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.'"

Comments

It's horizontal resolution:

[naz404]

From TFA article comments, it's horizontal resolution

5.6K = 5616x4096

8K = 8192x6144

Re:18k? 8k?

[Kjella]

With 1:1 pixels, 1080p*16/9 = 1920 horizontal. But if you're buying a camera, many "1080p" cameras record in 1440x1080 stretched to a 16:9 frame. Not that it's the big difference but was a little disappointing to find out (but I knew before purchase).

Thought it would be more, actually...

[Space cowboy]

Back in the mists of time, I wrote the database for the content management system that Lucas used on Star Wars I (the Phantom Menace). For reasons I won't go into, it was called 'Cakes', but ILM rebranded it internally as Media-DB.

At the peak of filming, it was coping with 40 DTF tapes/day being ingested. A DTF held 120GB back then (I think), and they were filming for ~3 months. At the same time as ingesting, it had to stream low-res proxies of all the footage to multiple destinations (some local, some not), and deliver high-res frames across the internal network to the animators etc.

Now, I doubt it was doing 40 tapes/day solidly - it'd depend on filming, but even taking 20 tapes/day, over 3 months that comes to ~160TB (assuming a 22-working-day month).

I do have fond memories of doing the James Bond intro-sequence (The world is not enough) with Smoke & Mirrors in London. When there were thousands of frames of nearly-naked highly-attractive women having oil poured all over their bodies, the visualisation tools became... significantly more advanced at a rapid rate :-)

Simon.

Vista

[Anonymous Coward]

But with all those upgrades were they finally able to run Vista?

IMAX - not so much

[bill_mcgonigle]

TFA says:

Nolan shot footage for the major visual-effects sequences with IMAX cameras

Wikipedia says:

The July 2008 Batman Begins sequel The Dark Knight features six sequences shot using IMAX technology, which the movie's press notes describe as the "first time ever that a major feature film has been even partially shot using IMAX cameras"

TFS says:

With most of the film shot with IMAX cameras

I went to see this in IMAX, a three hour drive from here. Don't waste your time if you're thinking of doing it. It looked no better than Iron Man, which I saw in a nice new theater, non-IMAX. This wasn't IMAX at a major science center, like in NYC or Baltimore, where the screens are massive - it was in a shopping-mall IMAX where the screen was no bigger than any other in the complex. Smaller, even, I think, then their best theatre. It had a very minor curvature, I think: this isn't fill-your-visual-field like I was expecting.

Sure, the sound was punchy. But I was expecting a 60FPS 70mm 4-story extravaganza, and got a simply nice theatre, but with plenty of flicker, 35mm presentation, and no discernible benefits. It seems IMAX is following in the footsteps of THX. Moral of the story: not all IMAX theatres are created equal - check first.

I hope this will save somebody else some gas.

Re:Not to be pedantic...

[Thagg]

Darren,

In the Good Old Days of photochemical process work, say on Star Wars, it was not uncommon to shoot the visual effects shots on VistaVision and the rest of the movie at normal film resolution. The idea was that the process work at the time added significant grain, blurriness, and reduced contrast to the image, so starting from a larger format with less grain helped make the visual effects shots blend in somewhat more seamlessly.

Doing the process shots on IMAX is a bit of a step up from VistaVision (ok, maybe two steps up!) but it makes some sense. Modern film stocks are much better than what was used on Star Wars, but there will always be something to be said for having more film acreage to work with.

That said -- there is a bit of "because we can" here as well. When they made The Dark Knight, they apparently didn't want to compromise in any way.

[disclaimer: I'm VFX supervisor for a film in production right now, with some 1000 shots...none of which we are doing at 8K]

Re:Points are Incorrect

[DragonWriter]

Bush has claimed that warrant-less wiretapping was authorized by congress as part of the war effort

No, Bush has claimed many justifications for warrantless wiretapping; he has argued, among them, that it is based on inherent Presidential powers over foreign affairs and security over which Congress has no authority whether or not there is a war; he has also claimed that if he had needed authorization for it, which he did not, the authorization for the use of military force also implicitly authorized it. He has never said that the warrantless wiretapping policy would ever end, and he has made arguments which suggest that the War on Terror can't ever end anyway, so saying that something would end when it did would have been meaningless.

From TFA

[Peeet]

There are a couple of mentions about how they had to go in and hand code some tools specifically for the work on this movie (mostly because current tools couldn't handle the amount of data needing to be worked on at any one time) but what I found most interesting was:

Matte painters worked in 8K resolution, and the artists painted texture maps in either 8K or 16K resolution, depending on the view. âoeThat was a bottleneck,â Franklin says. âoePhotoshop doesnâ(TM)t handle images above 4K very efficiently and itâ(TM)s a closed tool, so we couldnâ(TM)t get in there and add stuff to it. Working with Photoshop was possible, but slow. It took three or four times longer than usual to paint the textures.â

I doubt the GIMP would have been able to do it either, but I wonder if in the future, it might get used for a project similar to this because it is open source and can be modified for special use like this.

Re:100TB!

[E IS mC(Square)]

Well said. More here : http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/01/21/business/porn.php

Producers are taking steps to hide the imperfections. Some shots are lit differently, while some actors simply are not shot at certain angles, or are getting cosmetic surgery, or seeking expert grooming. "The biggest problem is razor burn," said Stormy Daniels, an actress, writer and director. "I'm not 100 percent sure why anyone would want to see their porn in HD."

most of that isn't making it onto a DVD

[YesIAmAScript]

That's 8k resolution. DVD only supports 0.7K resolution.

So one of steps is to cut the image down by a factor of 10 IN BOTH DIRECTIONS.

That means 99% of the pixels are thrown away before the compression even starts.

BluRay would keep 6% of the pixels, which is a lot more, but still nothing compared to the original.

And remember the theoretical resolution of IMAX is about 5x as much again (2.3x more in each direction).