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Delivering 8K VFX Shots For the Dark Knight
agent4256 writes "Barbara Robertson over at Studio Daily put forth this article featuring the technical background for the production of The Dark Knight. With most of the film shot with IMAX cameras (producing a theoretical resolution of 18k), the studios could not handle the size. Instead, they cut the resolution by more than half, down to 8K, the maximum resolution for scanned film. 'A single 8K frame requires 200 MB of data,' Franklin says. 'So we had to upgrade our whole infrastructure. We needed faster network speeds to move data around, massively beefed up servers, and — the most important thing — a new compositing solution.' To give you an idea of how far technology has taken us: 'In 1999, when we worked on Pitch Black [released in 2000], we needed to access 2 TB of data,' Franklin says. 'This show used over 100 TB of data.'"
"I thought you said the hardware was clear!"
"I said it looked clear!" "Well, what's it look like now?" "... Looks clear."
I like to place meaningful quotes in my sig, so people will know that I know what meaningful quotes are.
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.
You're doing it wrong.
That's almost as much as my porn collection!
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.
You forgot a few zeros... 100 000 000 MB / 200MB = 500 000
Your math is a 1000 out. 100TB ~= 100,000,000MB / 200MB = 500,000 frames for the movie, which does sound about right.
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...
Experiments must be reproducible; they should all fail in the same way.
100TB == 100,000,000MB 500,000 frames.
100,000MB is 100GB (not accounting for the difference between the 2^n and 10^n.)
100 TB = 100 million MB, not 100 thousand.
So, 500,000 frames in the movie. 70 fps for 120 minutes.
This post climbed Mt. Washington.
Really? You want a cookie for figuring out that the Batman is a reactionary?
-Peter
100,000MB is 100GB. That's 1/10th of a terabyte.
Do you think he's got the picture yet...never get your math wrong in a /. thread!
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?
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.
new mod: (-1 can't do the maths)
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Except Batman doesn't inexplicably throw thousands of Robins at Catwoman after the Joker does something bad, while he sits back doing nothing
If there was a God, I'd thank him that I'm not you.
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?)
Don't you wish slashdot had an edit feature? Clearly I meant 4.5 *gigabytes* per second.....
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.
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.
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.
So, most computer screens are in the 1-2K range. The film was shot in 18K, so about nine screens across.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Batman is a paean to Bush
You couldn't be more right.
Sigs are for Terrorists.
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
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.
Make me a friend and I'll mod you up
Maybe he typo'd on his sig, too. ;)
--
Dislaimer: I am not good.
Batman's lack of leadership has plunged our nation into weakness?
...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!
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.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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.
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
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.
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]
No. Well...maybe. Actually, yes. It really just depends.
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.
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.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
So... who has the torrent?
From TFA article comments, it's horizontal resolution
5.6K = 5616x4096
8K = 8192x6144
http://www.object404.com
So it's a factor 50 in 10 years ? And we're supposed to be impressed ? That's doubling only every 7 quarters.
\u262D = \u5350
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/
And thanks the gods for that.
One. I calculated it again myself and the math checks out.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
-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.
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. :)
Hey mi, thanks for making Spider-Man laugh.
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.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Just to add a bit of fun to Batman vs. Bush:
http://www.ebaumsworld.com/video/watch/790644/
Fnord.
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.
Perhaps, you should've, uhm, dare I suggest it, read the article?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
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.
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.
No. Well...maybe. Actually, yes. It really just depends.
Back in the mists of time, I wrote the database for the content management system that Lucas used on Star Wars I (the Phantom Menace). For reasons I won't go into, it was called 'Cakes', but ILM rebranded it internally as Media-DB.
At the peak of filming, it was coping with 40 DTF tapes/day being ingested. A DTF held 120GB back then (I think), and they were filming for ~3 months. At the same time as ingesting, it had to stream low-res proxies of all the footage to multiple destinations (some local, some not), and deliver high-res frames across the internal network to the animators etc.
Now, I doubt it was doing 40 tapes/day solidly - it'd depend on filming, but even taking 20 tapes/day, over 3 months that comes to ~160TB (assuming a 22-working-day month).
I do have fond memories of doing the James Bond intro-sequence (The world is not enough) with Smoke & Mirrors in London. When there were thousands of frames of nearly-naked highly-attractive women having oil poured all over their bodies, the visualisation tools became... significantly more advanced at a rapid rate :-)
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
But with all those upgrades were they finally able to run Vista?
TFA says:
Wikipedia says:
TFS says:
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.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
The runtime is 150 min.
Spelling and Grammar errors have been added to this post for your enjoyment
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).
so theres no point in seeing an imax version of this film if i read the summary correct.
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.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
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.
No. Well...maybe. Actually, yes. It really just depends.
Does this mean that we can assume the GP is a girl?
Spelling and Grammar errors have been added to this post for your enjoyment
They probably didn't keep all of the footage they shot.
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.)
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."
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
No, but we CAN assume you're an asshole!
"sometimes he felt that his whole life was a dream, and he wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it."
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.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Then I guess we can also assume that you have no sense of humor.
Spelling and Grammar errors have been added to this post for your enjoyment
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.
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.
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.
Some IMAX is 48 fps. 3D IMAX can be 96 fps.
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.)
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.
Even if there is a thousand of them — that's not enough to justify a qualifier.
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.
It really is not racism... Nope. I don't mind Arabs at all — but this point is where every one of them are wrong...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
there is one discrepancy. Batman has reliable intelligence. He doesn't make up intelligence reports just to go after anyone he wants.
Balderdash!
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.
Free Hans!
actually I do say "arr-pee-ems" when speaking that acronym, along with most of the population ;)
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
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.
Is it possible that not every element of a Hollywood blockbuster (and perhaps not any elements of some) is intended as political/social advocacy?
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.
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.
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."
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
100TB ~= 100,000,000MB
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.
Free Hans!
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.
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.
I like my beverages with warning labels!
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.
Oppressing an entire population is never cheap.
--Jeckler (/. Beta IS GARBAGE!)
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.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
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.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
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.
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)
Live Electronic Music
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).
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
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.
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.
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.
waiting for ad.doubleclick.net
It does have one, it's called Preview. Just learn to use it properly.
**TODO** Steal someone elses sig.
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.
Not if you want to pigeon hole it somewhere into the simplistic left-right spectrum! DUH
In conclusion, we can assert that Batman's secret identity is not George Bush.
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.
That's not, what I'm doing, and I'm tired of your attempts to redefine a common (and loaded) term.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
You have got exactly the right attitude.
Ham sandwiches for all!*
(*kosher or halal substitutes where applicable;)
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
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:
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)...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
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.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
K means Kelvin. They store the film at very low temperatures so that it lasts longer!
I like my coffee the way I like my women - roasted and ground up into little tiny pieces.