overstate the impact this will have. I might go so far as to say it will impact film in the same way that the printing press impacted the novel.
Once digital projection is a reality, all sorts of new possibilities in filmmaking open up...
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
1. I was one of those "grain sniffers". I was at a demo of an upcoming 11,000 lumen high res projector standing a few feet away from the screen, and I couldn't see any pixellation. The brightness and sharpness was astounding. Plus this project runs Linux, decrypting the image on the fly.
2. Image quality depends a lot on the projectionists. I sat in the projection booth of a megaplex for a week a while ago and saw three different projectionists opening up in the morning, and while all of them cleaned the lens, film gates and transport mechanism on the projector, not one of them cleaned the glass at the front of the booth. You could see dirt and finger marks on the glass even before they struck the lamphouse. I asked one of the projectionists about it, and he was pretty contemptuous of the type of audience they got at that plex and the type of low brow action-heavy movies they showed there. I got the impression he wanted to be at some arts house, and maybe if he'd had more respect for the audience he would have worried more about their experience. On the other hand, I work with another projectionist who is meticulous about every aspect of the showing.
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
Frankly, I didn't come out of AotC saying "that was a poor movie, because it had only average picture resolution." I came out saying, "that was a poor movie, because the acting, dialogue and plot were laughably bad. The effects were cool, though."
You know how many virgin 70mm screenings I attend each year? Roughly zero, because they're not available anywhere near me. When digital takes over, I'll still attend zero, because there'll still be none available near me. It's a niche market, and it will still exist, as a niche market, with digital. Meanwhile, though, the theaters I go to all the time will showing films that look just as good as they used to look, and which will only improve.
And you know what? I'll still judge those movies based on what they contain, not how they were shot.
It's funny how in the world of professional journalism, anything you say in an article could be used against you, while I remember back in High School, the newspaper staff would just fabricate quotes entirely, use false information, and they would rarely get caught. Even if they did, it's just a slap on the wrist.
"But because the movie-viewing experience can be a distinctly subjective one, the Digital Cinema Laboratory is also using "expert viewers," motion picture industry professionals, to evaluate picture quality and is considering forming a viewing panel of college students, too. Picture quality is not a simple question of numbers," Mr. Swartz said. "We need to understand better how our brains fill in parts of a picture to improve its perceived quality, even if that data is not literally on the screen."
I had heard that Lucas's digital format was significantly less detailed than regular film and had discounted its popularity for the near future. Maybe once it came up to film quality, I would think it a viable option. But this quote seems to suggest that most of film's quality is lost to viewers because either we don't need it, or decreased quality wouldn't be noticable as our minds would fill it in. I would be very interested in finding out more on this subject.
One more reason to keep an eye on your money.
I've talked to a few cinematographers and they all believe 24 fps is an important component of the "film look", along with grain and other artifacts of film technology. There are effects houses that say they can make digital video look like film.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I believe Eddie Murphy referred to percentages of net profit as "monkey points". Major players get a percentage of the gross.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
This is just a proposal for how it might work but something to note is that most movie theaters use teenagers as the bulk of their employees. Many hackers start as teenagers. I see some interesting developments occuring in the future for digital cinema.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Quality of image- film prints deteriorate over time and w/each play. Going digital, the film will look as good the 10,000 time as the first time.
Speed of distribution- Currently prints have to be distributed to each theater. With digital, they can set up satellite distribution so people worldwide can receive the movie at the same time.
Flexibility within multiplexes- Say you have the rights to "Hulk" this weekend in your 20 screen multiplex. All 5 screens of "Hulk" sell out. With digital prints which could conceivably be stored on your in-house network, you could open up an extra screen to show "Hulk" instead of another movie that no-one wants to watch. Also, if "Hulk" turns out to be a dud, you could shut down one screen and show "Matrix Reloaded" instead.
Thoughts on stocks, markets and trading
Has it occurred to any of your cinematographer friends that maybe this new media will allow them to do things differently, and maybe better (for some things, at least)? Sure, you might want to use 24 fps for effect, but surely there's times where there's things that can't be shot well now, but could look great at a faster frame rate...
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Well it sounds like people will like this tech and that it will improve the films we watch. However, if people are complaining that they did not like watching this version of movies than they must have some work to do.
I firmly believe much of what people find lacking in "digital film" is the noise and grain - much like digital audio. Of course, the technology is very young - digital video is relatively where digital audio was around 1985. Still, taking a "clean" film and adding a bit of "grain" richens it considerably.
Anyway, let's see you do a complete 90 minute feature in one very long take while hauling around a film camera...
Home movie cameras, such as miniDV cameras, all use 4:3 aspect ratio. My next TV is going to be 16:9 and that is where the TV manufacturers are concentrating there efforts. Why don't they make 16:9 camcorders then, so we can make home movies in that format?
How did I spam my own shite it isn't like I am trying to draw attention to myself.
See, now **that** is spamming.
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
I'd imagine it may allow for some greater discretion on the part of filmmakers, but I'd imagine most of it will be seen as profitability.
Another poster said it would help indie films, which might be more accurate, but I think what you might end up with is just better looking indie films.
Odd things can have psychological associations. I've noticed something similar with typefaces. Your brain builds associations between typefaces and emotions based on the way typefaces are commonly used.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
This is the saddest, most pathetic karma whoring I have ever seen. Usually I don't mind that posts with a tiny bit of info get bumped up to Score 5 because it is actually helping people. But this is just sick. What next? pr0n site password lists?
Furry cows moo and decompress.
Nonsense. Free software does not restrict user rights. Period.
The new projection equipment is not for you, so don't bother imporving their DRM. The makers of non-free software would be happy to have all the non-cost labor you provide. Be assured, however, that they will lock it up into machines you can't afford and put you in jail for making your own. They will have the "support" of hardware makers, much as they have the DVD Consortium now. The incumbents are terrified of new studios cropping up around the world and are looking for ways to lock them out of "their" theaters, and enywhere near their theaters. They can not tollerate competition and will do whatever it takes to make sure the new equipment plays their stuff and no one else's stuff in the most controlled fashion. They will also do what they can to make sure alternate equipment is inferior the same way they have done DVDs. It's great to work on free equipment, but you will have many enemies. Please don't help them cage you. Microsoft might not be the winner, but you will be the loser when DRM is implemented.
The best place to put your work is into free and open video work without silly restrictions. Why do you want video you would share be more restricted than canned film production that costs arms and legs? The honest way to make money off a movie is to provide real entertainment better than is practical in your home. That's where the real value is and people will continue dragging themselves into theaters over it no matter how easy it becomes to obtain "perfect" coppies.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Video compression is done largely by storing only what is different for each frame compared to the previous one. And obviously, the more frames per second you have, the more identical to each other they will look.
So I suspect even a frame rate doubling will not have more than a 5-10% effect on file size. Just a laymans opinion, but still.
And with the same disclaimer, I'm pretty sure you can get much better than 5:1 compression.
Please let me know when you can find a cellphone that can do what My cannon A20 digital camera can do. Oh and it needs glass lenses, a good optical zoom, and 2.1 megapixel that makes most 4 megapixel cameras look downright nasty.
I have yet to find a digital camera in the $400.00 range that can touch my 2 year old A20 in image quality. and the cellphone cameras are a horrible joke that look like a fisher-price toy took the picture.
it's like camcorders... None of the HD cameras can even get close to the quality of my Canon XL1 that is 6 years old today. pixels and technology mean absolutely nothing if you give it crap for optics. and NOTHING has optics anywhere near as good as a 6 year old XL1 outside of a $50,000.00 Professional camera.
Denver is the HQ city of Regal Theaters, a holding company that has purchased about half of the movie theatres in the country when the chains overbuilt and went bankrupt a few years ago. They've mostly converted to digital here, so I am pretty much forced to watch that format for new releases.
Digital is fine for CGI films like Nemo, and the numerous "comic book" films this summer. But I do notice pixelation artifats for some types of non-CG scenes.
This NYT article is so much bullshit. The "consortium" is nothing more than an attempt to PREVENT new technologies. I know for a fact because a friend of mine has developed and patented a laser projector for digital cinema, and has been illegally harassed and hounded by all the other big manufacturers, to the point where she's completely unable to get anyone to even consider using her system. Her patented laser projector can produce images with 4000 line resolution, way beyond anything Texas Instruments can produce, and since it uses lasers, it has "infinite focus," that is, you can project it on irregular surfaces and it's in focus at all points. It has no limits on image size, you could project a movie-quality image on the side of a mountain if you had powerful enough lasers. It truly is an imagesetter for motion pictures, at least an order of magnitude improvement over anything that's even in development. And it's been ready to ship for 2 years.
But thanks to the activities of entrenched business interests, represented by the Consortium, her business is being strangled, and she's now fighting a legal battle she is financially inequipped to fight. Through legal trickery and collusion with secret partners, her competitors managed to steal her $350k prototype right out of the development facility, and she's desperately fighting to get it back before they reverse-engineer it. It's multibillionaire theater owners and film/video technologists vs. the individual inventor, and billions of dollars are at stake. It sucks. Bad.
Somehow, I have my doubts that Hollywood, as big and stupid as it may be, is capable of crushing independent cinema completely.
Theater owners probably understand that digital projectors are a major cost to them, and thus they will make sure that the adoption of Hollywood's digital cinema platform goes as slowly as possible. The theater chains are major corporations, too, and if enough of them see no inherent advantage to switching to digital, why wouldn't they raise enough of a stink to delay the transition for years?
Plus, even if the major theater chains do play along with digital cinema, there will still be art house theaters in most cities that cling to traditional film projectors and independent and foreign films. CDs may have made vinyl less ubiquitous, but it never really died. Film will be the same. Let's not forget, also, that many people out there would just as soon rent a video or DVD than go to the theater. Straight-to-video may still carry a stigma, of course, but it's still as good a way to get a film on the market as any, especially if it your town lacks a decent art house cinema. Before the decade is out, straight-to-Internet may be an option for indie filmmakers as well.
Filmmaking is a creative enterprise. I'm sure that people with vision will find creative ways to get those visions out on the market. Pi got made. Memento got made. They won't be the last.
Visit me on the web at Permanent4.com.
http://www.vcdquality.com/
(Score:-1, Wrong)
When comparing pixels to film, the actual pixel resolution is only part of the equation. Yes, standard color CCD arrays use an offset-overlay technique to interpolate more resolution in the final image than any of the single color channels has. The exception to this is the Foevon chip, which has full color in every pixel, and the very high end systems you mention above.
The huge, HUGE advantage of digital imaging that you have not mentioned is grain. The spatial resolution (or how much detail is actually in the picture content) is actually very poor in 35mm, especially in less-exposed areas. If I accidentally underexpose my digital image by one or two stops, I can use a level adjustment to recover a near-perfect image with very little grain, and plenty of detail in even the darkest areas. If I try that with a 35mm film scan, it will be extremely grainy, even from a very low ISO film. The reason 35mm gets by is that at full frame from a reasonable viewing distance and at a correct exposure, the softness, gamma, grain and falloff present a nice pleasing picture.
In every day practical use, I find that a 6 megapixel standard CCD (not foevon) producing a 3k file has better detail than the average 35mm image. Downsampled to 2k and it's an extremely sharp, excellent 2k image. Right now I even have a 3 megapixel (2k) image from an older camera on a billboard just outside of town, it's about 15 feet across, looks really nice! Average viewing distance is a big factor as well.
Most digital visual effects for 35mm and features finished to anamorphic 35 are rendered at 2k resolution. A few years ago I did most of the animation on a 35mm film spot for American Express. It was rendered at 2k and transferred to 35 and it looked gorgeous. If you have very sharp spatial resolution in your 2k image (such as computer generated imagery where every pixel is sharp and perfect) you will not gain much of an advantage going to 3k or above. The only thing that kind of resolution is useful for right now is IMAX. I dispute the idea that 35mm has 4k of useful pixels. After about 3k you won't percieve any practical difference.
CCD technology will not be able to replace film (35mm) for at least another 5 years, if ever.
5 years for widespread distribution is practical. "ever" is ridiculous. :)
Remember, when talking technology, think about practical application and end results. pixels don't exist in a vacuum. (but when they're on a CRT they exist in a vacuum tube! :)
Personally, I'd like to see variable frame-rate 2k to 3k systems for regular movies, and 4k - 5k digital systems for IMAX sized projections, using a format that can be created and previewed on desktop PCs with very fast disk arrays and hires monitors. (check out IRIDAS for an excellent digital cinema and desktop hires playback system, including 3D!)
So independent producers are stuck in a high cost, low quality gheto. That's what I'm worried about. The problem is that the owners of the best projection equipment are not free to promote what they want for fear of the majors. Soon, they will have even less room to wiggle.
Before the decade is out, straight-to-Internet may be an option for indie filmmakers as well.
Like straight to internet music? Oh yeah, that got crushed too. It's one of the reason so many independet ISPs bit the bullet. As the lines are increasingly owned by "content" makers and their owners, it's going to get worse.
The web should act like a perfect market with many sellers and many buyers. Instead, it's being converted into yet another exlusive venue for the same old shit the RIAA/MPAA have been shoveling for the last 40 years. In ten years, a movie theater will have about as much chance to get a movie from an independent producer by www as you have of getting music from anything but a major label today. This probability is doubled if independent producers shackle themselves into the film gheto.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
and Atanajurat (The Fast Runner). The Russian Ark and Atanarjuat were two of the most amazing movies I've seen in the past year, and they were both shot on digital video. Atanarjuat is so engrossing that while watching it you forget time and space and particularly that it's a narrative movie, until they shows shots of the film-making processes during the end credits roll.
One simple rule for its versus it's
I agree with your assessments about the cost of film.
Normally, each 20-minute reel of 35 mm movie film weighs 35 pounds; a two hour movie print will weigh around 210 pounds per print. Small wonder why even on blockbuster films they usually roll the movie out in one region first due to the time and cost need to produce and ship thousands of prints of a movie for worldwide distribution.
With the rapid developments in optical disc storage technology, we will within a few years put on ONE 300 mm wide optical disc weighing at a little over 2.2 pounds (one kilogram) a two-hour movie with 2,000 lines resolution that no only has the English-language soundtrack, but dialogue soundtracks in as many as 8-9 other languages and subtitles in another 10 or more languages! Or by reducing the number of languages available, we could even make the same disc play 48 frames per second playback (the same as the much-touted Maxivision format) for sharp and very smooth motion playback. And given the maturity of the technology making optical discs now, we could stamp out several thousand copies of a movie in high-resolution digital format in a matter of hours, not to mention saving many millions in shipping costs!
I foresee by 2010 a digital projector that will actually be smaller than today's film projectors, with the biggest part of the projector being the projector lamp itself.
While the Maxivision format Roger Ebert touts is in theory a great idea, it still has some major downsides:
1. You need 50 percent more film for a two hour movie. That means shipping costs for one print of a movie will be quite a bit higher even if the film distribution company gets rate breaks from UPS and FedEx.
2. You still haven't solved the problem of film breakage and scratching.
3. Because projectors have to run at 48 fps all day, that means projectors will have to be built with tighter mechanical tolerances. And that means much more stringent training for projectionists to operate and fix these units.
Besides, with the rapid advancements in optical storage in the last 24 months, by 2010 we could easily stamp out 300 mm diameter optical discs that could store over ten terabytes on a single double-sided 300 mm disc. With MPEG-4 compression, a high-quality 2,000-line resolution movie running at 48 fps for two hours could easily fit on a 10 TB optical disc, plus lots of space left for dialogue soundtracks in multiple languages and subtitles in multiple languages.
PhantomHarlock is exactly right in regards to digital film and photography.
Yes, CCD's have their limitations, but they are also at the end of their useful life. Foveon's X3 chip is actually a radically different form of CMOS. It has none of the bandwidth limitations that CCD's do, and also capture red, green and blue on every pixel. There's no moire pattern from interpolation, because there's nothing to interpolate. The technology should easily be able to scale well into the QuadHD 60fps range in the next ten years or so.
You can currently get a system that can capture 640x480 @ 30fps and a firewire output. It's currently meant for product development, but retail NTSC and PAL compatible systems shouldn't be too far behind. I've seen some of the hi-res stills taken with the Sigma SD9, using the X3 chip, and they are astounding. Of course it was obvious that the photographer was a lighting expert. Sometimes that makes all the difference in the world.
Moekandu
Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself; but talent instantly recognizes genius. -- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The biggest technical hurdle with high resolution digital movie cameras is moving all that data from the CCD to the disks.
Sounds like a job for computers with PCI Express connections and Fibre Channel interface to hard drives! =) Maybe this high bandwidth requirement is the reason why PCI Express is being rolled out?
I work with cutting-edge digital video entertainment systems and have seen a bunch of compression and display technologies. I was not impressed by the Star Wars ep 2 digital theater projection I watched at a theater in Arlington, VA last year.
I watched the show at a distance of about two screen heights, and I could make out pixels and annoying aliasing problems throughout.
The colors were good, the picture was steady, no compression artifacts to speak of, but the resolution was clearly inferior to the 35mm projection I had seen the day before on a comparable screen. The end credits in particular were hard to read and had visible scaling artifacts.
This is clearly unsatisfactory. Will the 'standard' for digital theater projection have significantly higher resolution than what we saw last year? Will the early adopters get burned?
According to the Star Wars website, ep II was shot on a Sony digital movie camera with a resolution of 2.2 megapixels, which is just slightly more than regular HD. I don't even think the theater projection used had full HD resolution. The projection system seemed to have an odd pixel resolution which didn't match that of the movie, which may account for the apparent blur and pixel artifacts.
I'm generally not a fan of the idea of all-digital theaters. Too much control from Hollywood and potential for dirty tricks - in the future, when you see a movie in the theater one day may, your friend who sees it the next day may have a wholly different experience as the picture could be continously 'tweaked' and digitally re-edited to 'reflect' the whims of mass audience and address their concerns. Ick. Revisionism abounds.
If Star Wars ep 4 was released today, Lucas might have launched the picture with Han shooting first, the next day wimping out and deciding Greedo should be shown shooting first. Ya know?
Not to mention the asshats who wants to build 'macrovision' into the theater projection systems foiling would-be camcorder bootleggers; this technology supposedly alters the framerate erratically so that a camcorder will fail to sync up with it. But what will THAT do to the playing experience?
I have here lots of concert footage here that was shot direct to video; some was taken from old SNL performances, some was taken from digital sat caps of Rockpalast performances. I use a deinterlacer algorithm (roughly equivalent to the faroujda HD convertor) that expands each field to full screen rez and doubles the frame rate - and there is a HUGE visible difference between the full 50 or 60FPS and 25 or 30FPS.
The difference is because of how quickly those "pixels" get rewritten - but it doesn't have a damn thing to do with them "fading." The simple fact is doubling the frame rate gives the eye more information because even ;tho it's switching faster than we perceive, it's "smoothing over" twice as much signal from the noisy media. It's roughly analagious to doubling the sample rate of audio; the ear may not strictly "need" it, but the increased sample rate increases S/N ratio - no matter if it's audio, or video.
Pray tell, what is this "non-cinema" work (cough *pr0n* cough) you are doing? :)
You calculation ignores that you essentially get a 16mp b&w image, then you use the color data to interpolate the color across the image, getting much more quality than 4 million RGB sample.
The 16 million single samples record much more spatial detail, making the picture much sharper, at a cost of slightly less accurate color reproduction. It's the same tradeoff that JPEG/MPEG compression makes; the human eye is less sensitive to slight color differences than to brightness differences and spatial detail.
Dividing by two is a more accurate rule of thumb for comparing between the sensor types. An 16mp regular (bayer pattern) sensor is roughly equivalent to a 8mp stacked sensor, assuming you weight the factors about evenly (bit lower resolution, bit better color, etc).
Already 11mp bayer sensors are putting all but the most expensive film (and expensive processing/scanning) to shame. The Canon EOS-1Ds produces incredibly detailed pictures. Sure, it's not 24fps (it's 4 I think) but I don't think it'll be long before this quality is available at higher speeds. Digital tech can already replace film, but it'll be perhaps five years before everyone except the luddites has switched.
anyone hear of the new disposables that automatically send a cd with the photos on it so u can view them on your computer...basically like a digital for thse who dont want to spend the money for a real one. Sounds cool to me