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Big Buck Bunny In 4K, 60 Fps and 3D-stereo

Posted by timothy on from the open-culture dept.

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."

16 of 102 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Should have made a decent film first... by SavvyPlayer · · Score: 2, Informative

    My kids enjoyed it quite a bit, watching it several times and will certainly want to see the 'upgraded' edition. What more do can you ask for in an animated short?

  2. What are they displaying this on? by afidel · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

    --
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    1. Re:What are they displaying this on? by fizzer06 · · Score: 5, Informative
      http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-UN85S9-85-Inch-Ultra-120Hz/dp/B00CMEN95U/

      The reviews are great: "My wife and I bought this after selling our daughter Amanda into white slavery. "

    2. Re:What are they displaying this on? by MrL0G1C · · Score: 2

      And if you're interested in buying that then you'll probably want one of these as well (according to amazon).

      http://www.amazon.com/Male-Power-Collared-Harness-Mankini/dp/B00CQCMP4Y/ref=pd_sim_sbs_e_3/180-4293593-6900613

      I'm not entirely sure what the link is.

      --
      Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
    3. Re:What are they displaying this on? by GrammarPoliceChief · · Score: 2

      4k 60fps doesn't drop a single frame on my Retina MacBook Pro outputting to my Sony 4k TV, which will do 4k on either the two Mini DisplayPort or HDMI connections.

    4. Re:What are they displaying this on? by GrammarPoliceChief · · Score: 3, Informative

      Skip that, it is only outputting 4k 24Hz over HDMI. Plays fine on the 2880x1800 monitor and I'm sure will play fine on the 4k DP monitors in the studio which we edit 4k and 6k at 48fps all the time.

    5. Re:What are they displaying this on? by the_other_chewey · · Score: 4, Informative

      Is this full 3D at 60fps, or is this the 4K equivalent of HRF3D like the Hobbit which will simply show 30fps to each eye alternating?

      The Hobbit is 48 frames per second per eye, and is projected "double flashed":
      Each stereo pair is shown twice, alternating between left and right.
      So the projector is actually projecting 192 images per second.

      Standard 24Hz stereoscopic content by the way is projected triple flashed, resulting
      in 144 images per second.

      Nice amount of in-depth detail here:
      http://www.avnetwork.com/latest/0013/hfrbehind-the-scenes-of-a-major-video-projection-rollout/91486

  3. Why? by PhrostyMcByte · · Score: 2

    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?

    1. Re:Why? by wonkey_monkey · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Well, for a start, 24 doesn't go nicely into 60 so if you do have a particular keyframe position that you want to keep precisely, you'll need to work carefully around it.

      It may also be that you've specially keyed an object's position (perhaps camera position for a cut to another angle) in two neighbouring frames for a particular effect, but interpolating between those positions for the extra frames just doesn't work. Or you might end up with an intersection of objects which didn't happen on the original frames.

      Then you've also got the problem of extending the number of frames at either end of a scene. Suppose you have (for simplicity's sake) three frames in a scene:

      ADG

      and you want to triple the framerate. No problem, just stick two extra frames in for each existing frame:

      AbcDefG...

      Ah. Where do you get the two extra frames you need at the end? There's nowhere for the animation to go because (quite possibly) you only keyed right up to frame G originally, and that was the frame you wanted to end the shot on (as a hobbyist editor, one can get pretty picky about that). You could insert frames at the beginning of the scene, but that's the same problem. You could stretch the whole scene out more - here by inserting three frames between AD and DG - but then you'll be altering different scenes by slightly different amounts.

      They'll also be less motion blur with a higher framerate, so errors that may have been covered up might become more noticeable.

      --
      systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
  4. Re:Should have made a decent film first... by GrammarPoliceChief · · Score: 4, Interesting

    If only Hollywood understood this.

  5. Re:Awesome! by xororand · · Score: 2

    "Movies are best watched on cell phones."
    - David Lynch

  6. Re:Should have made a decent film first... by Urkki · · Score: 2

    No matter how high the resolution, this film is terrible...

    Well, I think it is excellent at what it is. Everything could be better, but anything will quickly reach a point where making something better makes something else less good. And BBB is easily in the region, where making it better is hard, where any improvement is just making it less good in some other respect, just making it different.

    Just because you did not enjoy it does not make it terrible. It only means your life is less enjoyable compared to those who liked it (well,,unless you get kicks out of calling it terrible).

  7. Re:Should have made a decent film first... by Xtifr · · Score: 2

    It's a technology demo created by techies. And now you want a (good) plot as well? You should just be thankful it isn't about Harry Potter defeating Darth Vader! :)

  8. Discs are for rural customers by tepples · · Score: 2

    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?

  9. 4k != 2160p by danknight48 · · Score: 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.

  10. Re:Should have made a decent film first... by aaronb1138 · · Score: 2

    It was meant to show off Blender. Like Blender, the movie is a mess. The difference in completeness, and usability between Blender and any of the big 3 animation packages is a greater disparity than Windows vs Linux for desktop usage.