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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.'"
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.