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Big Buck Bunny In 4K, 60 Fps and 3D-stereo
An anonymous reader writes "Blender Foundation open movie projects like Sintel and Tears of Steel have been mentioned on Slashdot in the recent years. Now an old-timer, their open movie Big Buck Bunny from 2008, has been getting a make-over in a new release: The entire movie has been recreated in 3D stereo with a resolution of 4K (3840x2160) at 60fps. It took years to rework the movie because the original Big Buck Bunny was created for 2D. Most of the scenes had to be modified to work well in 3D stereo. Furthermore, the original movie was made for cinemas and was 24fps; a lot of changes to the animations had to be made to get the correct results. The creator of the reworked version explains about it on BlenderNation where he also talks about the fact that the entire movie was rendered via an online collaborative renderfarm, BURP, where volunteers provided spare CPU cycles to make it happen. If you want to see how your computer measures up to playing 4K content in 60 fps you can download the reworked movie from the official homepage — lower resolutions are also available."
No matter how high the resolution, this film is terrible...
AFAIK to get 60fps at 4k using existing display connectors you need to use two DP or HDMI1.4 connections and MST, but with two connectors you just have enough bandwidth for 60fps so how are they doing 3D which would require another doubling of bandwidth and thus require 4 connectors? Are there 4k monitors with 4 inputs I'm not aware of?
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Since all my panels are 1080 or less, I will pass. I assume few people even have panels capable of 4k.
Silence is a state of mime.
I can understand needing to alter some things for 3D, like ensuring proper non-nauseating focus, or maybe there's missing geometry out of shot which the slightly repositioned cameras would expose. But this bit doesn't make a lot of sense to me:
Furthermore, the original movie was made for cinemas and was 24fps; a lot of changes to the animations had to be made to get the correct results.
In any game engine it would be trivial to adjust 1/48th exposure and 24fps to 1/120th exposure and 60fps. I find it difficult to believe animations would be keyframed to 24fps in a way that couldn't be correctly lerped.
Can someone explain in more detail the challenges they faced?
Finally some 4K content for my Seiki. Normally I just use it as a computer display. VLC has experimental support for hardware accelerated decoding which is absolutely necessary to play back 4K video.
It looks great, nice work folks.
I read a psyche study on the effects of high frame rates, something above a certain frame rate had an effect on the brain in that it could not distinguish between what was on the screen and real life.
Now obviously you know it's a movie, but it did things to heart rate etc, the consensus was that high frame rates have a variety of effects on the mind.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
>" If you want to see how your computer measures up to playing 4K content in 60 fps "
Not really. My monitor is 1080P, 2D. 4K 3D is about as incompatible as playing a tuna fish sandwich!
But thanks for the offer :)
That'll be perfect to be ready when it comes around again in another couple of decades.
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I'm going to put it on my cellphone.
'Big Buck Bunny' was NEVER made for the cinema, but rendered in the highest resolution format supported by common playback hardware available at the time.
Today, 4K (let alone at 60 FPS) is ***MISSING*** any agreed and standard formats or hardware that might play such formats. 4K is supposed to need the new H265 CODEC, which today has no decent hardware decoders, and no decent software decoders. So, H264 (AVC) is used in the interim. The only problem is there is ZERO agreement about supporting high framerate video at 4K in H264 consumer hardware or software.
If you attempt to play files like this using the usual suspects on your PC, be aware that rather than testing CPU power, you are testing the robustness of the memory management system of your CODEC, which is almost certainly NOT designed to handle these types of files.
Some of the latest GPUs, and one of the common, cheapo Chinese ARM companies (Rockchip, or maybe Allwinner) boasts 'support' of 4Kish H264 video streams, but they mean the industry (TV and cinema) standard of 24FPS, ***not*** 60FPS.
A software H264 CODEC running on a modern 4+ core x86 CPU could probably handle 4K @ 60FPS if the data rate isn't too high, but like I said, that means finding a CODEC optimised to expect such large data sets for each frame, at such high frequencies.
Compounding the issue is that the world's best H264 encoder, the open source and free x264, compresses so well (a 2 hour film at virtually best Bluray quality needs only 6GB), new H265 CODECs have an uphill battle challenging the efficiency of x264, but x264 isn't designed to be great for 4K (or 60FPS). While x264 can encode any resolution at any framerate, its optimal compression efficiency has evolved across time to match common usage cases.
So x264 just works (at current HD), but early H265 is going to produce crazy large files simply to handle 4K by comparison, with little visual improvement for most viewers (given monitor size and viewing distance). 4K video formats exist for digital distribution of cinema movies- the latest Hobbit movie was stated to be 600GB for the 48FPS version in 3D. By comparison, the 'rip' of the film will be around 20GB for the 3D version at 24FPS, and will lose very little detail indeed.
It gets worse. Broadcast (and Internet streaming services) already serve completely DREADFUL HD content, blocky and fuzzy whenever high motion events occur. They do so despite having relatively high data rates because they use absolutely TERRIBLE hardware encoders from useless companies that have had a monopoly of providing broadcast equipment for many, many decades. Commercial Real-time hardware encoders are complete JUNK, but provide brainless off-the-shelf solutions to lazy TV broadcasters. My point is that a bad situation becomes infinitely worse at 4K, where broadcast streams will have to constantly degrade to the quality of mid-90s 'RealPlayer' video content (recall all that .rm stuff?).
And no replacement for Bluray is ever coming- physical disks are over. What consumers need is first quality, x264 encoded, 720 and 1080 content, maybe with some of that at 48/50/60 FPS. There will be little to drive the coming 4K TVs, save for simple video games, and EXTREMELY expensive first-run pay cable-channels showing the latest Hollywood movies and premium sporting events. Normal 4K broadcasts, like I said, will be a total joke, with higher data rates and far lower picture quality than current best quality 1080 cable channels.
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They could have spent the same amount of effort improving the Blender user interface, i.e. making it usable.
There are plenty of public domain plots. If techies can get to work adapting familiar stories by the Grimms, H.C. Andersen, Carlo Collodi, and other famous pre-1900 fairy tale authors, that might start to eat away at Disney's position in the marketplace.
You can still try the high-motion (60 fps) render at 1080p 2D.
You can always download the 1080p version and transcode it to 720p. Transcoding while scaling down doesn't give quite as much generation loss.
And no replacement for Bluray is ever coming- physical disks are over.
Where does that leave rural customers who can't get cable, fiber, or even the higher tiers of DSL?
satellite tv and it's better then cable at mpeg 2
Since when is 2160p 4k?
Who decided to use the number on the left, round it up even more and hope noone with half a brain notices.
Ah thats right, the marketing twats. Probably the same ones who throw "cloud" down everyones throat.
Either way, i'd rather have 1080p at 60fps. Give it a year for compression/codecs and streaming services to catch up.
Then upgrade the resolution to 2k (its not 4k).
60fps just feels more natural. 24fps feels like slideshow. Upping the resolution of a slideshow does nothing for me.
But since the marketing has already started for 2k, and, the TV manufactures failed with 3D sales. No doubt we will have this crap rammed down our throats, and , sucked up by the masses.
In other words, it leaves them stuck with what happens to be playing at the moment, not a large back catalog of videos on demand.
"better then" - Ha ha!
Spot the American... you fucking idiot.
Don't you know what the words 'than' and 'then' mean? Most two year olds do. Why don't you?
I downloaded a few different versions - surprisingly, the difference in size between the 30fps and the 60fps versions is very small. I'm not sure if they sandbagged the quality of the 60fps version to match file sizes, or there is just not that much bandwidth required for additional B frames. Or did something go wrong in the rendering at 60fps? Curious.
And where is it compressed as VP9 WebM? What do they mean with H.264?
They should have included a parallel stereoscopic view.
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Since "3D" is stereo, why the redundancy?