"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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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).
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.
People have been saying that since the VHS home rental market sprang up. Most people were satisfied with that. There is no quality threshold that the stay-at-home crowd is waiting for, it already came long ago.
Theaters are a place to go, a thing to do, an experience to enjoy. They will never go away.
Why couldn't that character be brought back? Because Frank Miller didn't do it first?
Heh, I thought I was the only one who thought the reverence with which Frank Miller is treated was uncalled for. Sometimes his shit is just so amateurish and juvenille, I can't believe anyone laps it up. Ooooh, he made a Catholic Bishop the bad guy, that's sooooooooooo edgy!
"Life's too short." LOL, but not too short for you to post that response. You took a bunch of stuff that proves me right and acted as though it were the opposite. Yeah, I figured you were a troll. Thanks for confirming it.
I've been pleasantly surprised to see the countdown added to "don't walk" signals in various cities over recent years. (For those who haven't seen it, there's a picture and an explanation near the bottom of the page here.)
Do you know if there is any chance such countdowns could be added to lights as well? I can't think of a reason why they shouldn't be added to all signals, walk, don't walk, red, green, and especially yellow.
I have a feeling that would go a long way to reducing both accidents and road rage.
No, I have not RTFA. You should. Especially the original source, not the blogspam that made it to the front page.
In more than one city the yellows were set below the legal limit. Courts ruled that the yellow light times had to be increased and ticket fines refunded.
Most interestingly, one city (Dallas) shut down and several of their cameras after that, citing that they no longer had enough revenue coming in from them. They basically admitted, straight up, that it's all about the money. Does that cause you to rethink your "self-deluding crap" assessment?
Slashdot and several other major sites that I used to read every day are succumbing hard to this. Seems like these days half the stories they post are things I already read about a week, a month, or even several years ago, often with a very heavy slant added to the writeup, and several levels of blogspam you have to jump through to get to the actual story.
Yeah, might want to consider that the U.S. alone uses over 20 million barrels a day. Not to mention the US imports about 2/3rds of that right now, so "independence" would require at least 13 million barrels a day to be coming out of this field, and that's after subtracting the amount of energy that has to be invested to get it out.
So, besides the size of the field, there are these two factors to consider:
1. Rate of extraction
2. Energy Returned on Energy Invested (EROEI)
If it can only be produced at 1 million barrels a day, but the US currently imports 13 million a day, that isn't going to mean much in terms of independence, is it?
Also, since we're talking about shale, the EROEI is probably so low it might take as much as 600k barrels of oil worth of energy to extract each 1 million, leaving 400k net. So to make the US truly independent by matching its current import rate, this field would have to produce at a rate of more than 20 million barrels a day. That's a really high figure considering total worldwide production is around 70-80 million a day. Not bloody likely for this single field.
In short it's very unlikely that it will put even a minor dent in the USA's need to import oil.
Uwe Boll only shot 3 to 5 takes of every scene in the movie. He thought that the biggest strength in comedy is the emotion behind the acting, which cannot be kept when trying the scenes too often. That little snippet may remind you of Ed Wood Or Steven Spielberg. He did all the dialogue scenes for the original Jurassic Park in 3 takes or less. He also brought the movie in ahead of schedule. Not saying Boll is as good as Spielberg, just saying that's a poor metric for comparison.
Here's a guy posting about a very similar subject on this site a while ago:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=05/04/02/2351243&cid=12123337&threshold=-1&commentsort=0&mode=nested Not sure how many people took it seriously at the time, but it sounds like it's getting more and more towards mainstream awareness, especially with this new system. 20 years from now, could a person move around at all, on foot or otherwise, without the powers that be knowing about it?
I've seen DVDs that looked better than their so called "high" definition signals. There may be 1920x1080 pixels, but there is so little data behind them, they never lock into place except when the scene stays completely static. God help you if you want to watch an action movie, since every time something moves the whole screen turns into a blocky mess. So now they are talking about making it even worse? Awesome, can't wait.
Slashdot Mirror
"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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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).
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.
Theaters are a place to go, a thing to do, an experience to enjoy. They will never go away.
Why couldn't that character be brought back? Because Frank Miller didn't do it first?
Heh, I thought I was the only one who thought the reverence with which Frank Miller is treated was uncalled for. Sometimes his shit is just so amateurish and juvenille, I can't believe anyone laps it up. Ooooh, he made a Catholic Bishop the bad guy, that's sooooooooooo edgy!
Copyright deals with restriction of DISTRIBUTION
Actually, it deals with restriction of reproduction. Not quite the same thing.
It is the constant and widespread spewing of nonsense ... that has made people forget what copyright is all about.
I'd agree, but for both sides of the pro/anti copyright camps.
EXTRA!! EXTRA!! SUN DOES SOMETHING BAD!!!!
(actually, it wasn't really sun)
Today's story:
EXTRA!! EXTRA!! MYSQL DOES SOMETHING GOOD!!!!
(actually, sun may have been involved)
Understand now?
The problem is, you mention Sun when the outcome is "bad", but fail to mention them when it's "good". Biased much?
"Life's too short." LOL, but not too short for you to post that response. You took a bunch of stuff that proves me right and acted as though it were the opposite. Yeah, I figured you were a troll. Thanks for confirming it.
I've been pleasantly surprised to see the countdown added to "don't walk" signals in various cities over recent years. (For those who haven't seen it, there's a picture and an explanation near the bottom of the page here.)
Do you know if there is any chance such countdowns could be added to lights as well? I can't think of a reason why they shouldn't be added to all signals, walk, don't walk, red, green, and especially yellow.
I have a feeling that would go a long way to reducing both accidents and road rage.
In more than one city the yellows were set below the legal limit. Courts ruled that the yellow light times had to be increased and ticket fines refunded.
Most interestingly, one city (Dallas) shut down and several of their cameras after that, citing that they no longer had enough revenue coming in from them. They basically admitted, straight up, that it's all about the money. Does that cause you to rethink your "self-deluding crap" assessment?
Crap! How did that end up attached to the wrong comment? I meant to reply to this.
Slashdot and several other major sites that I used to read every day are succumbing hard to this. Seems like these days half the stories they post are things I already read about a week, a month, or even several years ago, often with a very heavy slant added to the writeup, and several levels of blogspam you have to jump through to get to the actual story.
So, besides the size of the field, there are these two factors to consider:
1. Rate of extraction
2. Energy Returned on Energy Invested (EROEI)
If it can only be produced at 1 million barrels a day, but the US currently imports 13 million a day, that isn't going to mean much in terms of independence, is it?
Also, since we're talking about shale, the EROEI is probably so low it might take as much as 600k barrels of oil worth of energy to extract each 1 million, leaving 400k net. So to make the US truly independent by matching its current import rate, this field would have to produce at a rate of more than 20 million barrels a day. That's a really high figure considering total worldwide production is around 70-80 million a day. Not bloody likely for this single field.
In short it's very unlikely that it will put even a minor dent in the USA's need to import oil.
I've seen DVDs that looked better than their so called "high" definition signals. There may be 1920x1080 pixels, but there is so little data behind them, they never lock into place except when the scene stays completely static. God help you if you want to watch an action movie, since every time something moves the whole screen turns into a blocky mess. So now they are talking about making it even worse? Awesome, can't wait.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzIM5Ya0yYM