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This topic comprises 3 pages: 1 2 3
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Author
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Topic: Percentage of DCPs and Auditoriums 4k?
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Marcel Birgelen
Film God
Posts: 3357
From: Maastricht, Limburg, Netherlands
Registered: Feb 2012
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posted 02-08-2019 05:47 PM
It's interesting to see how only a handful of special-effect heavy movies made it onto that list... So, I think there is merit in the conclusion that 2K SFX workflows are keeping 4K releases down across the board.
quote: Bruce Cloutier
Hmm. I had figured that to be a processing issue. I couldn't stand the resulting "soap opera" effect when using the motion smoothing algorithms available in my LG panel. That would take 24 fps and push it to 48 fps or whatever. It might not be so bad if originally filmed at the higher frame rate. Perhaps that with care regarding exposure to maintain the blur or what leads to the magic. I get it. It's a science. Let's not destroy that magic. I agree.
The interesting thing is, when the first Hobbit movie was released and we got an almost unfiltered look of what "unadulterated 48 FPS" would look like, I thought it looked even worse than most of those "smooth motion" features you could then find on many high-end TVs (and are now seemingly becoming the default on almost all TV sets you can buy...).
The next two movies had some obvious post production applied to them, the "HFR" looked less "soapy", although the effect was far from entirely gone. The HFR looked great on the special effects though, although it also got a bit of a video game feeling that way.
quote: Carsten Kurz
Maybe film makers need different tools to solve that issue. Merely switching from low to high frame rates from shot to shot doesn't work. It needs to be more advanced I think, something like dynamic motion blur in combination with different shooting frame rates and shutter speeds, chosen carefully per scene. I can imagine James Cameron solving that puzzle.
I still believe in the merits of higher frame rates and we shouldn't give up the concept entirely. Just like it's a special kind of art to get color right in cinema, it's a special art to get the look of motion right.
We can still use higher frame rates to get rid of irritating judder effects, while if we get motion blur and "general lack of information" right while shooting at higher frame rates, we can possibly have the best of both worlds.
It's been a while, but I've done some frame interpolation testings. The latest trial was with a piece of software that's using something called "adaptive convolution" as frame interpolation. You can find more about it here.
It's not something you can simply apply on any video, you apply it on individual frame pairs. So you need to do a little scripting yourself. It works pretty well with unencrypted DCPs , where you can easily extract the separate JPEG2000 frames and feed it to it.
The neat thing about it is that it really does a great job at creating interpolated frames that do have the same look as the two originals it's been derived from. So, if the original two frames have a lot of motion blur, the new frame, will also have a lot of motion blur. It doesn't try to eliminate motion blur by sharping up the image.
The results, if applied on 24fps content doubled to 48fps content looks quite convincing. It removes most of the perceptible judder entirely (although 48 fps might still be under the magical threshold of looking entirely fluid), but it keeps the dreaded "soap opera effect" at bay. The image might still look different from 24 fps and therefore may feel a bit less "cinematic", but that's maybe also because I'm also actively looking for differences.
It will be interesting to see what Avatar 2 will look like, if it will ever be released. ![[Wink]](wink.gif)
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 02-08-2019 07:18 PM
quote: Marcel Birgelen
I'm not implying that anybody is locating it there deliberately, you're making things up as you go. I'm just saying: it happens.
You are implying it. Saying "it happens" is doing just that. Implying it without providing any specifics to back up the claim.
quote: Marcel Birgelen
So, why are you making random assumptions then? I'm not pulling stuff just out of my *ss...
It sounds like you're claiming to know the condition of Internet infrastructure in both urban and rural parts of India, implying "it happens" with visual effects firms moving way outside of the city, where things like indoor plumbing might be a luxury. It's all grasping at straws trying to defend the 2K-only practice of CGI after 20+ years of computing technology improvement.
quote: Marcel Birgelen
There is a big difference between transporting raw 4K video versus voice calls. You can fit 30 UNCOMPRESSED concurrent calls into a single 2 MBit connection. If you use compression, you can easily up that to 60 or 100 concurrent calls or even more if you don't give anything about quality.
Did it occur to you that the work files for a CGI project (3D models, animation files, texture maps, etc.) might not be as big as a raw 4K uncompressed stream of a 2 hour movie? The final render of an American movie's visual effects sequence doesn't have to take place on the other side of the globe.
quote: Marcel Birgelen
I'd say, Skywalker Sound qualifies pretty much as "way out in the sticks."
Bad analogy. Audio is different from 4K CGI. And that "ranch" was established back in the late 1980's, before the Internet became popular.
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Marcel Birgelen
Film God
Posts: 3357
From: Maastricht, Limburg, Netherlands
Registered: Feb 2012
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posted 02-08-2019 08:09 PM
quote: Bobby Henderson
You are implying it. Saying "it happens" is doing just that. Implying it without providing any specifics to back up the claim.
Sorry Bobby, you're just being a pedantic prick.
I never implied that businesses are specially looking to locate themselves into the shittiest locations regarding available infrastructure. Yet. it happens all the time: It's often a combination between simple ignorance and lack of options. (And I even gave a very specific example.)
If you're going to open a business in a far-away foreign country, you simply can't expect infrastructure to be the same as in most urban western locations. And even if the actual infrastructure is pretty top notch (for example, in Shenzen, China), you may face other hurdles, like local laws and regulations (you can't even access the most basic Google services from there, without special permissions or running semi-illegal VPNs for example...).
quote: Bobby Henderson
It sounds like you're claiming to know the condition of Internet infrastructure in both urban and rural parts of India, implying "it happens" with visual effects firms moving way outside of the city, where things like indoor plumbing might be a luxury.
As a matter of fact, I do know quite a bit about the state of telecom infrastructure around the globe. Also, as a matter of fact, I've spent a lot of my life working in exactly that industry and the interest of that industry never left me. Hooking up all kinds of remote business sites in bumf*ck nowhere around the globe was a large part of the work I and my team had to do back then and a way lot more lucrative than selling DSL subscriptions to the poor masses.
quote: Bobby Henderson
It's all grasping at straws trying to defend the 2K-only practice of CGI after 20+ years of computing technology improvement.
Sorry, what?! I'm not trying to defend anyone. Get that shit out of your eyes and start reading the stuff I'm writing for once without making stuff up.
I think studios should step up their game and release anything they do at a 4K baseline. It's about time. I'm only trying to explain why it's probably not that easy to do so, with 15 or more special effect and post production shops working on the same project all over the planet, constantly needing to share their work with each other. I gave bandwidth as one of the bigger constrains in such a process, there surely are others.
In my opinion, the solution might differ from what you have in your head. I think stuff should be more consolidated. Instead of having teams from all over the world working on it, you should try to concentrate it more.
But the reason why it's all dispersed is simply because Hollywood doesn't want to invest in risky businesses, they leave those risks to those SFX firms. They also don't want to invest in long-term commitments, so they're happy to pay the premiums for all the one-time deals they make with those effect shops.
Those effect and post shops want to keep their costs down, so you see an increasing amount of outsourcing happening.
quote: Bobby Henderson
Did it occur to you that the work files for a CGI project (3D models, animation files, texture maps, etc.) might not be as big as a raw 4K uncompressed stream of a 2 hour movie? The final render of an American movie's visual effects sequence doesn't have to take place on the other side of the globe.
Did it occur to you that a special effects company seldom just outputs a single file of a few seconds of raw, uncompressed media? Did it occur to you that many special effects shots do include raw video, that needs some layers of effects added to it, often shot in multiple angles? Did it occur to you that there is usually much more material being produced than eventually ends up in the final movie? Did it occur to you that this material is still often goes into the terabyte range? Did it occur to you that many effects shop do not work on just a single project any given time? ...
Heck, even the stupid home video I just edited of a few days worth of road trip in 4K ended up being 500 GBytes worth of raw data...
Yawn really.
quote: Bobby Henderson
Bad analogy. Audio is different from 4K CGI. And that "ranch" was established back in the late 1980's, before the Internet became popular.
Did it occur to you, that I used that example not so much as a possible bottleneck of bandwidth, but as a quirky example, for a counter-argument to your argument regarding locating ones business close to airports, major highways, etc.? (They had their own dark fibers with multiple 10G DWDM channels between there and the then newly opened ILM Campus in the Presidio back in 2007 already, so I guess connectivity isn't really a problem for them...)
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Marcel Birgelen
Film God
Posts: 3357
From: Maastricht, Limburg, Netherlands
Registered: Feb 2012
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posted 02-09-2019 02:46 AM
quote: Bobby Henderson
You are literally going around in circles trying to use this hypothetical rural scenario to explain why in the space of over 20 fucking years visual effects studios are unable to break out of the 2K barrier, despite the many generations of technology improvements that have happened over the past couple of decades.
I'm not using a hypothetical rural scenario. Bangalore for example, isn't exactly rural at all, it's among the largest cities in the world. Yet, you'll be having a hard time getting a gigabit MPLS connection from there to your head office in e.g. California on anything other than a Disney-esque budget. I've also made clear that a 25 mbit connection won't do anything for any serious 4K workflow.
I'm also not implying that WAN bandwidth is the only bottleneck, also, other people you dismissed, like Dave, gave you convincing arguments too.
But bandwidth and availability of this bandwidth to the public in the broadest sense has shaped the very essence of technology. It's the reason, why it took more than 100 years for film to be replaced by digital video. There surely have been great improvements in bandwidth globally, in the last 20 years, we've now arrived at a stage where we can feed millions of minions with highly compressed streaming video at the same time.
But, transporting raw 4K video across the world over public infrastructure is still a challenging task. With about 110 GByte per hour of raw 4K material, it's still something that easily hits the limits of what's economically feasible.
quote: Bobby Henderson
Did it occur to you that I do computer graphics work for a living and might know a thing or two about this stuff? Not everything in a 3D modeling or animation sequence takes up a ton of hard drive space. Most of the actual CG stuff is all a bunch of separate objects in separate computer files. They're assets waiting to be inserted into a scene. None of it turns into something like video or film until the sequence is rendered. Not every worker on a project needs to handle every asset for an animation sequence or even all the stuff needed for a 3D model.
Well, I happened to be married to one that lives and breathes with Photoshop, Illustrator, Maya, the works, I'm the one who pays the hefty monthly subscriptions for those little gadgets... then again, some stuff can even be reasoned with simple logic...
First off all, there are more processes involved here than just 3D rendering. Post production, for example, pretty much involves a whole lot of raw video that gets graded, polished, etc.
Secondly... have you looked at a modern movie? CGI is all over the place now and it almost always involves interaction with live action. Ranging from actors in front of a green screen, shots filmed in studio that need some digital mattes done to extend the set. Many shots do need one or multiple layers of visual effects applied. Some shots are even being worked on by multiple effects companies.
So, the input for many VFX shops is a lot of heavy, raw video material, besides a bunch of 3D models and textures, which might even fit on a proverbial 5 1/4" floppy.
Now, even in the case where the input might only be "light material", the output will be, in many cases, still be rendered frames, or, raw video.
Also, like you may know from your own work, you're seldom done at the first take. You finish the project for your client, you submit the work and you'll get feedback about what needs to be different. This iterative process will only increase the amount of needed storage and bandwidth, especially if the output is raw video.
quote: Bobby Henderson
Nevertheless the fundamentals of that work process has not changed in over 20 years. But the quality of technology has improved by leaps and bounds since then. Yet we're stuck with the old standards. Improvements in computing horsepower are merely being used to generate the same old thing faster and cheaper.
While I agree that the 2K process might be "antiquated" and should be integrally replaced by a 4K baseline, you're also not really doing the improvements in CGI over the last 20 or so years any justice. While we might be somewhat stuck in 2K as a baseline standard, the quality of CGI in general has seen some great improvements over the years. If I look back to movies of the late 1990s and early 2000s, the CGI is pretty obvious in many of those. Nowadays, many movies are so CGI-heavy, it's hard to say where "reality" ends and "CGI" begins. Yes, there is still a lot of bad CGI around, but a lot of the modern CGI is actually so good, you don't even know it's "fake".
Shops like Pixar, Weta, ILM et all have contributed a lot to making CGI characters becoming much more believable over the years for example. We're now rendering CGI shots, nobody would've dreamed about 20 years ago.
You might argue that CGI has become an easy escape for lack of story, which I might agree on, but that's another discussion, probably even more off-topic than the one we're already in.
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 02-09-2019 12:00 PM
quote: Marcel Birgelen
I'm not using a hypothetical rural scenario. Bangalore for example, isn't exactly rural at all, it's among the largest cities in the world. Yet, you'll be having a hard time getting a gigabit MPLS connection from there to your head office in e.g. California on anything other than a Disney-esque budget. I've also made clear that a 25 mbit connection won't do anything for any serious 4K workflow.
Visual effects firms are not running their applications and doing final renders of sequences in the cloud. The only use of the Internet connection is trading assets. The actual work (modeling, rigging, animation, texture mapping, motion graphics, etc) is done using locally installed software. Final renders are still being done on render farms. An Internet connection of wildly varying quality doesn't figure into that equation.
It is possible to do crowd-sourced rendering and crowd-sourced super computing. Scientists have used massively distributed computing, even on a crowd-sourced basis, for simulating things like weather patterns to study climate change. The work flow needs of a visual effects firm are pretty different. The specialized nature (and cost) of the software and security of data are two stumbling blocks. An effects firm has far more immediate control of a render farm right there in the same building than it does for a bunch of different computers remotely chugging on data.
quote: Marcel Birgelen
But bandwidth and availability of this bandwidth to the public in the broadest sense has shaped the very essence of technology. It's the reason, why it took more than 100 years for film to be replaced by digital video. There surely have been great improvements in bandwidth globally, in the last 20 years, we've now arrived at a stage where we can feed millions of minions with highly compressed streaming video at the same time.
Digital video (or even TV itself) hasn't been around 100 years. Film versus video is a somewhat apples to oranges comparison. 2K CGI versus 4K CGI is a comparison of the same thing. Computing technology has had far more than a four-fold increase in performance since the 1990's. Going from 2K to 4K is not a logarithmic jump either.
quote: Marcel Birgelen
Secondly... have you looked at a modern movie? CGI is all over the place now and it almost always involves interaction with live action. Ranging from actors in front of a green screen, shots filmed in studio that need some digital mattes done to extend the set. Many shots do need one or multiple layers of visual effects applied. Some shots are even being worked on by multiple effects companies.
This is all stuff that was being done over 25 years ago. The big difference now is the computers are many times faster, far more powerful and the software being used for compositing live action with CGI elements is much more mature. Firms can crank out sequences far faster and far cheaper than they could 20+ years ago. Each generational improvement in computer graphics technology is only being used to do this 2K stuff even faster and cheaper than before. It has became fast/cheap enough that many ordinary TV series shows make heavy use of "digital back lot" techniques. Nevertheless for some strange reason 4K remains too difficult or too expensive for CG-heavy Hollywood movie productions to tackle.
quote: Marcel Birgelen
Also, like you may know from your own work, you're seldom done at the first take. You finish the project for your client, you submit the work and you'll get feedback about what needs to be different. This iterative process will only increase the amount of needed storage and bandwidth, especially if the output is raw video.
Effects firms don't go to final render on a sequence over and over again to get approval from the director. The elements of the sequence gain approval in stages. The models get designed and approved. Same goes for backgrounds, color schemes and so many other things. It all gets managed. Versions of pre-vis sequences in wire-frame or very basic shading get approved to block out the staging and pacing of the sequence. All that stuff gets signed off before the final render. Shit can happen where a final render has to be re-done, but that's an exception, not the rule.
Even in my own day job if I'm working on a complex project I'll make the client sign off on various elements and stages of progress while the work is in progress. It's fool-hardy to go all the way to the finish line on something like a vehicle wrap design only to have the client make changes that throw you clear back to square one. There's not enough time or money the client is willing to pay in design fees for that bullshit.
quote: Marcel Birgelen
While I agree that the 2K process might be "antiquated" and should be integrally replaced by a 4K baseline, you're also not really doing the improvements in CGI over the last 20 or so years any justice. While we might be somewhat stuck in 2K as a baseline standard, the quality of CGI in general has seen some great improvements over the years. If I look back to movies of the late 1990s and early 2000s, the CGI is pretty obvious in many of those. Nowadays, many movies are so CGI-heavy, it's hard to say where "reality" ends and "CGI" begins. Yes, there is still a lot of bad CGI around, but a lot of the modern CGI is actually so good, you don't even know it's "fake".
There was good and bad CGI being produced back in the 1990's. There's still good and bad CGI being produced now. The uncanny valley is still a thing with modeling people. There has been a lot of incremental improvements in CG technology. A lot more has happened in terms of business consolidation, like Autodesk and Adobe gobbling up competitors and start-ups. One thing that has improved noticeably in recent years is simulation of water, smoke and fire. The Houdini application has become much more popular due to that. But Houdini is not a new application; it has been around for over 20 years.
It has been a long time since I've seen something really clever and ground-breaking in terms of visual effects. We're coming up on the 20th anniversary when The Matrix was released. The first Star Wars prequel and Fight Club were released the same year. The Lord of the Rings movies started hitting the screen a couple years later. Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow was billed as one of the first (or the first) movies to be an all digital back lot production. That was nearly 15 years ago. We're coming up on 10 years since Avatar was released. The main thing that has happened since then is movies like 2012 throwing in a bigger volume of stuff or productions flirting with 3D in an on-again off-again manner.
The movie and TV industry is doing the hell out of CGI in 2K. But the situation reminds me of all those 35mm movies that were blown up to 70mm. They could have shot at least some of those blow-up 70mm movies on 65mm. No one wanted to spend the extra money required to do it. 35mm was good enough. And that's where we are with 2K. It's really absurd that 2K is locked in on all the big budget, effects heavy movies. Meanwhile it's possible to watch an ordinary mostly live action TV show in 4K.
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Marcel Birgelen
Film God
Posts: 3357
From: Maastricht, Limburg, Netherlands
Registered: Feb 2012
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posted 02-09-2019 08:23 PM
Bobby, in my last post I'm not mentioning "rendering in the cloud" anywhere. Most VFX houses still have 19" racks full of machines as render farms. I did mention cloud rendering in one of my earlier post, but as an alternative that's currently being explored by some firms to offload some peak loads. I also heard that Amazon likes to give away "free" AWS credits to companies involved with their studio ambitions.
So, even there you see a shift to the cloud, especially at smaller shops and Autodesk is actively pushing their "cloud rendering" offers to their licensees. I know, because I'm one of their spam targets. Heck, even Pixar is starting to pushing "cloud rendering services" for their Renderman engine...
And you can cut it anyway you want, once you're going to do VFX or post on film productions, you're going to push a lot of data. If you go from 2K to 4K, that amount of data will increase. Not necessarily 4-fold in all areas (your 3D models probably are sufficiently detailed for 4K, but maybe your textures are not), but it's safe to say that it will at the very least double if not triple.
quote: Bobby Henderson
Digital video (or even TV itself) hasn't been around 100 years. Film versus video is a somewhat apples to oranges comparison. 2K CGI versus 4K CGI is a comparison of the same thing.
The first experimental TV broadcasts are now about 90 years in the past. The reason why video was, for the longest time, no viable option for cinema, neither analog nor digital, is simply a bandwidth problem. There simply was no analog or digital technology available, that could handle the bandwidth of 35mm film at 24 fps.
Yet, once the video technology came just remotely close to achieving a similar result, you could see an immediate industry-wide push towards this new technology.
quote: Bobby Henderson
Computing technology has had far more than a four-fold increase in performance since the 1990's. Going from 2K to 4K is not a logarithmic jump either.
Not all developments around IT happen equally fast as the increase in CPU power, lately also GPU power and storage capacity. Large, public infrastructure, on which we built the Internet for example, increases its speed at a far lesser pace for example, since each iterative upgrade is simply much more expensive, especially if you need to upgrade stuff like physical cabling.
While the baseline of 2K may have stuck around, the application of CGI has pretty much exploded. It's also no longer the sole perk of expensive Hollywood features, since many TV series are also heavily relying on CGI.
And while people already marveled at some 3D extruded and crudely animated text about 25 years ago, sophisticated 3D animations are nowadays even achievable for local marketing.
I happened to watch the Blu-Ray release of "What Dreams May Come" recently. That movie won the Oscar for Special Effects in 1998. I remembered them as being pretty awesome at the time. The movie is known for its heavy use of CGI. Well, I can say it didn't age all that well...
Meanwhile, a movie that won the same Oscar two years prior, Independence Day, which still used a lot of practical effects, looks pretty good for today's standards.
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