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

two frist p0sts in a row

[pyro_dude]

oh my gawd!

Pitch Black?

[Wandering Wombat]

"I thought you said the hardware was clear!"
"I said it looked clear!" "Well, what's it look like now?" "... Looks clear."

Re:Pitch Black?

[Anonymous Coward]

"on Pitch Black [.....] we [only] needed to access 2 TB of data"

well duh, you don't need that much data for a black screen....

Re:Pitch Black?

[sentientbeing]

It must have been uncompressed

18k? 8k?

[KlomDark]

What is the meaning of these "k's" they are referencing here? I'm thinking it's not "kilo" in this case if 18k of them takes 200 gigs to store, unless they are using some kind of anti-compression on the data.

Re:18k? 8k?

[Captain Splendid]

Thousand. Duh. Context is everything.

Re:18k? 8k?

[jonnythan]

K = thousand, and they're referring to lines of resolution.

For comparison, 1080p HDTV has 1080 lines of resolution. That IMAX camera records around 18,000 lines.

Re:18k? 8k?

[MyNymWasTaken]

The 'k' refers to the horizontal resolution. The vertical resolution is a given since the aspect ratio is a fixed 1.34:1.

18K means a 18000 x 13433 resolution frame.

Re:18k? 8k?

[Anonymous Coward]

What is the meaning of these "k's" they are referencing here? I'm thinking it's not "kilo" in this case if 18k of them takes 200 gigs to store, unless they are using some kind of anti-compression on the data.

Horizontal resolution.

Re:18k? 8k?

[Anonymous Coward]

Note that the poster that you replied to already said kilo, and I'm pretty sure every person on this website knows what the prefix for thousand is. What we want to know is what the K is specifically, there are eighteen-thousand _______ per frame, and we want to know what the _______ is.

Re:18k? 8k?

[jonnythan]

You have it transposed.

Not horizontal resolution - number of horizontal lines. Just like the 1080 in 1080p refers to the number of horizontal lines. 1080p is 1920x1080.

8K refers to 8000 lines of resolution, so that it makes it the vertical resolution.

See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_cinematography

Re:18k? 8k?

[gEvil (beta)]

For comparison, 1080p HDTV has 1080 lines of resolution.

Actually, 1080p has 1920 lines of horizontal resolution (just under 2K, which is 2048).

Re:18k? 8k?

[Anonymous Coward]

It also means -255.15 degrees Celsius. (i.e. 18 kelven :P)

Coincidentally, that's the temperature that my spine feels when watching the frightening performance of the Joker in an IMAX theatre!

Re:18k? 8k?

[Anonymous Coward]

1080p is roughly 2K, because that refers to the horizontal resolution: 1080p is 1920 pixels wide. That's right. Most digital cinemas don't deliver a higher resolution than a 1080p home cinema. 4K projectors are not yet widely deployed. Regarding the initial question: 18K with an aspect ratio of 2:1 is 162 megapixels. 8k is 32 megapixels. 16bit per channel is 6 bytes per pixel: 32 megapixels * 6bytes/pixel = 192 megabytes.

Re:18k? 8k?

[mewsenews]

You have to look at the diagram in the wikipedia article you linked. The terms 2K and 4K as used in the visual effects industry refer to frame width. 2K is 2048 wide and 4K is 4096 wide.

It is different than the terms used for HDTV, where 1080p means 1080 vertical.

(I've worked in a VFX shop)

Re:18k? 8k?

[GregPK]

Sheesh, thats 241 megapixels

I couldn't imagine trying to edit that on anything less than a late model cray system.

Re:18k? 8k?

[prockcore]

8K plates are typically 8192x4320

At 16 bits per channel, it's 71MB per channel.

That'd be 212MB for the color plate alone, not to mention the shadow, specular, and reflection plates.

Re:18k? 8k?

[imashination]

I work in film studios, you're wrong. Even your own link says you're wrong.

2k, 4k and 8k, when referred to film, are the horizontal resolution.

720p and 1080p when referred to TV sizes, refer to the vertical resolution.

Look at the image in the middle with the coloured blocks
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_cinematography [wikipedia.org]

It shows 2K being just slightly larger than 1080p. If 2k referred to the vertical size then it would cover 4 times the area

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).

Re:18k? 8k?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, 8K _does_ refer to the horizontal resolution when you are talking about film scanning.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_picture_film_scanner

Re:18k? 8k?

[EvanED]

Actually, 1080p has 1920 lines of horizontal resolution (just under 2K, which is 2048)

Really? Why would lines of resolution be measured in powers of 2?

1080 isn't a power of 2. 1920 isn't a power of 2. 720 isn't a power of two. Nor is 480. So doesn't seem to me that resolution naturally falls on power-of-two boundaries. I would say 2K lines of resolution would be 2000 lines of resolution.

Re:18k? 8k?

[EvanED]

Reading other threads below, looks like it is indeed 2048.

This is the problem with redefining terms that have been in use for a couple centuries...

Re:18k? 8k?

[Anonymous Coward]

K = thousand

K = Kelvin
k = thousand
SI units are case sensitive. ;) Even non-SI units are case sensitive. b = bit, B = byte

Re:18k? 8k?

[guaigean]

Hey, what's that flying over your head at high speed?

Re:18k? 8k?

[jd]

Since the golden ratio is the theoretical ideal for all things visual, a power of e might make more sense.

Re:18k? 8k?

[PRMan]

Actually, this isn't correct. A 1080i signal can vary between 1920, 1440, 1280, etc. horizontal lines of resolution while still being 16X9. This is, of course, in the analog realm.

Obviously in the digital realm, things are far more fixed.

Re:18k? 8k?

[Peeet]

1080p has 1080 horizontal lines of resolution and 1920 vertical columns of resolution. Whether the 18,000 they are referring to are lines or columns, I'm not sure, because the only resolution data I can find on IMAX is 10,000 columns by 7,000 lines. Although that is just an "equivalency" as it's all recorded onto analog film which doesn't have "pixels" or "lines" or "columns", per se. It's only when you scan it (and thus the quality of your scanner I would assume) that digital measurements really start to become relevant.

Either way, IMAX resolution FTW.

Re:18k? 8k?

[Anonymous Coward]

And for those of you who were thinking that their digital cameras are seriously hi-res before reading TFA.. Still-image cameras have been capable of this resolution since 1901:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/120_film

Roughly.. Actually, the film emulsion has quite a bit to do with the "resolution" that is capable of being extracted from a frame of film. IMAX frame sizes are about 5cm x 7cm, the earliest 120 cameras were capable of 6cm x 9cm.

Re:18k? 8k?

[evanbd]

Film has a resolution, even though it isn't in the form of nice sharp-edged pixels. It's a question of how close together two objects can be and still be distinguished -- the distance is called the circle of confusion, within which the two objects are not fully distinct. Lenses, film, and printing process all play a role in the resolution of the final product. For test work, one usually uses a printed image with a very fine array of slowly converging lines, and you look for how close together the lines can get before they become indistinct. As a result, the number of (distinguishable) lines you can fit on the film is the natural way to measure its resolution. So film really does have "lines" and though they're not quite the same as in a digital system, they're remarkably close.

(Be aware there's a factor of two in there for Nyquist; a 1000 pixel wide display can only show 500 lines, obviously, and the same effect applies to analog systems.)

Of course, with better digital sensors (ie lots of megapixels), the lens quality becomes the limiting factor, and it would again make sense to speak of the imaging system in terms of lines of resolution rather than megapixels. There's a reason cheap cell phone cameras don't produce as sharp an image as a real camera with a good lens; if you want to measure the quality of the entire imaging system, you end up back with old-fashioned analog lines of resolution as one of the fundamental metrics. (Of course, there are plenty of other attributes, like various forms of noise and distortion.) If you read a good review of a digital camera, they'll point it at a test piece and measure available lines of resolution, just as they would for film.

Re:18k? 8k?

[nattt]

A 1000 pixel display can display 500 line pairs, which is 1000 lines.

Re:18k? 8k?

[fastest fascist]

It's the width of a frame in pixels.

Re:18k? 8k?

[budgenator]

a lonesome K is kilopixels of horizontal resolution, so in 16:9 format a 16K image would be 16K wide by 9K high. The pixels are probably 32 bit floating point or 16 bit interger per color, Red, Green, Blue, and Alpha

Re:18k? 8k?

[Peeet]

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...

Re:18k? 8k?

[evanbd]

It can display 500 distinct black lines on a white background. Or vice versa. When counting lines, both in the normal world and photography, you don't usually count both the lines and the spaces between them. When counting pixels, you count each pixel as a line, because it's a line of pixels separated by the miniscule gap between them. But if you're drawing with a pencil or exposing film, you only count the drawn / exposed part, not the background.

Re:18k? 8k?

[budgenator]

an open source image editor Cinepaint is in the middle of a rewrite to convert from GTK to FLTL, Fast Light Toolkit to free up some memory and CPU cycles by using a more spartan interface. The pro's want they work to be pretty, not their software.

Re:18k? 8k?

[budgenator]

what no Alpha channel?

Re:18k? 8k?

[prockcore]

The alpha channel is done as a separate mask plate. So there are mask plates for the shadow plate, specular plate, etc.

Re:18k? 8k?

[CarlosM7]

Undoing accidental offtopic mod

Re:18k? 8k?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're all almost right. In VFX when we say "2k" we don't mean exactly 2048. These days "2k" usually means 1920, but in the past each studio used a slightly different number, as when your shooting to 35mm film as output, the math to pick a digital width is pretty fuzzy.

Re:18k? 8k?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget that the more expensive cameras make use of multiple layer sensors, where each pixel gets all colors detected, rather than using a 4 pixel grid to pick up a pseudo-color. This being the case, each pixel could maintain more than a byte of data depending on the color-depth recorded..

Re:18k? 8k?

[iminplaya]

...and we want to know what the _______ is.

Well, I want to know what is is.

Re:18k? 8k?

[iminplaya]

Decimal or Binary?

Regular or menthol? Filtered or unfiltered?

Re:18k? 8k?

[mr_exit]

8k is the measurement of the frame size.

Unlike HDTV the frames in film land are measured horizontally across the frame. So 8k means that the frames are 8000 pixels (or close to) wide. This is done as films are worked on in many different aspect ratios, so the vertical number changes a lot.

Most films for standard cinema are 2048 pixels wide, sometimes 1920 if they are shot on HD

Re:18k? 8k?

[mr_exit]

It means that breaking down the frames into segments for rendering or any other processing gets really easy. Need to render faster and have lots of space on the renderwall? cut it into 512 or 256 pixel slices and go from there.

Re:18k? 8k?

[The_Wilschon]

Perhaps my knowledge of notable irrational numbers is deficient (although I suspect not). What exactly is the connection you see between the Euler number and the golden ratio?

Re:18k? 8k?

[gacl]

Actually K = Kelvin. k = thousand.

Re:18k? 8k?

[KlomDark]

+1 informative to this guy - the best explanation I've seen in all the replies.

Thanks!

8K? 18K?

[niceone]

What does K mean here?

Re:8K? 18K?

[tyrione]

What does K mean here?

K should reference Kelvins, whereas k represents in thousands.

Re:8K? 18K?

[MyNymWasTaken]

The horizontal resolution. The vertical resolution is a given since there is a fixed aspect ratio of 1.34:1.

18K means a 18000 x 13433 frame.
8K means a 8000 x 5970 frame.

Re:8K? 18K?

[sunderland56]

8K is the width, in pixels. Digital film work always talks about picture width - because the picture height is variable, depending on what aspect ratio is being used.

I'm not sure of the exact format that was used on that picture, but roughly speaking, we're talking 8192 wide x 4096 tall x 3 components (RGB) x 16 bits per component - or 192 MB per frame. That's 4.5 terabytes per second.

As far as "theoretical resolution" being 18K - only if you want to see individual film grains. No commonly available scanner goes above 8K so it doesn't much matter what the theoretical number is.

Re:8K? 18K?

[Anonymous Coward]

K means kilo, meaning kilopixels. It's a reference to the digital resolution of the frame, in this case it refers to the horizontal resolution (whereas HDTV resolutions refer to the vertical resolution, e.g. 480p, 1080p). In standard cinematic widescreen format (2.35:1) 8K corresponds to appx. 8000 x 3404 while 18k corresponds to appx. 18000 x 7660 (in practice "8K" usually means more like ~8500 though, these are just for purposes of comparison).

Note that "8K" is roughly 30 megapixels while "18K" is roughly 140 megapixels, per frame.

Does that clear things up?

Re:8K? 18K?

[sunderland56]

Don't you wish slashdot had an edit feature? Clearly I meant 4.5 *gigabytes* per second.....

Re:8K? 18K?

[JCOTTON]

What is a "K" in this context? I dont know. But here is a clue from comments to the original article:

Celboy, good question. Barbara went back to Paul Franklin at Double Negative and asked him to run us through the exact numbers. Turns out the 5.6K files took up a little less space than he had remembered. Here are his notes: ### 5.6K: 5616x4096; A full 5.6K was actually about 100 meg for the exr and 122 meg for the cineon/dpx; 8K: 8192x6144; approximately 150 meg for the exr and 200 for the cineon/dpx; exr files are run length encoded whereas cineon/dpx is not, so as well as being more efficient they also vary in size depending on how much detail (difference between pixels) there is on a frame to frame basis; My mistake on the downrez figure for the 8K to 5.6

Looks like the K indicates number of lines per frame. They use a formual to determine number of pixels per line *4:3 ratio or something like that.

Re:8K? 18K?

[camperdave]

I think the K refers to the image size (as in thousands of pixels horizontally). From comment 4 from The Fancy Article:

5.6K: 5616x4096;

A full 5.6K was actually about 100 meg for the exr and 122 meg for the cineon/dpx;

8K: 8192x6144;

approximately 150 meg for the exr and 200 for the cineon/dpx;

So, most computer screens are in the 1-2K range. The film was shot in 18K, so about nine screens across.

Re:8K? 18K?

[gblackwo]

Well, an edit button would get abused on these forums, it also promotes think before you speak. I can understand why you don't want to get ripped apart for putting the wrong units, we just tore a guy a new one for mistaking GB's and TB's

Re:8K? 18K?

[evenmoreconfused]

The reference you quote does make it clear, but you've drawn the wrong conclusion:

> 5.6K: 5616x4096; A full 5.6K was actually...

> 8K: 8192x6144; approximately ....

Thus 8K is 8192 pixels wide (not lines per frame) and 6144 pixels high. We commonly also use 2K's (2048 x 1501), 4K's (4096 x 3002), etc.

Also note that the digital professional cinema (not HDTV) industry (the world of DCI) also always uses image width rather than height to define resolutions (2K = 2048 x 1080, 4K = 4096 x 2160).

[/me = Technical Director on several digital 3D Imax films back through the late '90's -- these Hollywood guys are just now discovering stuff the rest of us have known for ages]

Re:8K? 18K?

[Ruud Althuizen]

It does have one, it's called Preview. Just learn to use it properly.

Re:8K? 18K?

[HeadlessNotAHorseman]

K means Kelvin. They store the film at very low temperatures so that it lasts longer!

please see this movie (we are desperate)

[Anonymous Coward]

and so Slashdot presents another weak technology/movie/slashvertisment tie in, in a desperate attempt to get visitors to go to the cinema to see another tired franchise devoid of originality and a cohesive story plot

iam sure i will enjoy downloading it

Re:please see this movie (we are desperate)

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure they're really that desperate at this point. It set all time box office records its opening weekend.

Re:please see this movie (we are desperate)

[Anonymous Coward]

"another tired franchise devoid of originality and a cohesive story plot"

a) you're an embarrassing troll
b) you wouldn't know an amazing movie if it walked up and fucked you in the ass
b) "story plot?" you fucking retard...

Re:please see this movie (we are desperate)

[Anonymous Coward]

"you wouldn't know an amazing movie if it walked up and fucked you in the ass"

Sounds like a good story plot to me.

Compression

[DirtySouthAfrican]

You're doing it wrong.

Re:Compression

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you sure? Lossy compression is probably a bad idea, lossless compression of frames this size may reduce data size on disk by a significant factor, but then you hit a lot of processing overhead which might make it more trouble than it's worth.

Try this experiment. Open up a 1024x768 image in photoshop, then resize it to be 800% larger (8000 horizontal pixels by whatever). Then add, oh, 15% noise (to similate real image scans, resized images by themselves are easier to compress than normal images). Then save as a .jpg, baseline format, highest quality (12).

How big is the resultant file? How long does it take your computer to open it? Now save it as a .bmp, how long does it take to load that file? Now multiply the difference in load and save times for compressed files by tens of thousands of frames and multiple levels of processing.

On my system I get about a factor of 1.5:1 reduction in file size with compression but easily a 1:10 increase in processing times to open or save the file. It seems like it's just not worth the overhead.

Re:Compression

[anss123]

I've made similar observations. Even with the latest hardware, PNG compression is slower than saving raw 24-bit BMP files across a Gigabit network; this despite the fact that PNG reduce the file size with about 70 to 80% (on images of scanned text).

That said, large Jpeg files are indeed slow to open, but this may be partly due to the software used to open them. Not that I know, but the algorithms might make assumptions that fail on large jpeg images. I've at least noticed that "good" PNG compressors not only take vastly longer to compress images but surprisingly do a much worse job with the large images I worked with - yet being much better on the same images just reduced to lower resolutions.

Re:Compression

[neumayr]

So basically you observed that IO is not the bottleneck in PNG compression.
*gasp*

Those are world shattering findings, you'd better write a paper or something, you'll be rich and famous is no time.

Re:Compression

[anss123]

So basically you observed that IO is not the bottleneck in PNG compression. *gasp* Those are world shattering findings, you'd better write a paper or something, you'll be rich and famous is no time.

Woho, I'm on my way to riches. You OTOH have to work on your sarcasm.

Re:Compression

[DarkOx]

True, but CPU you can do, I mean it should be trival to cut the image into areas and thus parallize the decompression job in a way that you can hand it off to a number of CPUs.

Disk / network IO seems like it would be quite a bit harder. As an other poster pointed out 4Gbps only gives you about 2fps. Now I have done a little work with some low end SAN hardware. 4G is about as fast as fiber HBAs get and 10G and faster switches get fantastically expensive. A single controller can only run so many shelves of disk before it become a bottleneck itself in terms of IO, so for a job like this you are going to need lots of controllers and lots of Fiber channel switching hardware. If you can squeeze the data volume down 20% that is going to be a big win in terms of cost and performance.

The other thing you have to remember is you proably have at least a double digit number of people wanting different data at the same time so you need quite a bit more throughput then first blush.

An ISCSI san soulution could give you a pretty good control to disk ratio, you build it all on 10GigE and then maybe some sort of specialized decompression gateway between the client and the storage contollers, running 10GigE all the way to the client systems?

Re:Compression

[budgenator]

these guy don't use jpeg in the pipeline, they use something like DPX, OpenEXR and 16-bit TIFF

Re:Compression

[bonch]

You're doing it wrong.

God, I'm sick of overused internet cliches.

Selective input control?

[plasmacutter]

I've heard of selective output control "downrezing" HD for users, but apparently the MPAA doesn't trust its own member organizations, and is exercising selective input control as well?

A right-wing movie

[mi]

Not exactly "on-topic", but related. There is a convincing argument, that Batman is a paean to Bush — a right-wing movie, that's immensely popular, while the left-wing ones ("Stoploss," "In The Valley of Elah," "Rendition" and "Redacted") bombed (pun intended by the blogger):

Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past.

Re:A right-wing movie

[pete-classic]

Really? You want a cookie for figuring out that the Batman is a reactionary?

-Peter

Re:A right-wing movie

[Anonymous Coward]

Except Batman doesn't inexplicably throw thousands of Robins at Catwoman after the Joker does something bad, while he sits back doing nothing

Re:A right-wing movie

[Evangelion]

If there was a God, I'd thank him that I'm not you.

Re:A right-wing movie

[oskard]

Batman is a paean to Bush

You couldn't be more right.

Re:A right-wing movie

[VoltCurve]

Batman's lack of leadership has plunged our nation into weakness?

Re:A right-wing movie

[spazdor]

Not to go (-1, Offtopic) but...
The fact that your sig has the phrase "What Arabs mean", without any further group quantifiers, is evidence that you don't have anything useful or coherent to say about world politics.

Re:A right-wing movie

[philspear]

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.

Re:A right-wing movie

[sheldon]

Anyone thinking Batman has a simplistic right-wing message is naive or hasn't seen the movie. The message is pretty complicated, and there's been a lot of discussion about this in blogs this week.

One of the better analysis, and some discussion which references the comic books:
http://www.cogitamusblog.com/2008/07/the-dark-night.html

Re:A right-wing movie

[The Ultimate Fartkno]

"Except Batman doesn't inexplicably throw thousands of Robins at Catwoman after the Joker does something bad, while he sits back doing nothing"

Reposting non-Anon, just so people browsing above +0 will actually see this.

Re:A right-wing movie

[DragonWriter]

There is a convincing argument, that Batman is a paean to Bush [wsj.com] -- a right-wing movie, that's immensely popular, while the left-wing ones ("Stoploss," "In The Valley of Elah," "Rendition" and "Redacted") bombed

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.

Re:A right-wing movie

[Yvan256]

Hey mi, thanks for making Spider-Man laugh.

Re:A right-wing movie

[mi]

"What Arabs mean", without any further group quantifiers

Quantifiers (a.k.a. "small print") would not fit into Slashdot's limits on signature's overall length. At least, you aren't demanding, I quantify the words "mean" or "occupation"...

That said, I doubt (although don't completely rule out) there exists an Arab in the world, who means anything else by the term "occupation" in the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Re:A right-wing movie

[mazarin5]

Just to add a bit of fun to Batman vs. Bush:
http://www.ebaumsworld.com/video/watch/790644/

Re:A right-wing movie

[mi]

Uh, Klavan is comparing the box office success of a comic book-based action movie

Perhaps, you should've, uhm, dare I suggest it, read the article?

Re:A right-wing movie

[Ethanol-fueled]

Anyone thinking Batman has a simplistic right-wing message is naive or hasn't seen the movie.

Maybe, but there are a couple things I'd like to point out:

-> A main bad guy is a Chinese businessman

-> Batman's partner saves the day by...illegally eavesdropping on everybody's cell phone audio like it's a good thing(tm)?

-> It portrays the mentally ill as being criminal zombie henchmen willing do do the bidding of any crazy bad guy.

Coincidence? As with some of the other batman movies, it's hard to tell if they're lampooing those actions or endorsing them.

Re:A right-wing movie

[spazdor]

That said, I doubt (although don't completely rule out) there exists an Arab in the world, who means anything else by the term "occupation" in the Arab-Israeli conflict.

This assertion is patently silly at best, and offensive at worst. You don't think a single member of the Arab race is a Zionist?

Say "Palestinian sympathizers" if that's what you mean. I promise it will fit into the character limit. Maybe then your rhetoric will sound less like thinly-veiled racism.

Re:A right-wing movie

[Sancho]

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

He won't get anything useful out of him because the guy is mentally ill, not because torture is ineffective. Batman uses torture. Remember the bit where he's "counting on" the fall not killing Sal?

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.

No, Batman becomes the scapegoat. He does things that need doing, whether or not they are in the law. Gotham needs for Harvey to be remembered fondly? Batman takes the fall. Gotham needs the Joker to be put down? Batman engages in wide-scale, highly illegal wiretapping.

He may have taken blame that didn't belong to him, but he still hasn't turned himself in. Why not? Probably because he justifies his actions by saying, "Gotham needs someone to do the dirty work." If he was actually tough on crime, he'd turn himself in, just like the Joker wanted.

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.

Oh, now you're going to claim that Arkham isn't basically Gitmo? (Ok, that was meant to be tongue-in-cheek.)

Re:A right-wing movie

[Jesus_666]

Except Batman doesn't inexplicably throw thousands of Robins at Catwoman after the Joker does something bad, while he sits back doing nothing

That would be pretty entertaining, though.

Joker: "Batman is rich and smart. You aren't. Why do you think YOU can stop me, Robin?"
Army of Robins: "Zerg rush! KEKEKEKEKEKEKEKEKEKEKE!"
Catwoman: "AIEEEEE!"
Joker: "...That would be pretty scary if he was actually rushing the right person."

Re:A right-wing movie

[bill_mcgonigle]

where he is currently polling under 30% with a 40% disapproval-approval spread.

And The Dark Knight has a 95% approval rating. The other 5% must be the same people who think Congress is doing a good job.

Re:A right-wing movie

[mi]

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.

That's foolish. Throughout history torture (or a mere threat thereof) proved itself as a useful tool, depending on circumstances (such as the ease, with which the obtained information can be verified). We frown upon it only because of the risk, however small, that an innocent may be subjected to a permanently disfiguring procedure by mistake...

If, however, that small risk, what multiplied by the magnitude of the possible damage, dwarfs the cost of even the innocent's entire life, or when the procedure is not, in fact, disfiguring in any way (such as waterboarding), to continue to reject the torture is to show the weakness, that has already lead a number of advanced civilizations to collapse at the hands of less sensitive ones.

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.

But the citizens might want to ask for lenience or forgiveness for someone, who "got things done" — the good things.

Batman uses his own money to fund his fight against the joker, whereas Bush spends my tax money and gives his friends tax breaks.

Hey! I must be a Bush's friend. Even the people, who paid no taxes at all, got their "refunds"... We must all be Bush's friends!

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.

Well, not-killing (anyone) is part of the idealized hero's credo — can't demand it of a real-life persons. You are dead-wrong about "terror suspects" — they did receive (what Bush believes to be) due process. You just disagree with him, on what is these guys' due...

Re:A right-wing movie

[philspear]

He may have taken blame that didn't belong to him, but he still hasn't turned himself in. Why not? Probably because he justifies his actions by saying, "Gotham needs someone to do the dirty work." If he was actually tough on crime, he'd turn himself in, just like the Joker wanted.

That's a good point and is true, but I was meaning more along the lines of "batman doesn't defend himself while bush has a press secretary."

Not a perfect example, because of course Batman does run from the law which is somewhat equivalent to the press spinning. Still, running from the law to get away with vigilanteism is substantially different than spinning the press to get away with war crimes. Batman needs to break the law to save it, then he runs from the cops so he can save more lives. Bush breaks the law ostensibly to save the country, and then lies about it to save face.

I guess though that's not really ways in which the movie is not praising Bush, as that's more my interpretation.

While we're on that subject though, Batman breaks the law to save Gotham, which was actually threatened. Bush broke the law not to save the union: it was never in danger. Al Qaeda never posed a significant threat, their actions were thoroughly counterproductive even absent a heavy-handed military response.

Re:A right-wing movie

[DragonWriter]

Perhaps, you should've, uhm, dare I suggest it, read the article?

I did. Klavan argues exactly as I described, and, beyond that, that the whole reason that the supposedly-Bush-praising Dark Knight and supposedly similar films have to be metaphorical (despite portraying supposedly more compelling, resonating political/moral values) while liberal films are literal (despite portraying supposedly less compelling political/moral values) is a supposed conspiracy of the "artistic community" that makes it so that "Hollywood conservatives" cannot "take off their masks and speak plainly in the light of day" and "pay President Bush his due and make good and true films about the war on terror".

He ignores entirely that (1) literal, rather than metaphorical, conservative movies are made, all the time, and do, in general, no better and perhaps worse than equally literal liberal movies, and (2) moviegoers may be interested in films for entertainment value rather than as political polemic; enjoying movies about masked vigilantes doesn't endorse a political viewpoint any more than enjoying movies about supernatural slashers stalking teenagers. He seems desperate to deny that his own political values are not as overwhelmingly popular as he would like them to be, but are instead hugely popular, but having their expression suppressed by a vague conspiracy. And I think part of this is that Klavan wants to feel justified in interpreting his own respectable, though not earth-shattering, artistic success as the public's validation of his personal political views.

Re:A right-wing movie

[mi]

This assertion is patently silly at best, and offensive at worst. You don't think a single member of the Arab race is a Zionist?

Even if there is a thousand of them — that's not enough to justify a qualifier.

Say "Palestinian sympathizers" if that's what you mean.

Golda Meir called herself "a Palestinian". There is no such people — it is not a tribe or a state, it is a piece of land. Of all Palestinians (Jewish, Arabic, and others) and their sympathizers a far bigger percentage reject the discussed meaning of the term "occupation", than that of Arabs world-wide.

I'm open to suggestion for a better term.

Maybe then your rhetoric will sound less like thinly-veiled racism.

It really is not racism... Nope. I don't mind Arabs at all — but this point is where every one of them are wrong...

Re:A right-wing movie

[kaizokuace]

there is one discrepancy. Batman has reliable intelligence. He doesn't make up intelligence reports just to go after anyone he wants.

Re:A right-wing movie

[Sancho]

I can agree with just about everything but the below:

Still, running from the law to get away with vigilanteism is substantially different than spinning the press to get away with war crimes. Batman needs to break the law to save it, then he runs from the cops so he can save more lives. Bush breaks the law ostensibly to save the country, and then lies about it to save face.

The truth is, one man's vigilante is another man's crusader. It's not hard to justify stopping atrocities. The hard part is getting everyone to agree to the definition of that word. You'll find people praising Bush for liberating Iraq--not because the media is spinning things, but because he toppled a dictator who actually was doing bad stuff. You'll also see people blasting him because he didn't follow UN guidelines. Honestly, it sounds a lot like what Batman does.

I don't think that the movie was praising Bush, I just thought that your counterexamples weren't as accurate as they could have been.

While we're on that subject though, Batman breaks the law to save Gotham, which was actually threatened. Bush broke the law not to save the union: it was never in danger. Al Qaeda never posed a significant threat, their actions were thoroughly counterproductive even absent a heavy-handed military response.

Well, that was the spin. It'd probably have been harder to justify going into Iraq to depose a dictator that we put there in the first place. Does that mean that it didn't need to be done? I don't know.

There's also some really interesting psychological games going on. I saw a story somewhere on Bush admitting that opening up the off-shore reserves wasn't going to do anything to the price of oil, except inasmuch as people are going to expect the price of oil to drop, so speculators will stop driving up the price. The war on terrorism is pretty much the same thing. It helps to make people feel like we're doing something about a problem that we have no control over. It lets them live their normal lives--something which is essential to keep the world functioning.

Did it work? Was it necessary? Honestly, I don't know. We can't know what would have happened if things went differently. But given the oil story, we know that the government does things with no actual value for the sake of the psychological value, and that means that we have to start thinking of all new questions.

Re:A right-wing movie

[DragonWriter]

As with some of the other batman movies, it's hard to tell if they're lampooing those actions or endorsing them.

Is it possible that not every element of a Hollywood blockbuster (and perhaps not any elements of some) is intended as political/social advocacy?

Re:A right-wing movie

[spazdor]

Even if there is a thousand of them - that's not enough to justify a qualifier.

but this point is where every one of them are wrong...

Do you see how these two sentences reveal a certain disregard for the truth of your assertions? You are still playing fast and loose with group memberships, and it's evident that you don't care if you misrepresent some people because of that.

Your problem is not with "Arabs" but with "Opponents of Israel." Regardless of how many members they may have in common, these are two different groups. Talking about an entire racial group as if they hold universally shared political beliefs just is racist.

I'm open to suggestion for a better term.

There are lots of better terms already in common use. If you can't bring yourself to say "Palestinian" (which is pretty childish by the way; do you also say "anti-life" because "pro-choice" grates on your ears?) then just say "anti-Zionist."

Re:A right-wing movie

[Anonymous Coward]

Bite me you leftist kike!

Re:A right-wing movie

[rrkap]

By the same logic you use to claim that there are no Palestinians, there are no Americans. The people living in modern Israel were called Palestinians since around 200 and have a distinct cultural identity. The history of Palestine is interesting, so I'm going to make this message even more off topic with a brief historical digression.

    After the Jews rebelled against Rome around the year 200 the Romans renamed the roman province Judaea* (a name which echoed the Jewish kingdom of Judah) Palestine* (a name which echoed the name Philistines who were a neighboring people group that often fought with Judah's).

So, if you describe your self as a Palestinian you are embracing either the ancient Philistine claim on the land that the Jews conquered or with the Romans who ended Jewish domination of the area for over 1700 years. It seems as reasonable of a claim to nationhood as the one made by Zionists before the 1950's.

All this being said, I don't really have a dog in this fight over a God-forsaken piece of desert and am off to fix myself a ham sandwich.

Re:A right-wing movie

[philspear]

Some of those were valid points as to why Bush isn't that bad, but I was listing ways in which Batman in "The Dark Knight" is not a praising metaphor for Bush.

I'm not, for example, saying that Bush shouldn't kill terrorists because Batman doesn't kill the Joker: I'm saying Batman is not a metaphor for Bush and one difference is that Batman turns them over to the police rather than holding a military tribunal.

Re:A right-wing movie

[dbcad7]

Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past.

Except the.. "certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past", part doesn't exist for W.

And by the way.. thanks for comparing Batman to Bush.. Now I want to imprison that lawless vigilante freak... and Batman too.

Re:A right-wing movie

[Cal Paterson]

He won't get anything useful out of him because the guy is mentally ill, not because torture is ineffective.

No, Batman in that scene actually states that Dent should stop because he is supposed to be "a white light" for gotham, and that if anyone saw this situation all the previous good work would be undone. They actually have an argument, and Batman notes in passing that the guy is from Arkham Asylum, and he wouldn't be useful anyway.

Re:A right-wing movie

[Cal Paterson]

Not if you want to pigeon hole it somewhere into the simplistic left-right spectrum! DUH

Re:A right-wing movie

[ikarys]

In conclusion, we can assert that Batman's secret identity is not George Bush.

Re:A right-wing movie

[sheldon]

It also has a number of left-wing themes.

As i said, the movie is complicated. It's primarily about escalating violence, the Joker coming to being because of Batman, etc. When one looks at the various actions taken by Batman, it's obvious that the whole thing is a learning experience for him. He relies on emotion at times, and the result is not as he would like.

Re:A right-wing movie

[mi]

Talking about an entire racial group as if they hold universally shared political beliefs just is racist.

That's not, what I'm doing, and I'm tired of your attempts to redefine a common (and loaded) term.

Re:A right-wing movie

[spazdor]

You have got exactly the right attitude.

Ham sandwiches for all!*

(*kosher or halal substitutes where applicable;)

200MB?

[VeNoM0619]

A single 8K frame requires 200 MB of data

Ok... but..

. 'This show used over 100 TB of data.'"

I'll forget I read "show" by which they meant movie. 100,000MB / 200MB = just 500 frames for the movie? 8k x 8k

Let's just assume the 100 TB figure is right: 100 * $150 = $15,000 (USD). Don't studios spend millions making movies?

Re:200MB?

[Kegetys]

You forgot a few zeros... 100 000 000 MB / 200MB = 500 000

Re:200MB?

[CmdrSammo]

Your math is a 1000 out. 100TB ~= 100,000,000MB / 200MB = 500,000 frames for the movie, which does sound about right.

Re:200MB?

[Anonymous Coward]

why don't you try that math again...

Re:200MB?

[PsndCsrV]

You're off by a bit. The math should be:

100,000,000 MB / 200 MB = 500,000 frames

Not sure where you were going with your money calculations...

Re:200MB?

[jimbudncl]

100TB == 100,000,000MB 500,000 frames.

Re:200MB?

[brendank310]

100,000MB is 100GB (not accounting for the difference between the 2^n and 10^n.)

Re:200MB?

[LotsOfPhil]

100 TB = 100 million MB, not 100 thousand.
So, 500,000 frames in the movie. 70 fps for 120 minutes.

Re:200MB?

[FreakyGeeky]

100,000MB is 100GB. That's 1/10th of a terabyte.

Re:200MB?

[CmdrSammo]

Do you think he's got the picture yet...never get your math wrong in a /. thread!

Re:200MB?

[Anonymous Coward]

A single 8K frame requires 200 MB of data

Ok... but..

. 'This show used over 100 TB of data.'"

I'll forget I read "show" by which they meant movie. 100,000MB / 200MB = just 500 frames for the movie? 8k x 8k

Let's just assume the 100 TB figure is right: 100 * $150 = $15,000 (USD). Don't studios spend millions making movies?

you forgot some 0's there.

100,000MB = 100GB

therefor over 500000 frames for the movie

Re:200MB?

[v1]

new mod: (-1 can't do the maths)

Re:200MB?

[gblackwo]

Your math is incorrect. One terabyte is equal to 1000 GB. So if the movie used 100TB then it used 100,000 GB, or 100,000,000 MB which divided by 200 MB = 500,000 frames, which if the film is shot around 24-30 frames/sec equates to the film being around 5.78 - 4.63 hours worth of frames. (Maybe before editing? seems kinda long? Unless they shot in 60fps or something?)

Re:200MB?

[OSU ChemE]

I'll forget I read "show" by which they meant movie. 100,000MB / 200MB = just 500 frames for the movie?

Except that 100 TB is roughly 100,000,000 MB

So, 100,000,000 MB / 200 MB per frame = 500,000 frames

500,000 frames / 24 frames per second / 60 seconds per minute = about 350 minutes, or almost 6 hours. It was long, but not that long.

And as far as storage, I'm guessing that was one of the smallest costs involved. Besides, you probably want some backups of the data as well.

Re:200MB?

[SensitiveMale]

Check your math on a Terrabyte being 1,000 Megabytes.

Also, check your math on the 100 hard drives as well. Add in the infrastructure for those hard drives, spares for RAID arrays, the network infrastructure to handle that data across all of the computers, and the computer hardware to be able to handle that much data for editing. After all, I doubt they are just copying files across a USB cable.

Re:200MB?

[Anonymous Coward]

nice idea, but you have the wrong order of magnitude... see 102,400 mb would be 100gb roughly, the correct equation would have been 104,857,600mb/200mb= 524,378 frames roughly, you may turn in your geek card at the door now.

Re:200MB?

[sahonen]

Every element of a composite counts separately. At minimum, you're talking about a guy in front of a greenscreen and a background plate, which takes up twice the space of the background plate alone.

Re:200MB?

[jimbudncl]

Maybe he typo'd on his sig, too. ;)

--
Dislaimer: I am not good.

Re:200MB?

[CastrTroy]

Which is only 5.8 hours of film, assuming 24 frames per second. That would definitely fit the entire movie, but it would be nowhere close to all the footage that was shot. It's not like all movies are filmed like Russian Ark.

Re:200MB?

[initdeep]

I'll bet you never make a math mistake again now!!

20 responses (give or take) correcting you in less than 12 minutes!

Whoo hoo for not having anything better to do.

Re:200MB?

[spazdor]

Hey, you! Did you know that you got your math wrong? I know that errors like that usually go unnoticed around here, because pedants generally don't hang out around here.

Re:200MB?

[Anonymous Coward]

Check your spelling on the terabyte drives. "Terra" is a planet.

Re:200MB?

[EMeta]

It's not like all movies are filmed like Russian Ark [imdb.com].

And thanks the gods for that.

Re:200MB?

[Skye16]

Seriously, i just yelled "gah!" out loud after reading 15 of the "UR DOIN' IT WRONG!" posts in a row.

Ritual seppuku is the only option left; for anyone who corrected his math AFTER the first two people.

I'll expect your guts on my desk in the morning kthx.

Re:200MB?

[evenmoreconfused]

Actually, 24fps x 2 eyes (i.e. one left eye image, one right) x running time in seconds. The remainder will be outtakes, redos, etc.

Re:200MB?

[LandDolphin]

The runtime is 150 min.

Re:200MB?

[Anonymous Coward]

100TB done properly in a DC is about 80,000 ukp or about 150,000 USD.

Re:200MB?

[lwright84]

Well.. 100,000MB is only 100GB, not 100TB. You need another 3 zeros.

100,000,000MB = 100TB. So 100,000,000MB / 200MB = 500,000 frames for the movie (assuming all frames required the same amount of data, which is unlikely). Also they more than likely upgraded their infrastructure nearly 2 years ago when 1TB definitely did not equal $150. It was probably more like $500 or more for 1TB. In that case, 100 * $500 = $50,000, which is considerable considering thats just how much they spent for storage space (not cabling, housing, support, etc).

Re:200MB?

[evenmoreconfused]

Ack!

Cancel that...

It's a 2D movie, not 3D. So it's just 24fps x running time in seconds, the rest being outtakes, redos, pre-compositing layers, etc.

Re:200MB?

[LandDolphin]

Does this mean that we can assume the GP is a girl?

Re:200MB?

[Annymouse Cowherd]

They probably didn't keep all of the footage they shot.

Re:200MB?

[malilo]

No, but we CAN assume you're an asshole!

Re:200MB?

[LandDolphin]

Then I guess we can also assume that you have no sense of humor.

Re:200MB?

[Anonymous Coward]

Math, being short for mathematics, would spell out maths as mathematicss.
Do you use the term rpms also? (rpm = revolutions per minute -> rpms = Revolutions per minutes).

Re:200MB?

[drsmithy]

Let's just assume the 100 TB figure is right: 100 * $150 = $15,000 (USD). Don't studios spend millions making movies?

Real Storage (tm) isn't a RAID0 of cheap & nasty SATA drives bought with mail-in rebates.

Re:200MB?

[v1]

actually I do say "arr-pee-ems" when speaking that acronym, along with most of the population ;)

Re:200MB?

[Anonymous Coward]

Terra = planet Earth, not just any planet.

Re:200MB?

[E IS mC(Square)]

Can't believe nobody has noticed this so far - ridiculous!!

100TB ~= 100,000,000MB

Re:200MB?

[budgenator]

well there is the blooper reels and of course when DVD sales go flat, they'll release a "directors cut" with deleted scenes and alternate endings and the "how we made" reels. 6 hrs actually sound a bit constrained.

Re:200MB?

[old and new again]

they were just doing a few scenes, so 4-5 hours is right (the 3 scenes they talk are about 20 minutes total) I guess teh facility doing the final editing has way more then 100TB of strage(which in 2008, is pretty small, major editing facility probably habe petabytes of storage)

100TB!

[Gr33nNight]

That's almost as much as my porn collection!

Re:100TB!

[tgd]

I shudder to think of what 8K porn frames would be like.

Some things are just best left blurry.

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."

Re:100TB!

[Anonymous Coward]

Well obviously HD anime porn ain't so bad.

New Meme....

[crymeph0]

How many Dark Knights is that? Burn karma burn!

Re:New Meme....

[Jesus_666]

How many Dark Knights is that?

One. I calculated it again myself and the math checks out.

Storage?

[HockeyPuck]

Besides consuming 100TB, anybody have any better ideas on a) how this stuff was stored and b) how it was backed up? SAN/NAS or internal disk on the servers?

Re:Storage?

[Anonymous Coward]

Customized compression allowed them to store it into a single bit.

Unfortunately, the decompression program took up 100TB.

Re:Storage?

[initdeep]

If its anything like LOTR was, its on a huge SAN, and most likely fiber optic.

Re:Storage?

[Anarke_Incarnate]

I would vote for some high speed NAS heads covering the arrays. These tend to get a lot of use, though they are really just LSI engenios. http://www.bluearc.com/html/products/titan-3000.shtml

Re:Storage?

[evenmoreconfused]

We at the StereoLab in the National Film Board of Canada have an infrastructure set up specifically to manage a number of simultaneous 3D productions, several in "Large Format" (i.e. Imax) resolutions and the rest in various HD and 35mm formats. It's been to make over a dozen 3D digital films in the last few years or so.

In practice we use about an equal mix of internal data server drives, SAN, NAS, and a pool of bare drives with a stack of empty shells. Often people drop a drive in a shell and attach it (via eSATA, FW800 or USB in that order of preference) to whatever machine they need it on, because it reduces network load. This technique works especially well for intermediate data that is output, reinput, and then discarded.

Re:Storage?

[Kent Recal]

100T isn't much by storage standards. It translates to roughly 2 racks of hardware for high-speed/low-latency serving plus roughly half a rack for archival. I'd say $150-$200k ballpark which is a drop in the bucket for hollywood. So, serving the stuff at 4 Gbit/s ain't so hard, *processing* it at that rate is a different story.

Re:Storage?

[drsmithy]

I'd say $150-$200k ballpark which is a drop in the bucket for hollywood.

I think there's a zero missing here. $200k wouldn't buy you a rack full of SATA disk from, say, IBM, let alone the fast stuff (or the controllers to sit in front of it).

So, serving the stuff at 4 Gbit/s ain't so hard, *processing* it at that rate is a different story.

Indeed. In context, a completely saturated 4G fibre link would replay this at 2fps.

Re:Storage?

[Kent Recal]

I think there's a zero missing here. $200k wouldn't buy you a rack full of SATA disk from, say, IBM, let alone the fast stuff (or the controllers to sit in front of it).

Well, the 300G velociraptors go for around $300. Let's say we fit 16 per 2U, that's 336 drives per rack or roughly $100k USD (not even factoring in the discounts that you get at those volumes). The remaining $100k would break down to only ~$5k per shelf, which admittedly is a bit low for beefy FC fabric. Still I wouldn't say I was off by a zero. Nodge the estimate up to $250k per shelf and we're good to go. :-)

Re:Storage?

[Kent Recal]

ofcourse in the last sentence meant to say: Nodge the estimate up to $250k per rack ...

Re:Storage?

[Anarke_Incarnate]

The stuff from bluearc is waaaay more than the $200K range. The disk arrays cost in the near $500K range. If you want throughput, you want more than "enough disk to store my stuff on" as well as needing slack space, edit space, etc. You need spindles to make data fly. Figure 2 or 3 of those $500K arrays and each NAS head was about $90K last I looked. I'd want at least 4 heads MIN per array.

Re:Storage?

[drsmithy]

Well, the 300G velociraptors go for around $300. Let's say we fit 16 per 2U, that's 336 drives per rack or roughly $100k USD (not even factoring in the discounts that you get at those volumes). The remaining $100k would break down to only ~$5k per shelf, which admittedly is a bit low for beefy FC fabric. Still I wouldn't say I was off by a zero. Nodge the estimate up to $250k per shelf and we're good to go. :-)

Enterprise-level SAN disk is not off-the-shelf hardware. An EXP810 disk shelf (3U, 16x3.5" SAS or SATA drives), for example, runs about $20k with 1TB SATA drives and about $30k with 300G 15k RPM drives. A mid-range dual controller SAN head to sit in front of them runs around the $60k mark (and is probably too low-end for this kind of environment, so likely double that figure at least).

I am not trying to justify these prices (although to some degree they are justifiable), I'm just trying to highlight that with this kind of hardware, prices for somewhat similar off-the-shelf-hardware are not representative. A single 15k RPM, 300G fibre channel drive for an enterprise-level SAN is around $1700.

A rack full of enterprise-level (fibre channel, 15k RPM, 300G) drives would probably run around $500k each. That would be 13 drive shelves and a SAN head, all at 3U. You would have 208 spindles with a raw capacity of 62,400 GB. Knock off, say, 4 spindles for hot spares, account for GiB vs GB, account for RAID10 and you'll have a usable capacity (before filesystem overheads) of something in the ballpark of 28TB per rack. Four such racks and your 100TB of fast, enterprise-level disk has cost something in the regions of $2,000,000.

(All my prices are discounted, not list, and therefore at least somewhat realistic. Admittedly someone buying a couple of million bucks worth of disk will likely get a bigger discount than we do, but probably not hugely more. OTOH, my prices are less than 6 months old, whereas the hardware in question would have been bought several years ago. That two million figure is probably less than half of what was actually paid. Call it $5,000,000 for a nice round number.)

Then, once you've got the storage, you need the fibre channel fabric to run it over. More millions (for something on this scale). You'd be dropping a couple of grand per machine just for HBAs.

Re:Storage?

[Kent Recal]

Well, okay, I give in. ;-)
You're right, hollywood will certainly rather buy "certified enterprise turnkey" instead of rolling their own. You're also correct that I still was too optimistic in my estimate, I was especially missing out on the switches/controllers. They'd probably go straight for 10Gbit/s or whatever the ceiling today is, that alone blows my little calc to pieces.

I guess my mind was a bit caught up in our own developments here as my company is in the process of moving away from StorageTek/NetApp towards a homegrown solution (3rd storage rack here). Our finding so far is that the savings are mindblowing when you start looking at the "discounters" like Overland and SuperMicro. Ofcourse we miss out on the tight SLAs and "4h on-site support" this time but in exchange we have gotten literally twice the capacity and 1,5 the IOPS for our money - with better redundancy, too.

Anyways, obviously that's not the way to go when you need high-end as I mistakenly implied in my earlier post...

Re:Storage?

[mischi_amnesiac]

http://www.sun.com/servers/x64/x4540/ 48 TB for roughly 22 000$.

Re:Storage?

[drsmithy]

The 48TB model is actually $62k.

That's raw space. You need to halve it for RAID10. Then, of course, you have the problem of accessing the data at a reasonable speed from other machines.

Re:Storage?

[HeadlessNotAHorseman]

They stored it on 72,817,778 floppy disks.

One word...

[teh1337striker]

Damn.

Not to be pedantic...

[DarrenBaker]

...but only about 25 - 30% of the film was shot in IMAX, at four times the cost of regular the anamorphic process used for the rest of the film.

Digital is dead! Long live film!

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:Not to be pedantic...

[DarrenBaker]

True, but they didn't do only the process shots oin IMAX - they shot entire scenes with no visual effects in them using it, just because everything looks better in IMAX. There's a great article in this month's American Cinematographer with Pfister and Nolan talking about why they chose to use it, and how it panned out.

Actually, what's interesting is that only two years ago, Terence Malick tried to film THE NEW WORLD in 65 mm, which would actually be a step down from IMAX, but the studio stepped in and shut that idea down pretty quickly, considering the costs. Seems like Nolan can sell some snake oil better than Malick!

Re:Not to be pedantic...

[Apotsy]

I wouldn't call shooting in IMAX "snake oil", but since Nolan just had the biggest opening ever, I think if he wants to do the next movie entirely in IMAX or even 5/65, they would let him. He's got a ticket to do whatever he wants now.

Malick actually did get his wish and got a few of the wide establishing shots done in 65mm, but the vast majority was 35mm scope. Still looked great. Today's negatives can do wonders.

Oh, and here's the article you mentioned.

Re:Not to be pedantic...

[DarrenBaker]

If I were Nolan, the next one would be shot in Ultra-Panavision 70 mm, hands-down the best-looking format ever created. A huge negative, plus it's anamorphic!

That's true, he did get some shots in 65, which was great, but it was too bad about the rest of the movie. Sigh. Looks like John Smith wasn't the only one capable of screwing up hot Native American ass.

Thanks for the link - I didn't know they had an online presence... For shame!

Re:Not to be pedantic...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah I was just reading through comments to see if anyone else had noticed this. They only filmed 30mins of the movie in IMAX, not sure where the OP pulled this "more than 50%" bullshit out of...

Re:Not to be pedantic...

[Apotsy]

Man, I almost got to see a 70mm screening of It's a Mad Mad (however many there are) World a couple of years ago, but there was a problem and the screening was cancelled. It was going to be with an anamorphic lens and everything, a rare treat. Hopefully the chance will come up again.

Re:Not to be pedantic...

[DarrenBaker]

Makes me wish I lived in or around LA, so I could go see 70mm prints of great old movies. Unfortunately I live in Canada, where things like that just don't happen.

Sigh.

Re:Not to be pedantic...

[Apotsy]

This was in San Francisco at the Castro theater. They do a great job. Which coast are you on? There's always the Cinerama in Seattle.

The problem with the screening was, oddly enough, with the sound and not the picture. They had the anamorphic 70mm worked out and everything, and then the DTS unit failed (this was a new print with a DTS timecode added). They were unable to resolve the problem and ended up canceling the screening. I was pretty bummed, but maybe next time.

Re:Not to be pedantic...

[DarrenBaker]

Unfortunately, I'm in Southern Ontario, which is nestled snugly between New York State and Michigan - hell and gone from the left coast.

Sorry to hear about the screening, that's a bummer man. Someone should put together a travelling roadshow for 70mm movies, so everyone in the Americas can see what a difference it makes.

So... who has the torrent?

[b4dc0d3r]

So... who has the torrent?

It's horizontal resolution:

[naz404]

From TFA article comments, it's horizontal resolution

5.6K = 5616x4096

8K = 8192x6144

2TB - 100TB

[Arthur B.]

So it's a factor 50 in 10 years ? And we're supposed to be impressed ? That's doubling only every 7 quarters.

Re:2TB - 100TB

[Anonymous Coward]

So it's a factor 50 in 10 years ? And we're supposed to be impressed ? That's doubling only every 7 quarters.

OH SNAP!
BURRRN!

Re:2TB - 100TB

[jd]

Be grateful. Hollywood is looking more and more to 3D films, and that means halving the resolution or framerate (if they use polarized light, which is the only way to get 3D in color without shuttered lenses).

Re:2TB - 100TB

[bennomatic]

Bah. 3d films should be delivered to the viewer with modeling, lighting and textures, but with just a recommended viewing angle. If I can't move the camera, it's not really 3d.

Re:2TB - 100TB

[jd]

For animations such as Toy Story or Finding Nemo, it would theoretically be possible to provide the movie as source and render at the destination. You'd need those Intel 80-core CPUs arranged in a 4-way SMP to get enough horsepower in your television/home studio, but I really can't see any reason besides Intel not having released that yet as to why you couldn't do this. If you render at destination, then you could indeed move the camera anywhere at any time. No different than changing where you sit in an amphitheater for a play, and nobody claims that that changes the intent or purpose of the directors or producers.

I see no easy way of doing this for an actual cinema screen, or for live-action footage. I would personally disregard the whole 3D effort until things like that can be resolved. I'd much prefer efforts to enhance IMAX. 11.1 audio is not the state-of-the-art it once was, and both lenses and film have improved since IMAX was introduced. Besides, IMAX uses a single film spool - keeping three (or indeed N) spools in sync is not that hard, and using a prism to then mix the colours together is a cinch. Just with three tapes, you should be able to double the resolution of the footage. To get the colours absolutely perfect, six tapes would be preferable.

Getting that sort of quality into the multiplexes would be tough, but frankly if they want a gimmick capable of bringing back the really big audience numbers, that would seem to offer more hope than a cheap pair of paper glasses.

Re:2TB - 100TB

[bennomatic]

I totally agree. To re-interpret one of my comments through your post, live-action 3d is a gimmick, not real 3d, since you can't move around in it. It'd be better to disregard that sort of gimmick altogether and concentrate on other, more useful elements of the movie experience for live action, and plan for *real* 3d when the technology gets cheap enough...

Re:2TB - 100TB

[bennomatic]

Gee, if it were every 6 quarters, it would be right up there with Moore's law...

Re:2TB - 100TB

[kramulous]

Don't you have to double the framerate if you're showing 3D using polarised lenses? If you still have the same existing bandwidth, you divide the resolution by approx 1.4 (not 2) to maintain the 2*currentFrameRate.

I've just been driving interactive discrete modeled simulations on a tiled display (8K) in stereo (actually just twice framerate since it actually doesn't make sense on LCDs ... just playing around) ... I'm doing this on an eight core system (software rendering). The timesteps are being simulated on a 512 core system ... not the 8 core one.

I don't think 3D is a gimmick. It's just that directors need to understand that the rules for shooting for 2D image completely change for 3D. For example, you can't have action in the background or action happening off focus (or whatever the term is for around the edges) .... it will make people queezy. Content can look really, really amazing when done correctly. Hollywood just needs the Stanley Kubrick of 3D.

Re:2TB - 100TB

[grumbel]

For animations such as Toy Story or Finding Nemo, it would theoretically be possible to provide the movie as source and render at the destination.

Actually even for those it would be impossible or at least not without a lot of additional work. Even when a movie scene is based on 3d models, the final result is always a 2D composition, not something that came directly out of the 3d renderer, some of the layers that where used in composition will be completly flat 2D. The 3d models are also incredible incomplete, everthing you don't see in on the screen, is for most part simply not there, it was never modeled. So if you could adjust your camera angel you would simply look into nothingness. So from the Hollywood side of things I wouldn't expect to see a 'real' 3D movie anytime soon. However the gaming industry is already doing it, for one thing there are plenty of homebrew machinima movies that are rendered in realtime in a game engine and then there are also games like MetalGear4 or Half Life 2, which allow you to navigate the camera around as you like in certain cutscenes. In the case of MetalGear4 its especially interesting, since you have things happening in multiple places and have the ability to split the screen into views of you navigating around and the predefined viewing angles. And there are of course games like Ico or Shadow of the Collosus, which don't give you as much freedom as the former, but still allow you to pan the camera around a little bit in all cutscenes.

Computing power isn't really that big of an issue, sure you can't just renderer a Pixar movie in realtime, but with todays 3D hardware you can get close enough. You might always be 10 years being what is possible in off-line rendering, but then movies 10 years ago where fun to watch too.

Wake up, mods!

[mr_matticus]

No, GP had it right. "2K" is ~2048x1080, with some variance. With 1080 horizontal lines, and approximately 2000 (2k) horizontal pixels.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Vector_Video_Standards2.svg
http://www.dcinematoday.com/dc/features.aspx?ID=16
http://campustechnology.com/articles/45435/

Wait, does that make sense? The math

[Woundweavr]

-A single 8K frame requires 200 MB of data.
-The Dark Knight is officially listed at 2hrs 30 minutes (150 minutes= 9000seconds)
-Total usage 100 TB (5 frames a Gig, 5120 per T, 512,000+ frames)

Minimal frame rate is ~24/s.

200 MB/frame x 9,000 sec/movie x 24 frames/second = 43200000 MB=42187.5 GB = 41.2 TB.
If the frame rate was 60 frames/second then that would be the whole film (no retakes, extras, bloopers etc).

I never realized the sheer amount of compression that is going on between the raw footage and getting it into a DVD.

Re:Wait, does that make sense? The math

[mr_matticus]

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.

Re:Wait, does that make sense? The math

[AmigaHeretic]

>>>I never realized the sheer amount of compression that is going on between the raw footage and getting it into a DVD.


Yeah, but you have to figure the first compression is going from a 40 FOOT screen to a 40 INCH screen. Like they said above IMAX fames can be 18,000 x 12,000 or something... a little pointless even on a pretty highend monitor/tv.

Re:Wait, does that make sense? The math

[mewsenews]

The data set for a show in a VFX studio includes several revisions of every shot, data such as models and textures (in this case a centimeter scan of an entire road), and thousands of revisions of project files, compositing data, etc etc etc.

Re:Wait, does that make sense? The math

[drsmithy]

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.

Re:Wait, does that make sense? The math

[JSBiff]

That is a very big space savings, before any compression is applied. The article summary mentions that they reduced the Imax frames to 8000 lines. Reducing that down to 1920 (someone said the 8000 lines corresponds to horizontal resolution; not sure if that's true, but if so, corresponds to the 1920 in 1920x1080 HD resolution), which corresponds to an approximate downscale of 1/4 *in one axis* when converting to HD, which gives us a total size reduction to 1/16 of the original frame size (1/4 horiz * 1/4 vertical), so if the frames were approx 200MB at Imax resolution, they would be about 12.5MB per frame in HD resolution. MPEG compression probably takes that down to, what, like 1-2 MB per frame?

Re:Wait, does that make sense? The math

[Anonymous Coward]

For effects shots, you have multiple bitmap sequences that need to be composited together... All overlapping pixels on a layer effectively count twice into storage requirements, and most effects shots consist of multiple layers, so I'm surprised the total space used isn't much larger.

Re:Wait, does that make sense? The math

[Anonymous Coward]

More like .15 MB per frame.

Re:Wait, does that make sense? The math

[Anonymous Coward]

Your math is fine, it's your understanding that's off.

That 100TB figure is the data used by one visual effects studio to create their shots. That
includes final rendered composites (what makes it onto film), as well as all the models,
textures, animation files, etc., etc.

As far as the "compression" goes, yes, there's compression, but the main thing that gets all
that final IMAX-sized video onto a DVD is just plain old image re-scaling from film-rez down
to HD or standard definition.

(Yes, I work in the visual effects industry.)

Re:Wait, does that make sense? The math

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Visual effects operates in many, many layers. Then there's the shots that just don't make it to the released version.

Re:Wait, does that make sense? The math

[Jarik_Tentsu]

Think bitmap vs JPEG. Because that's essentially what it is. Converting something from RAW RGB to something with lossy compression. MPEG2 has even more compressing with null frames, i-frames, b-frames and p-frames.

That being said - do they really keep it raw during editing? Or do they use lossless codecs like Lagarith or HuffyYUV (Or rather, whatever the industry standard is)?

Re:Wait, does that make sense? The math

[Anonymous Coward]

only very few of the shots apparently have been worked on in 8k (and only imax shots). the majority was done in 4k which is still quite something considering that probably ~98 percent of movie fx are done in 2k.

  -k

Re:Wait, does that make sense? The math

[Anonymous Coward]

You're assuming that they only have to store the final frames.

It's not like the first version of a shot is the final one. Far from it.

Re:Wait, does that make sense? The math

[Anonymous Coward]

mr matticus makes a good point, but you're both not considering the fact that this article is only about the 700 visual effects shots sent out to post production companies. And all the details are in reference only to the 370 shots that were given to Double Negative(a post production company) to work on. The remaining 330 effects shots went to 3 other companies(who presumably needed close 100TB of storage between them to do the work).

100TB is the storage space required by Double Negative to work on 370 effects shots. It is most certainly not the amount of video data they handed over to the studio when they were done. And I seriously doubt that the final master sitting in some studio vault somewhere, in it's full resolution glory, comes close to 100TB either(I'm no expert though, 8000 pixels wide is pretty damn huge).

$150??

[Anonymous Coward]

Many people have corrected your GB v. TB, mistake but as someone who works on the tech side of a major VFX house, your $150/TB estimate is way off.

When a few thousand processors all need to load the same file simultaneously, a Western Digital from newegg does not cut it. :)

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.

Re:Thought it would be more, actually...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, most of the source material is going to be hours and hours of green screen footage.

It probably compresses extremely well.

Re:Thought it would be more, actually...

[kramulous]

Fuck! That'd be awesome fun ... especially dealing with that IO. Cool story.

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:IMAX - not so much

[duc1701]

It definitely varies with each theater. I went to the King of Prussia, PA IMAX theater and the IMAX scenes were clearly sharper than the others. It was nice. I don't know if it was nice enough to justify the higher ticket price, mind you, but it was still cool.

Re:IMAX - not so much

[Actually, I do RTFA]

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.

Doesn't this mean it's not worth driving to your IMAX theater for any movie; not it's not worth driving to any IMAX theater for any showing of the Dark Knight?

Re:IMAX - not so much

[bill_mcgonigle]

Doesn't this mean it's not worth driving to your IMAX theater for any movie; not it's not worth driving to any IMAX theater for any showing of the Dark Knight?

As I understand it, 'real' IMAX movies (the relatively short documentaries, typically) are presented in the high-quality format. The IMAX.com website is hard to dissect.

Re:IMAX - not so much

[Apotsy]

Unfortunately, it sounds like you saw it in one of the IMAX MPX theaters, which is (as you saw) a scaled-down version of the full IMAX system.

Sorry to hear you had such a bad experience, but as I posted here, they are going to replace it with something even worse soon, so if you can make it to one of those large installations in a major city like you mentioned, you should. This could be your last chance to see anything like this.

Also, according to this, about 30 minutes of the movie was shot in IMAX, with the rest in 35mm anamorphic (scanned at 4K).

imax the same as normal theatre ?

[sjwest]

so theres no point in seeing an imax version of this film if i read the summary correct.

Contributing to overcorrection.

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot a few zeros..

Points are Incorrect

[mosb1000]

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.

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.

Re:Points are Incorrect

[mosb1000]

It is hard to make the case that this program will end. But it may be the only way to catch the Joker, so to speak. In the movie, it's easy to destroy the machine and do the right thing. What will happen when the Joker escapes, though? Will we be seeing the machine again? I don't know what to tell you.

The movie's point is valid, we will never know where the terrorists are without this system. The government can not wait for them to strike and then pick up the pieces (the public won't stand for it). The writer is just saying that we need to use it responsibly.

Re:Points are Incorrect

[philspear]

I think the writer's thoughts on the subject of spying on citizen's is actually voiced with Morgan Freeman's concerns, which is decidedly anti-surveillance.

Plus, Morgan Freeman is the only one who can be trusted with it. I'd be okay with wiretapping if Morgan Freeman had sole discresion over it. Those who set up the system (Batman here) and the enforcement (again Batman) should not be the ones in control of it.

The writer is explicitly saying we should not be wiretapping or spying on citizens, and is saying even if we did need it, we can only trust it to Morgan Freeman... or at least not Bush, congress, or law enforcement.

Re:Points are Incorrect

[dbcad7]

The problem here is.. the machine is looking where the joker isn't.

The thing is.. I am a "results" guy.. show me where this wire tapping has done anything, and I am on board.. but I don't see any.. If I am going to give up this privacy issue.. then I want to see the results.. publicly.. This hiding everything for whatever fantasy world of secrecy they live in doesn't cut it.. Use your tap and make an arrest.. then I'll believe you and say it's justified.. Right now I don't believe it is doing a damn thing.

Re:Points are Incorrect

[BiggestPOS]

Morgan Freeman is God right? I think that puts him above suspicion in my opinion.

Re:Points are Incorrect

[mosb1000]

I think it's safe to say that if conventional wire-tapping catches criminals, this will too. I I don't have a problem with this program, so long as they add appropriate safeguards, restrict the scope of investigations to serious crimes like terrorism, murder or rape, and have a policy of retroactive full disclosure (fully disclose any spying that took place upon the completion of an investigation or after some set amount of time like 5 years or so).

Re:Points are Incorrect

[dbcad7]

My point is.. you take away my privacy by tapping, I take away your privacy to secrecy... Again, if they need it show me the results proving it... I also want to know the statistics.. how many phone taps to arrests... 10 to 1 ?.. 1000 to 1 ?.. 10,000 to 1 ?

Re:Points are Incorrect

[denzacar]

1. Batman is not an elected official. Batman is just another criminal in the eyes of the law. His personal morality has nothing to do with the fact that he is doing illegal things.

2. Wiretapping ending after the "war on idea" ends?

3. Batman is a criminal in the eyes of the law. Batman is fighting crime and evil on the streets of Gotham. Batman only attacks criminals.
You try being logical about positive reasons for sending Batman to jail, letting criminals loose on the streets and very likely creating a world wide depression by letting stocks of Wayne Enterprises fall once Bruce Wayne ends up in jail.

4. Apparently, you and I have not seen the same movie. It was Dent's trap in which Dent used Batman.

5. Again... Which movie did you see?
Are we even sure that Dent is dead? All we know is that his reputation is dead as Gordon puts it.
And it is not like he fell from the top of Gotham Cathedral like Joker in Batman (1989). Batman sure got up and ran (not walked) away after that fall.

Re:Points are Incorrect

[Hal_Porter]

Morgan Freeman is God right?

No, but God played Morgan Freeman in a movie once.

IMAX

[HaeMaker]

Some IMAX is 48 fps. 3D IMAX can be 96 fps.

200MB per frame ?

[drsmithy]

At 24fps = nearly 5GB/sec for playback.

That's a mighty impressive I/O subsystem (at every level).

(Assuming realtime, of course, which I doubt happens.)

See it NOW, before digital projection ruins it

[Apotsy]

For reference, the vast majority of digital projectors in existence are 2K. There are a few 4K ones in the wild, but the most popular tech for electronic projection (namely DLP) currently maxes out at 2K. Sony has some 4K SXRD projectors available, but very few theaters have installed them.

The IMAX company is currently still running most of their theaters on the 15-perf 70mm film systems, so you can still see the full 8K image to day if you want to. The problem is, they are planning to install DLP-based systems that will reduce the resolution to 2K x 2K (although the article doesn't mention that). Once those are installed, you will not be able to see images like we're seeing today. The resolution will be far lower.

Even if Nolan and his team go for these kinds of high resolution images again for the next movie, there might not be any place to see it that can do it justice.

Now I know someone is going to chime in and say that film is analog, so anything digital is automatically better, but ask yourself: Would you replace a high quality analog sound system with 4-bit digital sound? That's approximately what we're talking about here. If the IMAX company were planning to tile a bunch of 2K x 2K images on the screen to produce an 8K image, or maybe use some other technology to achieve the kind of resolution they have today, then it would be a different story. But they aren't.

See it now, before they take it away.

Re:See it NOW, before digital projection ruins it

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you sure? It seems more likely to me that IMAX are working with Texas Instruments on at least a 4K DLP solution. I can see how they can get away with 4K in place of a "theoretical" 18K film res, but they'd never get away with 2K, surely!

Re:See it NOW, before digital projection ruins it

[Apotsy]

I wish I were wrong, but...

"Images from the two projectors overlap, so in a sense, technically speaking, it's 2K resolution," says Brian Bonnick, the company's executive vp technology.

From here.

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:From TFA

[budgenator]

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.

the only open source app I know of that handles it is cinepaint, it actually handles 32 bit floating color channels as well as 16 and 8 bit.

Re:From TFA

[TRS-80]

CinePaint is a GIMP fork.

Re:From TFA

[budgenator]

That was a while ago, not much GIMP code left in it anymore, they are even replacing GTK with FLTK right now.

By Neruos

[Anonymous Coward]

To bad all this stuff doesn't mean the eye benefits from it.

LoTRs and StarWars are prolly the most developed movies of this time for details and mass movements on screen. The Dark Knight was a good movie, looked good, saw it at iMax and at a normal theatre, but overall, It didn't look any different from then some movies of the late 90s. During both viewings, I never once had a "wow this movie looks state-of-the-art" or "this movie has the best visuals I have ever seen".

Higher resolution and lighting make 3D depth it does not.

It has been discuss that human eyes reach a limit of about 324 megapixels per 90 degree angle at avg of 24 frames per second. Anything above this will appear out of sync, blur, etc.

Re:By Neruos

[Apotsy]

There is an easier way to measure it: how small of an angle does a single pixel have to subtend before it becomes invisible? That's the ceiling for "high" resolution imagery.

The basis for this is the 1 arcminute rule. References such as this pin the minimal spatial resolution of the human vision system at 1 minute of arc. In a few cases, details can be seen at even smaller angles, but for generic structures, 1 minute of arc is the rule. So for every minute of arc the image covers, you need at least 1 pixel.

For a normal moviegoing experience, if you sit at the SMPTE recommended 2 screen heights back, a 2.35:1 image will cover about 60 degrees of vision. That means you need 3600 pixels across the width of the image in order for it to appear at its sharpest, most detailed possible. Standard 35mm print stocks are easily able to deliver the equivalent of this much resolution. Most digital projectors are unfortunately lower than that (DLP is at around 2000), but we're starting to see some "4K" projectors out there now, mainly from Sony in the form of SXRD.

IMAX covers approximately 90 degress of vision if you're sitting near the center of the theater, so that's 90*60 = 5400 pixels necessary. Lo and behold, the article mentions that they found they could get away with "5.6K" resolution (5600 pixels), but not much lower. The 1 arcminute rule is held up again.

Now if you're sitting in near front row of one of the larger IMAX theaters, you might be covering 120-130 degrees of vision, so 8K would then be necessary. Fortunately, they did some shots at that resolution, so even the people who like to sit up front will see a smooth, detailed image.

There are some people out there who have, for some strange reason, decided to double the 1 arcminute rule and make it 2 arcminutes. I don't understand why, but I've seen some charts where people use this figure to try to explain why we don't need HDTV, or perhaps why we only need 720p. These calculations are wrong. The value is 1 arcminute, not 2. There is plenty of evidence to support this, and the filmmakers' experience with needing such high resolutions is further proof.

Most of the film shot in IMAX?

[barzok]

IIRC from the July issue of Wired, there were only 3 scenes shot in IMAX. The skyhook, the top of the Sears Tower, and...I'm not sure what the last one was.

Standard IMAX cameras can only shoot about 3 minutes at a stretch, and they consume massive amounts of very expensive film. An entire movie like TDK would cost a fortune to shoot in IMAX.

bluray is the new VHS

[heroine]

Considering the number of still cameras doing 4k images, the fact that every movie is now being printed on IMAX, blu-ray & HDTV have been left behind. We're too used to seeing 4k images from still cameras to get excited about blu-ray.

Re:bluray is the new VHS

[Mix Master Nixon]

We're too used to seeing 4k images from still cameras to get excited about blu-ray

Doesn't really account for the whole "moving pictures" thing. That's sort of an important difference between Blu-ray and a 4k digital still camera. Plus on my 1360x768 cheapo HD set, images from a digital still camera and a Blu-ray will both look exactly the same - and that means much better than the DVDs most folks are accustomed to.

the fact that every movie is now being printed on IMAX

You and I must have different definitions of "fact", as, by enormous margins, most films aren't blown up to IMAX. It isn't even close. Where can I get tickets to a IMAX print of WALL*E? Or IRON MAN? Or CJ7? Or THE WACKNESS? Or STEP BROTHERS? Or most other films?

Slashdot shouldn't post stories having anything to do with movies. It's like reading about tech news in People Magazine - excruciating.

Which theaters in So. CA?

[antdude]

Is there a list of these DLP and IMAX theaters with the specific details like resolutions? I went to a few IMAX and DLP theaters in Southern California especially in Hollywood.

Re:Which theaters in So. CA?

[Apotsy]

Don't worry, there are currently no IMAX digital installations showing The Dark Knight. I was talking about next time. If you see The Dark Knight it in IMAX, you're pretty much guaranteed it's running from 70mm film. I have heard that this is at Nolan and Pfister's request, but cannot confirm. As for regular, non-IMAX theaters, Fandango.com will tell you which ones are running DLP, down to the specific auditorium. As far as I have been able to see, their information is accurate.

DLP is always 2K or less. TI has not made or announced any chips at greater resolution. 2K is currently the highest pixel count chip anyone can buy. In fact, for several years, it was only 1280x1024. Can you believe some people actually wanted to put that in theaters and call it a day? Ridiculous. Thankfully, better heads prevailed and we now have 2K at minimum, for better or worse.

The upcoming IMAX digital system will be two 2K DLP projectors "stacked", so the maximum resolution will be 2K x 2K. To get even up to 4K x 4K, they would need four projectors at least, which they have said they aren't doing. It's really not going to compare very well up against their traditional 15-perf / 70mm systems, but apparently they are in dire financial straits and want to save money.

(Not sure why my original post was modded "troll", but everything I said is correct and verifiable.)

Re:Which theaters in So. CA?

[antdude]

Thanks. I thought it was interesting comment (was marked Interesting). If it was downvoted, then how come no replies about it? Sheesh.

I am decideing to watch it in IMAX first or DLP first (can't watch both due to lack of time and pricey). 20 minutes of IMAX scenes only. I saw Spider-Man 3 on IMAX in Ontario Palace Stadium 21. Man, that was huge. Colors were OK. DLP is bright colors and clear. I have seen DLP movies in El Capitan (both Chronicles of Narnia movies), Mann's Chinese/Grauman's Chinese (SW:AOTC and Casino Royale), The Bridge (The Incredibles), Irvine Spectrum 21 (SW:AOTC (ep 2)), Arclight Dome (SW:ROTS and Transformers), and Edwards Ontario Palace Stadium 22 (POTC3).

Re:Which theaters in So. CA?

[antdude]

I forgot SW:TPM DLP in an AMC Burbank theater when it was very new! It was nice, but gradients were annoying but expected from a new technology.

Re:Which theaters in So. CA?

[Apotsy]

Yeah, that must have been on one of those old 1st generation 1280x1024 DLP machines. Very pixelated I'm sure. Can you believe some people thought (and probably still do) that that was already as good as it needed to be? There was a Disney executive that went around saying it was "already better than any film presentation", and wanted theaters to install it right then, no improvements needed. Clearly that guy had never seen a good 35mm presentation, let alone 70mm. I seriously think some of these people need glasses.

For the record, I actually would like it if there were some kind of electronic projection system that could meet or beat the very best film quality. I'd be all in favor conversion then. But replacing 15/70 with 2K x 2K? Yuk.

Re:Which theaters in So. CA?

[NeMon'ess]

I saw the first half of Episode II on film. Then there was a fire alarm and the entire multiplex had to evacuate. When we were let back inside, I instead went to the digitally projected theater showing Episode II at 1280x1024 and saw it there from start to finish. So that was basically back-to-back. I saw the pixels from 1/3rd of the way back from the screen. Yet I think it was almost as detailed as the film version, and because there was no film jitter or grain, about equally clear. Since then I've seen the 2K projectors and they're a superior viewing experience compared to non-IMAX film.

I certainly don't think they should ever take the place of IMAX, that's terrible news. However most people don't see movies in IMAX.

So what really irks me is NOT that we don't have 4K movies yet driving 4K projector uptake. The Red One camera is bringing those out next year. What I actually want are 2K movies at 48fps, the other option offered by the digital distribution standard. 2K movies look better than film on regular large screens. Yet any time there is much motion at all happening, the picture gets blurry. So why have 4K projectors simply providing higher-resoultion blur? What have you heard about directors making movies at 48fps? The last I heard were some people championing Maxivision. Then there's a bunch of folks who insist movies have to stay 24fps or otherwise it'll look like TV. I'm willing to take that risk at least once to see how an action movie looks in 48fps super-clear glory.

Re:Which theaters in So. CA?

[Apotsy]

Episode II looked like garbage on film because it got such a poor transfer. Not sure what they did wrong, but it really sucked. Movies since then that have had digital intermediates or transfers from digital video source haven't looked nearly as bad. Guess it's just hard to go from digital to film and get it right. Even Pixar seems to do a poor job of it -- their movies look far softer on film than they should. The only lab I've seen get consistently good results is EFilm. Most places that insist on rolling their own solution would probably do better to just let EFilm handle it.

Also, the resolution of the digital video cameras used for that Ep.II was far below 2K due to subsampling, so you were seeing nearly all the pixels even at 1280, so your observation isn't that surprising.

On the other hand, I've seen obvious jagged edges in 2K material transferred to film so many times I've lost count. And this is in regular theaters, not screening rooms. That alone a pretty good indication that 35mm can reproduce full 2K, even under "real world" conditions.

As for 4K, we've already got 4K from film, no need to wait for a digital camera. There have been movies shot on film that had 4K digital intermediates ever since Spider-Man 2. There are more and more each year. "Hancock" was the most recent big release, and it was shown in 4K on some electronic projectors. The 35mm prints looked pretty good too, obviously having come from a 4K laser-out.

James Cameron agrees with you about 48fps (near the bottom of the article).

Re:Which theaters in So. CA?

[NeMon'ess]

Thanks for the link to the Cameron interview. Very neat stuff.

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).

Paint + Roto on Linux

[Stele]

If anyone is interested, a lot of the rotoscoping and digital paint work were done on 64 bit Linux machines using reasonably high-end graphics cards (supporting 4k and 8k floating-point textures), in a program called Silhouette, which supports working in floating-point formats.

Wow. One more way to market crummy crap.

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for that reeeeeeeally important info bit. After that stinking lame story, that's exactly what I needed to know.

Next time around, please use that obscene amount of money and people's effort you spent on this rubbish for say ... provide water supply to folks dying in Africa every day for lack thereof. I'll happily buy a ticket, even allowing for the side effect of promoting some douche bags career.

If that's too much to ask, publish a decent translation of Marcel Proust's "A la recherche du temps perdu". Or just do anything at least remotely reasonable. Thanks.

clustered file system?

[Anonymous Coward]

What clustered file system are they using to access 100TB of data? I've tried several Xsan, GFS, OCFS2, Gluster ..all are lacking in some respects.

Photoshop

[icegreentea]

There's an interesting line in the article about matte painting. Artists painted in Photoshop, but ran into problems because it wasn't designed to run at such a high resolution (in other words, it was butt slow). "It's a closed tool, so we couldn't get in there and add stuff to it". I think this represents a significant area were the GIMP COULD possibly compete, if they are fast/good enough at adding CYMK and colour management. Furthermore, the phrasing seems to say "we are willing to and have the resources to modify programs to fit our own needs". Aside from familiarity with Photoshop, I wonder if there was any other significant reason they simply didn't just go modify GIMP.

That all being said, I personally do not use GIMP. I use Photoshop to paint, because that is what I'm familiar with (I can't wrap my head around Corel Painter), and because my tablet seems to screw up with GIMP. But I'm waiting for when the GIMP can provide.

Re:Photoshop

[Anonymous Coward]

Aside from familiarity with Photoshop, I wonder if there was any other significant reason they simply didn't just go modify GIMP.

Matte Painters are professional photoshop users, you can't expect them to shift to GIMP simply to improve efficiency at high res.

HA!

[Anonymous Coward]

wish I still had points :/

Still != motion

[Anonymous Coward]

Their digital MOTION cameras are seriously hi-res. Epic fail.

On "Palestinians"

[mi]

By the same logic you use to claim that there are no Palestinians, there are no Americans.

There were not. There are now. New nations can form, but the "Palestinians" aren't one — they pretend to be one, because that helps them legitimize their claims to the land of Israel. Here is, what a prominent "Palestinian" said in 1977, in an apparent "off-guard" moment. From the camel's mouth:

The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct "Palestinian people" to oppose Zionism.

For tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa, while as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem. However, the moment we reclaim our right to all of Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan.

That was a Palestine Liberation Organization executive committee member Zahir Muhsein, talking to a Dutch newspaper...

They are simply Arabs. Israel's entire landmass is less than one promille (one tenth of one percent), than that of the Arab lands, and is hardly the best part of Middle East either (not a drop of oil!). The "Arab brothers" certainly could've absorbed all of the refugees, if they wanted to — like Germans did, for example. Instead, they continue to fight Israel's existence and had to invent the "Palestinian nation" for the purpose (among other inventions)...

Hey!

[denzacar]

Could Marcel Proust defeat the entire first team of JLA?
I didn't think so.

And while you are so smart - why not pick up a language or two.
So YOU could read YOUR favorite fiction it in its original form. French OR Klingon, whichever it may be.
I'm afraid that won't help to folks dying in Africa but then again - neither will a "decent translation" of literary masturbations of a 19th century French homosexual.

Oh and... "In Search of Lost Time" sucks.
Oh shit! I forgot...
Only YOU Mr. Anonymous Coward are entitled to personal tastes.

lossless png files

[Anonymous Coward]

I understand that you don't want to compress the data in a lossy format, but can't you use a lossless graphics format for each frame? That should reduce each frame significantly.