Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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).
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.
Physicists get Hadrons!
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]
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
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."