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This topic comprises 2 pages: 1 2
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Author
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Topic: The DCP for American Beauty was dreadful
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Bajsic Bojan
Expert Film Handler
Posts: 190
From: Ljubljana, Si, Eu
Registered: Aug 2008
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posted 03-30-2013 03:00 AM
As mentioned previously, there are numerous things wrong with this picture.
quote: Bobby Henderson
No rules to authoring DCP's? I guess the spec sheets on dcimovies.com are just an academic waste of time?
Yes. You can scour the DCI specs for any rules about DCP source material and you will find nothing. As mentioned previously, it can be a youtube 320 flash. There is NO OBLIGATION for a 'studio' to make a DCP from 5GB / Tiff frame 10k source material in 4:4:4, 16bit color or whatever. DCI sets the standards for the final product PACKAGING, regardless of source. And as you mentioned is common in the graphics industry, people will take that VHS rip, run it through a programe to create 4:4:4 5GB tiffs @ 10000x4500px and call it art.
quote: Bobby Henderson
If that's really the case I'd like to congratulate anyone doing that for being an absolute moron. There's NOTHING gained from ripping video from a Blu-ray and making a DCP out of it. It's a complete waste of time. Since there's an additional decode/re-encode factor thrown into it the Blu-ray disc will always look better with such a DCP hack. The theater might as well just play the retail Blu-ray disc regardless of what they think about the disc format.
Yes, welcome to capitalism. They can charge more for a '2k (!) DCP(!)' then for a BR. It is also 'BETTER QUALITY BECAUSE IT IS DCP'. ![[Roll Eyes]](rolleyes.gif)
How many of todays distros have quality control that is more than a 24" full hd (!), maybe IPS or sometimes TN monitor (!!), doing QC from easyDCP (!!!). Or sometimes not even that (!!!!). Of course they won't see anything wrong with the product. It makes them money, its cheaper to get by than 35mm, they can do it at their home, they don't really care what happens afterwards.
If we have noticed 35mm prints being worse and worse over the past 5 years because of lack of QC, lack of interest in making an end product that looks good, even for a thing that cost many many $$$$, how much do you think they care for a bunch of 1's and 0's they get over a file sharing service for 10 times less $$$?
quote: Bobby Henderson
This sort of thing would do a great job of selling people on NEVER VISITING THE MOVIE THEATER and watching movies exclusively at home ON BLU-RAY if they like.
But, that is what people in the industry ARE doing. Making CINEMA & HOME THEATER & BROADCAST & MOBILE (STREAMING) APPLICATIONS have the same BASE in order for PEOPLE to have a CHOICE in which way to watch movies the second they are released, preferably on ALL platforms at the same time.
quote: Bobby Henderson
I think it should be mandatory for the picture and sound to be better than what can be delivered at home. DCPs have the capability of being a hell of a lot better than the audio and video on a Blu-ray disc. Movie studios need to be using that capability all the time.
But that costs money. Execs will just say 'WHY?' and be done with it. Digital is here to make things cheaper for them in all the stages. Production, post, audio, distribution. Quality has been deemed acceptable. By media, by the audiences and <GASP> by industry professionals. Not as good as 35mm you say? Pffft, its marvelous, no scratches and flicker.
And 35mm is only serving the cinema industry, while a file on a hard disk can easily be pushed to cinema, ht, broadcast, streaming, archives, mobile phones, ipods, ipads, rental companies,... who cares what happens to it. Who cares how this will get stored and if we dont have access to a movie from 2008 anymore. Who cares if it is compressed video and sound. Who cares if any company who gets the file can do with it as they like, put pauses inside, compresses it even more, does some fps changes, adds a banner or commercial or two. Who cares if it is projected over a 3D lens at 15% of the intended light. Who cares if it is projected in a 2.00:1 ratio, regardless if it is a scope or a flat feature. Who cares if the sound is not 7.1 PCM but a stereo AC3 decode.
It's all good.
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Martin McCaffery
Film God
Posts: 2481
From: Montgomery, AL
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 03-30-2013 08:35 AM
quote: Bajsic Bojan
And 35mm is only serving the cinema industry, while a file on a hard disk can easily be pushed to cinema, ht, broadcast, streaming, archives, mobile phones, ipods, ipads, rental companies,... who cares what happens to it.
As long, of course, as no one bootlegs it and cuts into the revenue stream. THAT requires lots of investment and "quality control" to prevent.
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 03-30-2013 01:45 PM
quote: Brad Miller
They are using the MASTER that the bluray was created from, not an actual bluray to create the DCP. The DCPs are higher quality than the bluray, but in a case like this (and others, such as Ferris Bueller) the original TRANSFER that was used for both the bluray and the DCP sucked.
That's what I figured. But the way Bajsic is putting it anything goes with how Hollywood studios make their DCPs. Where is he getting his information?
The idea of taking a Blu-ray rip and repurposing it as a DCP is just too ridiculous to believe. And if anyone in any sort of professional capacity is ordering this to be done he should get a job doing something else for a living. Something that doesn't involve manipulating digital data.
quote: Bajsic Bojan
Yes. You can scour the DCI specs for any rules about DCP source material and you will find nothing.
This excerpt from "DCI DCSS v12 with errata 2012-1010" sounds like more than nothing.
quote: DCI DCSS v12 with errata 2012-1010
4.4. Codestream Specification
All codestreams shall fully conform with [ISO 15444-1:2004/PDAM 1 (soon to be Amendment 1)], as
more fully constrained as follows:
• The capability parameter for a 2K distribution shall be Rsiz = 3, for a 4K distribution it shall be
Rsiz = 4.
• All image frames shall be untiled. More precisely, the entire image shall be encoded as a single
tile.
• The image and tile origins shall both be at (0, 0).
• There shall be no more than 5 wavelet transform levels for 2K content and no more than 6
wavelet transform levels for 4K content. There shall be no less than one wavelet transform level
for 4K content. Additionally, every color component of every frame of a distribution shall have
the same number of wavelet transform levels.
• Codeblocks shall be of size 32x32.
• The codeblock coding style shall be SPcod, SPcoc = 0b00000000.
• All precinct sizes at all resolutions shall be 256x256, except the lowest frequency subband, which
shall have a precinct size of 128x128.
• There shall be no region of interest, i.e., Region of interest (RGN) marker segments are
disallowed.
• Coding style Default (COD), Coding style Component (COC), Quantization Default (QCD), and
Quantization Component (QCC) marker segments shall appear only in the main header.
• Packed Packet headers, Main header (PPM) and Packed Packet headers, Tile-part header (PPT)
marker segments are forbidden.
Those are some pretty specific rules. Rules that any AVC/VC1 video encode on Blu-ray would break. That PDF at dcimovies.com is full of rules. The rules are not only there to establish some kind of quality standard. They're also there more importantly to ensure (or at least improve) file compatibility with a variety of d-cinema hardware.
quote: Bajsic Bojan
But that costs money. Execs will just say 'WHY?' and be done with it. Digital is here to make things cheaper for them in all the stages.
The problem with the logic of "they're ripping the Blu-ray data and turning it into a DCP because it's cheaper" is it just doesn't make sense. If a movie studio only cares about being absolutely cheap when it comes to distributing an older movie to theaters it would be a hell of a lot cheaper and more simple for them to have the theater just play the Blu-ray. The mere act of ripping the Blu-ray data and turning it into a DCP involves all sorts of labor charges.
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Bajsic Bojan
Expert Film Handler
Posts: 190
From: Ljubljana, Si, Eu
Registered: Aug 2008
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posted 03-30-2013 04:32 PM
As said, those have nothing to do if my source is a 320x240 flash video i converted to tiff images of 2048x858. I am DCI compliant!
In other news:
quote: Bobby Henderson
That's what I figured. But the way Bajsic is putting it anything goes with how Hollywood studios make their DCPs. Where is he getting his information?
Did i say anything about Hollywood? The topic discussed is practices observed in the last couple of years. Specifically mentioned are the DCP's of OLDER movies that did not have a DCI workflow, no DCDMs were created, were probably shot on 35mm...
I am not saying anything bad about HW and how the major studios of the US are handling it. Frankly, everything I got from them in the last 2 years was on EXT2 drives inside CRU carriers, properly named according to the convention, picture is mostly great for the resolutions it offers and i have 0 complaints towards them.
The reality is, DCPs are getting created at a much much more larger scale than only the five or six HW studios. The reality is that only a smaller part of those movies receive ANY quality control. The reality is that most movies of titles not originally available as DCPs (which would be 99.9% of titles before 2008) do not have a proper DCP made.
The real 'restorations for DCP' of older movies are rare and few and are usually hyped and presented at big festivals like Cannes or Berlin or whatever. The others get their source from bluray source masters and some from dvd source masters and some from actual blurays or otherwise compromised, lossy, files.
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 03-31-2013 06:06 PM
quote: Andrew Thomas
Those are all specifications for the DCP itself. That doesn't specify the input source file going into the DCP.
Those are specifications for how the video code stream in the DCP should be encoded from the uncompressed DCM (Digital Cinema Master).
Every consumer grade video format violates those rules. They have many levels of wavelet transforms, they heavily use inter-frame compression, every frame has dozens of tiles rather than the frame being just one tile. It goes on and on. Those consumer grade formats can't conform to the DCP JPEG 2000 encoding rules. They do so in return for much smaller file sizes and far more severe compression ratios.
quote:
As said, those have nothing to do if my source is a 320x240 flash video i converted to tiff images of 2048x858. I am DCI compliant!
Not really.
Yeah, it's technically possible to grab H.264 video out of a Flash Video container and convert it over to a bunch of still images to save in JPEG 2000 format. The end result is still going to look like shit. It's gonna have all the visual flaws of that severely compressed Flash Video source along with another set of flaws added from the extra decode/encode process to get it into JPEG 2000 format.
If anyone wants to show a movie encoded in Flash Video through a digital projector they might as well hook up a computer to the projector system and play the FLV through it. The same thing goes for Quicktime, DiVX or any other "wrapper" you want to use. No need to bother with sending the embedded video stream through a JPEG 2000 compression step. The end result will actually look worse than the lossy compressed source file. Wrapping that turd of a video file into a DCP container is a total waste of time.
This reminds me of people who "design" their own logos in Photoshop and save the finished result as a JPEG with only computer screen resolution. Then when someone like me needs a vector-based version of it (or something with much higher native resolution) they try placing the same JPEG image into an Adobe Illustrator .AI document. They think this pointless step will magically convert the JPEG image into clean vector-based art. The Illustrator .AI "wrapper" does nothing to change a turd inside of it into something more digitally "perfect."
quote: Bajsic Bojan
The reality is, DCPs are getting created at a much much more larger scale than only the five or six HW studios. The reality is that only a smaller part of those movies receive ANY quality control.
If this very low standard of practice is going on in a widespread scale outside of the major Hollywood studio system then it would be yet another reason for American multiplex movie chains to keep on booking big Hollywood studio product on a near exclusive basis.
I know I wouldn't pay good money to see a poorly encoded movie in a first run movie theater. With the workflow being that bad I might not give the movie a viewing chance in any medium (Blu-ray, Netflix, cable, YouTube, etc.).
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 03-31-2013 11:47 PM
quote: Bobby Henderson
...if this shit is happening...
Just in case I'm wrong I'm not going to name the publisher and title for lawsuit avoidance reasons, but about ten years ago I bought the newly released DVD of a moderately well known British feature made around the time of the outbreak of World War II. The version was distinctive, because of heavy scratching around the reel ends of the element used for the transfer, and the fact that one scene was reshot for the film's American release - a speech in which one of the characters makes a veiled criticism of US anti-interventionism was reshot after negative responses at test screenings. This DVD is of the American version, which is hardly ever shown.
Last year, the same movie was re-released again on BD. I rented it on Lovefilm (British version of Netflix), and I'm 99.99% sure that they quite simply up-rezzed from the same source as was used for the earlier DVD - probably a Beta SP or a Digibeta. I recognised all the scratches, poor grading, high contrast ... and the American version of the controversial speech.
I've seen other examples of commercially published BDs that I'm absolutely convinced have been uprezzed from standard definition masters. Therefore I would be disappointed, but not at all surprised, if some distributors are creating DCPs of rep and re-release titles from sources that were never designed to be used as the master for a 2K presentation.
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Frank Angel
Film God
Posts: 5305
From: Brooklyn NY USA
Registered: Dec 1999
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posted 05-28-2013 09:54 AM
OK, so if I am hearing you all correctly, there is no way to rip a BluRay to create a DCP without there being considerable quality loss, yes? Seems counter-intuitive, but OK. So here's the problem that creates for the art house when we are told, the studio has no DCP, PLAY THE BLURAY. That may sound fine, but suppose I have a number of items I want to assemble into a show -- say a cartoon, a short subject, digital sound logos. The logistics of that become daunting or near impossible if I need to fiddle with a stack of discs that need to be played. To rip each one of these components and assemble them in a playlist would seem to be what the whole server idea is about. But you are saying there would be no way to do this without degrading whatever quality is inherent on the BRay?
Now with a non-compliant DCI projector, one can at least rip each of the items in the program and assemble-edit them to a single BR disc. When we finally buy a DCI system, that would be the only way to retain the BR quality? There's no way to author each item to DCP so they can be assembled in the server into a playlist?
Question: at this point, what is the best software out there for ripping BRays so a "show" copy can be burned with nothing but the feature and no menu or other preview gack? I am assuming when we get a DCI projector/server system, this will be the only way to assemble a contiguous program if we want to play multiple items since you are saying that can't be done by authoring BRay content to DCP without making it look like crap.
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Carsten Kurz
Film God
Posts: 4340
From: Cologne, NRW, Germany
Registered: Aug 2009
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posted 05-28-2013 04:28 PM
Of course you can make a decent looking DCP from a decent looking BluRay. But if the BluRay is already poorly made, the DCP won't look any better. The problem is not the BluRay, but poor masters.
The DCI 250MBit/s max interframe-only wavelet codec with a 12Bit xyz colourspace has quite some headroom against the poorer source codecs VC-1 or AVC. While recompression is not advisable as a general rule, as a matter of fact, it happens all the time even in highend productions. Someone with the necessary skills just needs to balance pros and cons and make educated decisions on codec types, datarates and possible colour space conversion and requantizing issues.
Basically, it already makes sense to rip a BD to a DCP just to be able to play it from a DCI server RAID instead of a picky optical drive, with automation support, and without all the trailer, copyright, etc. bullshit that comes on the original medium. It's a handling aspect, not a strict image quality aspect, clearly.
For BluRay->DCP conversion: MakeMKV -> DVD-o-matic
Be prepared for some framerate/audio sampling rate questions to be answered, but for the typical 23,97fps or 24fps 1080p Bluray, it's no big deal. Ripping the disc may take something like an hour, while the J2k encoding can take one or two days (unless you have overnight access to a decent network of windows or linux boxes for network rendering). Also no problem to restrict the rip to only the main feature with your preferred language.
Only issue in a commercial cinema environment - it is illegal ;-)
A playlist-enabled decent mediaplayer like VLC or MPC-HC will play the original codec rip on sub-DCI gear without any recompression needed, and you can author it to a DCP later without unnecessary additional conversions. Typically you will pad a 1920*1080 Bluray with black sides to a 1998*1080 flat DCP, or v-crop and h-pad a letterboxed scope Bluray to a correct 2048*858 scope container, involving no scaling. Blurays do not follow strict 1.85 or 2.39 AR rules, so depending on the specific title, more or less cropping or black padding is needed. DVD-o-matic has a preview window showing these processing options live.
I usually prefer padding or (minor) cropping over any scaling.
- Carsten
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