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Delivering 8K VFX Shots For the Dark Knight
agent4256 writes "Barbara Robertson over at Studio Daily put forth this article featuring the technical background for the production of The Dark Knight. With most of the film shot with IMAX cameras (producing a theoretical resolution of 18k), the studios could not handle the size. Instead, they cut the resolution by more than half, down to 8K, the maximum resolution for scanned film. 'A single 8K frame requires 200 MB of data,' Franklin says. 'So we had to upgrade our whole infrastructure. We needed faster network speeds to move data around, massively beefed up servers, and — the most important thing — a new compositing solution.' To give you an idea of how far technology has taken us: 'In 1999, when we worked on Pitch Black [released in 2000], we needed to access 2 TB of data,' Franklin says. 'This show used over 100 TB of data.'"
Really? You want a cookie for figuring out that the Batman is a reactionary?
-Peter
Yeah, no, just no. That's idiotic and is looking for deeper meaning then the meaning that is there. Have you seen the movie?
*****SPOILER ALERT***********
1. Harvey Dent attempts to torture a captured underling to get information out of him, Batman stops this, pointing out he's not going to get anything useful out of him. It was russian roulette torture, not waterboarding, but the connections should be obvious
2. Some city-wide cell-phone based surveillance system is set up by batman, and while it does work the movie makes the point that batman can't be trusted with it, he gives it to the CEO of Wayne enterprises and it gets destroyed right after the joker is caught. Again, they don't actually call it the patriot act, but the parallels are not easy to miss. Bush isn't giving the patriot act to France with the string that they destroy it once osama is caught.
3. While Batman does operate outside the law to get things done, he doesn't make that excuse to duck punishment. At the end, he actually takes on blame that shouldn't be his.
4. Batman uses his own money to fund his fight against the joker, wheras Bush spends my tax money and gives his friends tax breaks.
5. Batman refuses to kill villians and instead turns them over to the justice system. Bush attempts to kill terrorist sympathizers, and refuses to give terror suspects due process.
Uh, Klavan is comparing the box office success of a comic book-based action movie that can be read in a strained way as political allegory with the returns of overtly political films and trying to read into that that the political position that the former can be stretched into an endorsement of is more popular than the political position that the latter fairly overtly embrace? Really? And you find this worth repeating, why?
I've got a better, simpler explanation of the box office figures: big-budget films based on popular franchises with no overt political viewpoint tend to, on average, be bigger box office successes than smaller-budget films that overtly embrace a particular point of view on current political issues.
As to the current popularity of W., rather than trying to infer it by strained film analogies, we could look at current job approval poll numbers, where he is currently polling under 30% with a 40% disapproval-approval spread.
So it's a factor 50 in 10 years ? And we're supposed to be impressed ? That's doubling only every 7 quarters.
\u262D = \u5350
Not all of the footage shot makes it into the finished film; this includes alternate angles, scenes shot but never finished, and deleted scenes cut after post-production...and probably other stuff. Even if it is included, it is sometimes composited from multiple source shots, which each need to be stored on disk, on top of the finished shot.
Some problems. . .
1. Batman stops Harvey Dent, but then tries to extract information from the Joker by force.
2. Bush has claimed that warrant-less wiretapping was authorized by congress as part of the war effort, therefore such an authorization would end with the war.
3. If Batman doesn't duck punishment, then why doesn't he turn himself in?
4. Batman used the police force in his trap that ultimately caught the Joker, so he is not above using government money to achieve his goals. He also depends on commissioner Gordan to get leads and prosecute criminals.
5. Batman did, in fact, kill Two-Face, so he does kill villains. The Joker predicted this in the interrogation room (you'll have to break your one rule), and it is a key part of the movie.
I never realized the sheer amount of compression that is going on between the raw footage and getting it into a DVD.
More impressive is the IO bandwidth necessary to play back the uncompressed source in realtime.
Is it possible that not every element of a Hollywood blockbuster (and perhaps not any elements of some) is intended as political/social advocacy?
What he's saying is that in analog film, it can display 500 distinguishable lines, in that you need a white line on either side of a black line to make the black line distinguishable. Yes technically you could say that the white line counts as a line too, but that doesn't help in measuring the abilities of an optical system / photographic medium to allow you to resolve distinct objects in an image (hence "resol"ution).
Because there are no physical "pixels" in analog film, you could cheat and just show a piece of film that is all black and say that it has some astronomical resolution because it is showing millions of black lines all next to eachother and even that it's resolution has a dot pitch of one molecule, but that's just engaging in pointless arguing. (I forget the logical fallacy, ad-something...)
Either way, the original point stands. No matter which of our misinformed resolution measurements we're using, IMAX is still a shockingly higher resolution than full HD; and if you've ever seen full HD up close, that's something to think about.
I guess...