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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.
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.
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.
That's almost as much as my porn collection!
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.
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.
Really? You want a cookie for figuring out that the Batman is a reactionary?
-Peter
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.
Don't you wish slashdot had an edit feature? Clearly I meant 4.5 *gigabytes* per second.....
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
...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!
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)
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.
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!
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/
-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.
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
With 1:1 pixels, 1080p*16/9 = 1920 horizontal. But if you're buying a camera, many "1080p" cameras record in 1440x1080 stretched to a 16:9 frame. Not that it's the big difference but was a little disappointing to find out (but I knew before purchase).
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Back in the mists of time, I wrote the database for the content management system that Lucas used on Star Wars I (the Phantom Menace). For reasons I won't go into, it was called 'Cakes', but ILM rebranded it internally as Media-DB.
At the peak of filming, it was coping with 40 DTF tapes/day being ingested. A DTF held 120GB back then (I think), and they were filming for ~3 months. At the same time as ingesting, it had to stream low-res proxies of all the footage to multiple destinations (some local, some not), and deliver high-res frames across the internal network to the animators etc.
Now, I doubt it was doing 40 tapes/day solidly - it'd depend on filming, but even taking 20 tapes/day, over 3 months that comes to ~160TB (assuming a 22-working-day month).
I do have fond memories of doing the James Bond intro-sequence (The world is not enough) with Smoke & Mirrors in London. When there were thousands of frames of nearly-naked highly-attractive women having oil poured all over their bodies, the visualisation tools became... significantly more advanced at a rapid rate :-)
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
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)
Hey, what's that flying over your head at high speed?
Microsoft Sucks, F/OSS Rocks. I get mod points now right?
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.
No. Well...maybe. Actually, yes. It really just depends.
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.
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.
Some IMAX is 48 fps. 3D IMAX can be 96 fps.
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!
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.
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.
A 1000 pixel display can display 500 line pairs, which is 1000 lines.
-- oldthinkers unbellyfeel ingsoc
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...
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.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
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.)
Free Hans!
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
...and we want to know what the _______ is.
Well, I want to know what is is.
What?