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Topic: Avatar's Aspect Ratio Craziness

Justin Hamaker
Film God

Posts: 2253
From: Lakeport, CA USA
Registered: Jan 2004

posted 12-30-2009 07:27 AM

Saw Avatar in 3D last night at the Roxy in Santa Rosa. It was in a ~200 seat auditorium and was shown in flat. The auditorium was rather long and somewhat narrow so it was a smallish screen. Sitting about 4 rows up in the stadium section, I did not feel immersed in the picture. I might just have to watch it again at my theatre in 2D where we have a nice big scope picture.

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Carsten Kurz
Film God

Posts: 4340
From: Cologne, NRW, Germany
Registered: Aug 2009

posted 02-01-2010 08:37 PM

The german version of AVATAR reportedly has only 157GBytes. Someone mentioned to be playing german version and englisch (OMU) and confirms 100GB difference between the two. Could it be that they compressed two different versions from the DCDM? 157GBytes for a 162min 3D feature?

Even if it is 'only' DCI-CS, that's less than half of the allowed DCI-Datarate!?

Any clue?

- Carsten

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Jonathan Althaus
Master Film Handler

Posts: 435
From: Bedford, TX
Registered: Dec 2008

posted 02-01-2010 09:00 PM

Doesn't seem right. Legion at 100 mins and 24 fps was 160GB.

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Monte L Fullmer
Film God

Posts: 8367
From: Nampa, Idaho, USA
Registered: Nov 2004

posted 02-01-2010 10:43 PM

quote: Carsten Kurz
Could it be that they compressed two different versions from the DCDM? 157GBytes for a 162min 3D feature?

Was this 157gB feature be in letterbox flat? If so, the filesize would be smaller than the full scope version which is almost 280gB in size...

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Jussi Siponen
Film Handler

Posts: 75
From: Mikkeli, Itä-Suomi, FINLAND
Registered: Jan 2010

posted 02-02-2010 02:44 AM

One possible explanation for the variation in DCP size is related to subtitles: for 3D features (eg. Avatar) subtitles have to be rendered into the actual content rather than having the projector built-in system (Cinecanvas?) render them.

If DCP creation for the different language versions is handled by 3rd parties (one assumes having a native speaker of the trageted language do timing and spelling check would be helpful), they are very likely using different software packages for the JPEG2000 compression.

The compression performance varies from product to product, yet the output is still "in spec". Our copy of Avatar (scope, with Finnish subtitles) is in the 250GB ballpark in size, which is what I'd expect given the run time.

On the other hand, eg. the DCP for "Hangover" was so small I thought it was broken for sure. It wasn't, just compressed exceptionally tight. I'd like to think I'm more sensitive to quality issues than most customers, yet I couldn't find any fault with the image. (Some loss of small details may have actually occured and I just didn't notice -- hard to tell without doing A/B compare of compressed and uncompressed frame.)

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Carsten Kurz
Film God

Posts: 4340
From: Cologne, NRW, Germany
Registered: Aug 2009

posted 02-02-2010 05:42 AM

We're not in the right subforum for this I guess, but wouldn't Scope DCPs actually be smaller than Flat?

One question indeed is, why is the german version so small, and another, why is the UK/OMU version 100GB larger? Rendered subtitels on an OMU version maybe could be the reason, but then why is the standard US version the same size?

Very good hint at the subtitling for the 3D version. Where is it actually placed in 3D space?

I would think that classical character animation, Pixar, etc. compresses very well and to small sizes, but even as AVATAR contains a lot of CG, it has 'liveimage' image structure and shouldn't compress that much better than 'real' live footage.

But maybe it still contains less noise components than full format camera footage?

- Carsten

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Carsten Kurz
Film God

Posts: 4340
From: Cologne, NRW, Germany
Registered: Aug 2009

posted 02-02-2010 07:06 AM

I will take this aspect to 'DCP size variations...' in the 'Straight To Video' section before someone does it for me...

And sorry, I just heard it wasn't the OMU version with rendered subtling (no such thing) but the original english language version in CS, so same size as US and UK.

Still remains a miracle why the german version came out so small?

- Carsten

BTW - how can I reference forum posts or threads in postings? Do I really have to use these monsters?

DCP size discussion

[ 02-02-2010, 08:51 AM: Message edited by: Adam Martin ]

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