Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Cameron goes digital?

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Posted by Phil Connolly (Member # 465) on 05-06-2001, 10:41 AM:

News Story

I thought Mr Cameron prefered to use film on productions over video?

Posted by Aaron Haney (Member # 747) on 05-06-2001, 02:12 PM:

Your link doesn't work. But I did see an item about this on Friday. Is this what you're talking about?

Well, I found it pretty surprising, too. Especially since in this interview from a few years ago, Cameron specifically says HDTV isn't good enough. Note that when he says "1125 line HDTV", he's talking about analog HDTV, which has 1125 lines, with 1080 of those being "active" lines (lines that actually contain picture information). That's where today's digital HDTV "1080" formats come from -- it's the exact same resolution, just lossy-compressed digital rather than analog.

This sudden change of opinion diminishes him a lot in my eyes. He didn't seem like the type of person to jump on a bandwagon, but there it is. And he's not exactly the first person to say that digital will "revolutionize" filmmaking -- everybody and their dog have been saying it for years now. Plus, I don't understand what's so revolutionary about what he's suggesting. Okay, so cameras will get smaller. And they might become two pieces: a camera with a cable running to a separate device that actually records the data. But that's nothing new, remember the portable VCR-and-video camera combo? It was very popular in the early 80's. If fact, I used a system like that for many years, until camcorders took over. So now Cameron thinks things are going to go back to the way they were with videomaking in the early 80's. Fine, but how exactly is that "revolutionary"?

Even if cameras get absolutely tiny, that's not going to be such a big change. 35mm film cameras have already done plenty of acrobatics and gone into lots of tight spaces. Just look at some of the behind-the-scenes footage from "Das Boot". Look how small the camera is, and how smoothly it moves around the cramped set. Or look at that incredible 3-minute tracking shot at the beginning of "Boogie Nights". Or the opening of "Snake Eyes". Heck, James Cameron himself took 35mm cameras to the bottom of the ocean for "Titanic"! (And according to this book, people tried to talk him into using HDTV instead, and he insisted on shooting with film.)

What will smaller cameras be able accomplish that hasn't been done before? More hand-held camera work? That can be done today. "Traffic" was almost entirely hand-held. Cameras may get a bit more flexible, but a camera that moves around too much can be poorly suited for the big screen. Remember all those people who reported getting motion sickness from "Blair Witch"?

I think most of the things people talk about when they discuss digital filmmaking are only "revolutionary" if you ignore history. I expect that kind of blather from some people, but I thought James Cameron was above it. Guess I was wrong.

Posted by Phil Connolly (Member # 465) on 05-06-2001, 02:42 PM:

Sorry the correct link is: Here

This is the guy who personal paid for 70mm prints of titanic to be struck, so why would he accept such a drop in picture quality. The other main problem with lightwight hand-held cameras is shake. A bigger camera has more inertia, the current generation of tiny mini-dv cameras are almost imposible to hold steady.

Super 16 cameras can be really small and produce better images than HDTV in my opinion.

Posted by Scott Norwood (Member # 30) on 05-06-2001, 02:57 PM:

The more interesting part of that article is that Lucas thinks that the picture quality on Episode I looked better than anything he had worked on previously. Either he's on crack or he's going blind. I can't believe that anyone could say that honestly.

As for the "smaller cameras" issue--HDTV cameras aren't that small. A 35mm B&H Eyemo camera (of the type used to shoot most of the WWII newsreel footage) can be held in one hand and produces very nice pictures; I know someone who has one...it's slightly bigger than a Bolex 16mm camera and about twice as heavy, but it's far smaller than the HDTV equivalent. Also, the Aaton 35 (of the type used to film much of Trainspotting) looks almost exactly like the 16mm Aaton cameras and is, also, smaller than any of the currently available HDTV cameras. Not to mention that there's no need to carry around monitors, oscilloscopes, etc. in order to use it.

Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 05-06-2001, 05:10 PM:

Maybe all of that time underwater messed with Cameron's brain.

Lucas can sure do a lot of digital stuff now like deleting when an actor blinks and whatnot. Why even have actors? What is the point? Hopefully Episode III will be 100% computer animation just like ANTZ. I bet Lucas is pissed off about the necessity of having actual 35mm film prints struck for release. Poor digital bastard!

Posted by Aaron Haney (Member # 747) on 05-06-2001, 09:42 PM:

Thanks for posting the correct link Phil. That's an interesting article. Funny that Cameron would use "Titanic 2" as a code name for his next project. I have to say this statement by Lucas baffled me:

quote:
'At this point we've not used any film elements at all,' said Lucas

Either he's lying, or that means there are no slow motion shots in Episode II. The Sony camera they used can only shoot at 24fps, so if they wanted to do any over- or under-cranked shots they would have to have been done on film.

I agree with you Scott. If Lucas actually thinks Episode I "looked as good if not better" than anything he's done before, he must be going blind. Remember "Return of the Jedi"? It wasn't the best movie of the series, but it certainly had great image quality; especially the 70mm blow-ups. Episode I's image quality was crap by comparison.

I also noticed nobody in that article mentioned any of the trade-offs associated with shooting HDTV vs. film -- the lower resolution, the smaller color gamut, the smaller contrast range, the in-camera lossy data compression, and the fact that CCDs have a smaller exposure latitude than film, producing very different images. Oh yeah, and the fact that high ASA film stocks allow for shooting in lower light conditions than current HDTV cameras.

No, the only thing anybody said was that film is "ancient". I gave up on Lucas a long time ago, but I really did expect better of Cameron. I didn't think he was going to jump in and start bleating "THIS SI TEH FUTUR3!!" along with everyone else.

Posted by Rory Burke (Member # 512) on 05-09-2001, 04:23 PM:

AS far as I understand it all ditital cinema is is nothing close to being video (scanned lines). It uses far better technology and it "promises" to have a high quality picture standard...better than HDTV. I believe that Quvis' Qubit has the ability to reproduce a pixel count of 4k x 4k which I believe is close enough to photographic quality. You have to start somewhere with the technology and let it evolve on its own. We didn't fly the speed of sound overnight. I think people like Cameron and Lucas with thei digital ventures are defintily foreseeing the future and not necesarrily acting on what is available currently.
On another note: Isn't chinese television quality far superior to american TV? Does anyone know? Yet another reason to start accepting emerging technologies and give them a chance.

Posted by John Pytlak (Member # 331) on 05-09-2001, 10:04 PM:

The current DLP-Cinema projectors are only 1280 x 1024 pixels -- which is less than many laptop computer displays.

------------------
John P. Pytlak, Senior Technical Specialist
Worldwide Technical Services, Entertainment Imaging
Eastman Kodak Company
Research Labs, Building 69, Room 7419
Rochester, New York, 14650-1922 USA
Tel: 716-477-5325 Cell: 716-781-4036 Fax: 716-722-7243
E-Mail: john.pytlak@kodak.com
Web site: http://www.kodak.com/go/motion

Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 05-10-2001, 01:13 AM:

What resolution do you have your laptop set at, John? 1280 x 1024 is an odd aspect ratio. It is not 1.33 like 800x600, 1024x768, etc. Unless the pixels themselves change shape. Which they don't when I change my monitor to that resolution. I have to manually adjust the image with the monitor controls to fit the screen.

Posted by John Pytlak (Member # 331) on 05-10-2001, 07:07 AM:

I was refering to the displays already available on some high-end laptops. For example, Dell's normal 15" XGA display has 1024 x 768 pixels. Dell's 15" Super XGA display is 1400 x 1050 pixels, and their 15" Ultra XGA is 1600 x 1200 pixels. Dell promotes these displays as being preferable for viewing DVD movies on their computers:
Link to Dell Inspiron Specifications

My daughter's notebook computer has the Super XGA display.

In effect, the display on a readily available laptop costing a few thousand dollars can rival the 1280 x 1024 pixels of current Digital Cinema displays.

Posted by Evans A Criswell (Member # 381) on 05-10-2001, 10:23 AM:

Joe, you're right about 1280x1024 not being 1.33:1. It's 1.25:1. The pixels do not change shape, and if you don't adjust your vertical and/or horizontal size controls to account for that, your image will be stretched slightly in the horizontal direction. Viewable area on most monitors is 1.33:1 and many people run 1280x1024 with the image stretched to cover as much of the area as possible. I used to do that, until I wrote a piece of mapping software and needed to be able to do sanity checks by measuring distances on the screen. From that point on, I've had about a half-inch of black on each side of my monitors when running at 1280x1024 and I typically go to the trouble to measure with a ruler to get the aspect as close as possible to 1.25:1 when running that resolution. If you have a DVD player in your computer and play movies extrapolated to 1280x1024, your movies will be horizontally stretched to a wider aspect ratio if you don't adjust your monitor properly. (for example, 1.85:1 will become 1.97:1)

Note: This is for computer systems, not digital projectors. I don't know how they handle the aspect ratio difference in the DLP world. They either have to make the pixels non-square (either by design or through an anamorphic lens of some sort) or waste part of the resolution to get the proper ratio. Could someone "in the know" please describe how the "flat" and "scope" formats are supported with the 1280x1024 array?

------------------
Evans A Criswell
Huntsville-Decatur Movie Theatre Info Site

Posted by John Pytlak (Member # 331) on 05-10-2001, 10:37 AM:

Evans: They use a 1.5X anamorphic lens for 1.85:1 movies, and a 1.9X anamorphic lens for 2.4:1 movies. For example, here are the Schneider Cine-Digitar Lenses:
http://www.schneideroptics.com/projection/digital/digitarthrow.htm

In my viewing experience, the anamorphic lenses tend to magnify the vertical inter-pixel spacing, giving a unique vertical line raster when sitting close to the screen.

Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 05-10-2001, 03:24 PM:

Aren't DVDs limited to NTSC resolution? What good would watching them at 1600 by 1200 make? The best thing about watching DVDs on a computer is the progressive scanning and true 24 frames per second on many DVDs.

Posted by John Pytlak (Member # 331) on 05-10-2001, 03:32 PM:

Yes, watching DVDs on a computer takes advantage of progressive scan and seeing every line for widescreen presentation. Going with the highest resolution display lets you see all the sharpness information that's on the DVD. I think even with an NTSC DVD, you'd prefers the quality on an Ultra XGA display to a normal XGA. Maybe an image scientist like Evans can explain using words like "Nyquist", "aliasing" and "sampling".

Here are some websites:
http://www.ph.tn.tudelft.nl/Courses/FIP/noframes/fip-Contents.html
http://www.education.siggraph.org/materials/HyperGraph/aliasing/alias3.htm
http://www.spie.org/web/meetings/programs/or98/or_courses/sc22.html
http://www.cs.rochester.edu/u/kyros/Courses/CS290C/Lectures/lecture-11/lecture-11.pdf

Posted by Evans A Criswell (Member # 381) on 05-10-2001, 05:06 PM:

DVD is 720 by 480, so the best dimensions to use would be 720 by 480 or each dimension should be an integer multiple of the native size or else there will some slight artifacts in the conversion due to beat patterns. Note that 720 by 480 is for a 4:3 (non-anamorphic) or 16:9 (anamorphic) image, so the pixels are not square. This must be accounted for in the conversion as well. 720 by 480 is 1.5:1, which is neither 4:3 or 16:9, so regardless of which screen size is used, the resolution will have to be set so that pixels are not square, or the resolution must be converted to fit the resolution in use (which will probably involve letterboxing to some extent).

For example, if a 1280 by 1024 resolution is to be used on a 4:3 screen, and an anamorphic DVD is played, then the 720 by 480 image represents a 16:9 image which would translate into a 1280 by 720 area on the screen to be shown at the right aspect ratio, assuming that the user sets their controls so that the 1280 by 1024 area is 1.25:1 on their screen, as I mentioned earlier. For a 1024x768 resolution screen, then 1024x576 area would be used, and I would guess that more artifacts would be created going from 480 scan lines to 576 than to 720.

I wish someone would make a system that had a special mode that would go 1440x960 in a 16:9 screen area with a 72Hz refresh rate for DVDs. That would be great.

------------------
Evans A Criswell
Huntsville-Decatur Movie Theatre Info Site

Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 05-10-2001, 05:30 PM:

720 x 480 is not a 1.33 aspect ratio. 640 x 480 is. My DV camera uses a 720 x480 resolution, but it also uses non-square pixels to achieve the proper 1.33 ratio.

It is intersting to note that my PC (AMD 500Mhz(Intel makes inferior processors), Windows 2000 Professional w/ MultiProcessor Support, 192 Megs of RAM) cannot play back DVDs smoothly. It stutters every few frames and is worse in anamorphic presentations. My Mac (G4 450Mhz, Mac OS 9.1, 256 Megs of RAM Virtual Memory off) does not stutter at all in any mode, resolution, or color setting with the exact same DVD drive. But who wants to watch a DVD on the computer anyway? Maybe if you never have any friends (or girlfriends) over.

Posted by Rory Burke (Member # 512) on 05-11-2001, 03:38 AM:

sorry Joe!!

My P Celeron 266 128Ram Handles DVD's just fine....no skips...buffering...no symtoms at all...nothing like what you are reporting. smooth sailing hear in as liquid as DVD presentation you can muster.

Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 05-11-2001, 03:58 AM:

What kind of graphic card do you have? Also, what software are you using? Maybe I am using a bad player. I think it is called Power DVD 3 Pro or something like that.

Posted by Evans A Criswell (Member # 381) on 05-11-2001, 09:52 AM:

Joe, for watching DVDs on a computer, you just need to find you a geek girlfriend.

About the 720x480 thing, I know my post had a lot of numbers in it, but I said that 720x480 was 1.5:1 and had to be changed to either 4:3 or 16:9 either by resizing the image or by making pixels non-square, or both. I didn't mean to imply in any way that 720x480 was 4:3 in my previous post. I simply said that the 720x480 must be stretched to fit a 4:3 or 16:9 area.

Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 05-11-2001, 04:05 PM:

Hi Evans. How you doin'?

Yeah, I made my post before completely reading yours. I re-read it afterwards and saw what you said. I was gonna edit my post but decided "Ah what the hell, people already think I'm ignorant, I'll just leave it!"