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Author Topic: 4K and 2K DCP have similar bitrates Pietro Clarici Expert Film Handler Posts: 136 From: Foligno (PG) Italy Registered: Sep 2008 posted 09-09-2016 06:17 AM                        I really didn't want to fuel a new film vs. digital disputation, sorry about that. My point, like Bill said, it's that *at this point*, with presentation happening 99,9% in digital except for special engagements, shooting and processing film doesn't always guarantee a better final result. Of course your opinion - or your DCPs - might have been different, but on the same 4K setups, I thought Revenant looked way better than the last two Nolan movies. Gone Girl looked great as well. Differences would be noticeable with high quality film presentation, but the sad reality is that, for all intents and purposes, film presentation no longer exists. Is digital perfect? Of course not, and since all my screens are 2.39:1 I very much agree with Bobby on the Scope nonsense. Again, real world experience didn't necessarily reflect that, as the last 35mm copies we were getting here were so awful that even projecting in relatively modest 858p has been a vast improvement, but it definitely could have been better by using the full container and pushing anamorphic lenses.  |  IP: Logged Bobby Henderson "Ask me about Trajan." Posts: 10973 From: Lawton, OK, USA Registered: Apr 2001 posted 09-09-2016 09:48 AM                     The movie studios, projector manufacturers and movie theaters could have treated the 'scope format in digital cinema with at least some respect, but they chose to cut costs and quality instead. Right now d-cinema's version of 'scope must be a bean counter's wet dream. The aspect ratio pleases the "filmmakers" while cutting rendering and data handling costs down to the lowest possible level due to the small image size. The "filmmakers" get to stick anamorphic lenses on their Arri Alexa cameras to bake anamorphic bokeh into their video camera imagery, to make it look more like a movie. Never mind the fact more and more TV shows are using the same anamorphic lenses to make their TV shows look like a movie. What a joke. The correct approach would have been using full container format in the projector (all of a 2048 X 1080 2K chip or 4096 X 2160 4K chip) in conjunciton with a 1.25x anamorphic lens to unsqueeze a 'scope image from the DCP -something originally rendered at 2560 X 1080 or 5120 X 2160, but horizontally squeezed to DCP full container format. This would deliver a huge jump in quality over the TV style bullshit version of 'scope used now. The quality jump would be even more noticeable on proper common height movie theater screens. While I understand that 35mm print quality really took a nose dive over the past decade, the notion of favorably comparing the current d-cinema standard to that is flawed one. It's a shitty comparison against film done wrong. Worse yet, it ignores another comparison: theater image quality against the image quality on HDTV sets at home. I am not seeing a big difference there at all. That's a potentially very troubling thing, especially as 4K UHDTV sets proliferate more in the marketplace. I think it's pretty funny that consumers can buy 21:9 ratio TV sets and computer monitors that support 2560 X 1080 and higher resolutions, but movie theaters are stuck with something not nearly as good.  |  IP: Logged Andrew Thomas Master Film Handler Posts: 273 From: Pearland, TX, USA Registered: Jun 2012 posted 09-11-2016 12:53 PM                     quote: I read someone online, although can't verify if this is true, someone inquired to Disney why The Force Awakens didn't have a 4K DCP. They said it was due to time and budget constraints. Yes, the movie that made $2billion couldn't afford a 4K DCP [Confused] The time and money cost for rendering a movie like Episode 7 in 4K is massive. Every frame of that movie has complex effects that have to be rendered, and increasing the number of rendered pixels by 4 times is not cheap in time or money.  |  IP: Logged Edward Summerhays Film Handler Posts: 16 From: Sydney, NSW, Australia Registered: Sep 2016 posted 09-11-2016 06:09 PM                     I understand that rendering at 4K is more time consuming and more expensive. I understand time being more of an issue than money, but at the end of they day, I think the money should be spend for a better image. A New Hope (1977) holds more information in it's picture than The Force Awakens (2015). You see how much money they sink into restoring old 70mm films, which is worth it. Why not sink money into ensuring a film released today exists in the highest resolution possible? At the end of the day, A New Hope can be released in true 4K, but The Force Awakens can't. That seems problematic. I do understand though that time can't be stretched like money can. Unless, of-course, The Force Awakens has a 4K workflow, then perhaps it can be rendered to 4K in the future. JJ prioritized practical effects over CGI, so that should make the film warrant 4K more, as less 2K visual effects upscales.  |  IP: Logged Bobby Henderson "Ask me about Trajan." Posts: 10973 From: Lawton, OK, USA Registered: Apr 2001 posted 09-12-2016 07:13 PM                     quote: Andrew Thomas The time and money cost for rendering a movie like Episode 7 in 4K is massive. Well, that's all a relative thing when doing a flat comparison between 2K and 4K. The trouble is 4K has been in use to some extent for over a decade now. Current 2016 era computers are many times more powerful than computers from 10 years ago. A production should be able to do a 3D 4K dual eye render today in the amount of time a 2D 2K movie took to render 10 years ago, if not considerably faster. The studio bean counters will have to pardon me when I excuse them of being cheapskates on actual nuts and bolts stuff that makes a difference on screen. Not only are studios going through the motions these days with CGI; a bunch of the work is getting out-sourced to shops overseas to pinch pennies. There's hardly anything driving the state of the art with movie-making these days. What's the last movie that had truly "never seen that before" ground-breaking visual effects? I don't know how the hell modern big budget movies are managing to blow $200 million plus on a production budget and tens of millions more on marketing when they're effectively making a fucking 2 hour long TV show episode. But Hollywood is great at the "rolling break even" art of accounting. A movie production can be a world-wide hit, grossing several hundred million dollars yet still show a loss on paper. Meanwhile there's long form television series putting 10 to 26 episodes per year in the can. They're using the same kinds of cameras, the same digital intermediate techniques, the same digital back-lot techniques and even doing complex CGI. Yet those shows are being produced at a small fraction of the cost. In the end, I think most of the huge sums of money getting spent on a movie production goes into the pockets of a few key people and not very much of it is actually getting spent on screen.  |  IP: Logged Edward Summerhays Film Handler Posts: 16 From: Sydney, NSW, Australia Registered: Sep 2016 posted 09-12-2016 08:03 PM                     quote: Bobby Henderson Yet those shows are being produced at a small fraction of the cost. And in 4K! Every Netflix original in the past 2 years, if I am not mistaken, has been shot, mastered, and presented in 4K. A lot of other TV shows seem to be following suite.  |  IP: Logged

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