Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Ice Age Film Soft

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Posted by John Hazelton (Member # 898) on 04-03-2002, 10:45 PM:

I've run "Ice Age" in both film and digital cinema, and the film looked noticeably (distressingly) soft. I had a Select print to run, about the best you can get. I had to focus on the grain of the film, because there were no sharp edges to the images. The hair on the animals was mushy and indistinct, and lettering in the credits had no sharp edges. I suspected that the film was written out at about 1K resolution.

When I later ran the DLP version, it was very sharp, with much more detail visible than on the the film. Naturally, a computer-rendered movie like "Ice Age" is well-suited to electronic cinema, but the appearance on film was pretty disappointing.

Does anyone here know at what resolution the film output was made?

Posted by Mike Olpin (Member # 1115) on 04-04-2002, 01:52 AM:

No, i don't know what process was used for the transfer to film. Perhaps

has a better idea of this.

However, this proves a point: DLP Digital cinema looks AWSOME when taken from a digital source. Many people judge DLP based on films that were transefered to digital from a film print - in part because not many DLP movies relesed are "Digital Native." For this reason, i am realy looking forward to see AOTC, which is digitally sourced. After that, we will be able to pass more accurate judgement as to the future of DLP and Digital Cinema.

Posted by Aaron Haney (Member # 747) on 04-04-2002, 02:09 AM:

I'm often surprised at just how bad digital video looks when output to film. Other times, I'm amazed at how good it looks. It seems highly dependent on the method of transfer.

I saw Final Fantasy (which had very good film prints) in both 35mm and DLP, and the results were about the same, although the contrast was much better on film. Before that, I had seen Toy Story 2 on both film and DLP, and DLP was the clear winner, due to the fact that the film prints for Toy Story 2 were absolutely awful. I heard there were some dye-transfer prints of Toy Story 2 made, but I didn't get to see one. Perhaps that would have been better.

Statements from Lucas's people have made it sound as though they will be putting some effort into making the film prints of Ep. II as good as possible, so it will make for an interesting comparison, no doubt. Especially given the fact that Ep. II is finalized at HDTV resolution, and DLP is currently much lower than that. If the transfer is done right, the 35mm prints should actually show more detail than the DLP version.

I would also be very interested in seeing Ep. II on Kodak's full 2K resolution digital cinema system, as it will not have the 1280x1024 limitation that DLP does.

Posted by Mike Olpin (Member # 1115) on 04-04-2002, 02:13 AM:

Doesnt Kodak use TI's DLP chip?

Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 04-04-2002, 03:51 AM:

Maybe the film was made soft on purpose to make it seem like DLP had a technical edge.

Posted by Richard Fowler (Member # 893) on 04-04-2002, 06:25 AM:

Kodak system is using the JVC IDLA chip....which is currently at 2K with plans to go to 4K when and if feasible.
Richard Fowler
TVP-Theatre & Video Products Inc. www.tvpmiami.com

Posted by John Pytlak (Member # 331) on 04-04-2002, 06:56 AM:

Here are links to information about the Kodak Digital Cinema System:
http://www.kodak.com/go/dcinema
http://www.kodak.com/US/en/motion/digital/system.shtml

As far as transferring digital images back to film, the ultimate quality will depend upon the quality of the input material, the resolution used, and the output device. Recording directly to the multiple duplicate negatives used for release printing costs more, but offers better quality than recording a single master positive from which the multiple duplicate negatives are made.

Here are some links to information:
http://www.cinesite.com/la/digital/background.html
http://www.cinesite.com/la/digital/technical.html
http://www.cinesite.com/CineonTech/resoultions/ResChart.html

Even today, more expensive 4K resolution is being used for scanning and recording when maximum quality is desired. For example, I've read that cinematographer Steven Poster ASC insisted that 4K be used for scanning and recording of "Stuart Little 2", even though most of the CGI and effects work would be rendered at lower resolution.

------------------
John P. Pytlak, Senior Technical Specialist
Worldwide Technical Services, Entertainment Imaging
Research Labs, Building 69, Room 7525A
Rochester, New York, 14650-1922 USA
Tel: +1 585 477 5325 Cell: +1 585 781 4036 Fax: +1 585 722 7243
E-Mail: john.pytlak@kodak.com
Web site: http://www.kodak.com/go/motion

Posted by John Pytlak (Member # 331) on 04-04-2002, 07:33 AM:

Here are some links to information on "Ice Age":
http://www.siggraph.org/s2001/media/docs/caf.html

Ice Age
John Donkin, Blue Sky Studios
"Ice Age" is a fully computer graphics animated feature film from Blue Sky Studios and Twentieth Century Fox. Set against the on slought of the Ice Age, the story revolves around three characters: a woolly mammoth, a sabre-tooth tiger, and a giant sloth. Together this unlikely group of characters takes an unexpected passenger, an abandoned human baby, on a journey home. Blue Sky's propietary renderer CGIstudio(tm) is featured. Alias|Wavefront's Maya is used for modeling and animation. Nothing Real's Shake software is used for compositing.
http://mag.awn.com/index.php3?ltype=pageone&article_no=1342&page=1
http://www.corona.bc.ca/films/details/iceage.html
http://www.blueskystudios.com/

Posted by Andy Muirhead (Member # 712) on 04-04-2002, 06:41 PM:

Yeah, i'm not impressed with my print of Ice Age either. Not sharp at all.

Posted by Dave Macaulay (Member # 813) on 04-04-2002, 08:44 PM:

What resolution was Ice Age recorded at? I saw some of it at a large AMC cinema and the picture was rather soft.
DLP is, I think, 1280x1024 and the D-ILA 2048x1536. (This begs the question of what resolution D-Cinema data will be in. The end image (for any given digital display) is inherently best when the data is at the same resolution as the display system, and real-time rendering from primitives is not an option today) Assuming Ice age was rendered for DLP presentation at 1280x1024, I think this is going to look pretty soft on a big screen. The "right" way to make a film print would be to render it again at a higher resolution, or more likely to render once at a higher resolution and subsample the pixel data for the D-cinema release and use the higher resolution to feed the film recorder.
The cost of computer time for the actual rendering is a LOT, and scales by pixel count per frame - which rises exponentially to increasing XxY resolution (doubling the resolution, ie from 512x384 to 1024x768, means 4 times the pixels... two squared).
So a (thrifty? cheap?) producer may just render at DLP resolution, and use that resolution in the film recorder. That, I think, will give a film image less clear than a well photographed and printed "real" image.

Maybe John Pytlak has some info on the effective screen image resolution of 1.85:1 aperture 35mm printed positive film projected through a good lens?
I really expect it to be more than 1280 pixels across the screen.
(ahhh... and 1280 wide at 1.85:1 is only 692 high, does DLP throw away the rest of the native resolution?)
I have no doubt that a 35 scope film image area's effective resolution blows away current DLP resolution.

Posted by Christopher Seo (Member # 7) on 04-04-2002, 10:17 PM:

Another soft image is the "Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron" trailers we're playing with Ice Age. We've actually gotten a few complaints of poor focus over this.

Posted by John Pytlak (Member # 331) on 04-05-2002, 07:20 AM:

Several technical papers pertinent to this discussion have recently been presented at SMPTE conferences:

"Using Digital Intermediate to Provide the 70mm Quality in Theatres" by Roger A. Morton, Michelle A. Maurer, G. Fielding and Christopher L. DuMont of Kodak. (Nov.6, 2001)

"Evolution of Resolution in Film Scanners" by Peter Swinson, SMPTE Journal, December 2001

"Assessing the Quality of Motion Picture Systems from Scene-to-Digital Data" by Roger A. Morton, Michelle A. Maurer and Christopher L. DuMont, SMPTE Journal February/March 2002.

Posted by John Pytlak (Member # 331) on 04-05-2002, 07:35 AM:

Dave Macaulay asked: "(ahhh... and 1280 wide at 1.85:1 is only 692 high, does DLP throw away the rest of the native resolution?)"

Most of the 1280 x 1024 pixels end up on the screen, as a 1.5X anamorphic lens is used for 1.85:1 aspect ratio pictures, and a 1.9X anamorphic lens is used for 2.39:1 "scope" images.

Posted by John Hazelton (Member # 898) on 04-05-2002, 12:24 PM:

Joe Redifer wrote (perhaps in jest):

quote:
Maybe the film was made soft on purpose to make it seem like DLP had a technical edge.

I don't think the director would be willing to reduce the quality of the film output just to boost E-Cinema's reputation, especially knowing that the vast majority of the theater audience will see the movie on film. He would want it to look as good as possible for everyone.

I somehow suspect that the company that did the filmout was given fairly low resolution files to start with, but I don't know where one would find that information.

Some digital source to film transfers look great, but this one in particular really stood out to me.

Posted by John Hawkinson (Member # 1135) on 04-05-2002, 01:01 PM:

How flexible are the film recorders in terms of their output resolution? Are they limitted to a few fixed-choices, like 1K or 2K or 4K (and corresponding horizontal resolutions)?

If so, then there's a potential dithering problem to produce both DLP and film from the same digital source. (This is presuming that they're only going digitally render things at one resolution, which makes sense since it's a really expensive process.) If the film recorder's resolution is not an integral muliple of DLP resolution, then unless the rendering is done at the product of their common factors, one of the two formats will have dithering artifacts, which will translate into lower perceived resolution...right?

Maybe this is a non-issue? Seems like it might be, at least for vertical resolution, 2K and 4K are integer multiples of 1024

--jhawk

Posted by Dave Macaulay (Member # 813) on 04-05-2002, 04:28 PM:

The film recorders I've seen are just (just?) a high resolution white phosphor CRT with a servo operated film camera focused on it. Each colour is scanned separately through an appropriate filter mounted in a motorized wheel. After the 3 colours are scanned the camera advances one frame.
The spot size - and thus picture resolution - varies with brightness; too bright and it "blooms" larger. The spot is therefore rather dim and the spot scanning speed pretty slow - only a few lines scanned per second, so recording one frame takes a while... several minutes.
Watching the recorder CRT it is impossible to guess what the image is, you see only a dim spot of flickering light scanning the screen.

There is no "digital" resolution limitation inherent in a film recorder's monochrome analog CRT. Resolution is primarily limited by the spot size, and the higher resolution one wants the dimmer the spot gets, and then recording time per frame goes up because a dimmer spot has to scan more slowly to expose the film. Reciprocity failure comes into play if the spot is too dim.
The practical resolution limit was about 6K pixels per line on the recorders Imax used in 1990 - probably current models are better?

Posted by John T. Hendrickson, Jr (Member # 849) on 04-05-2002, 05:06 PM:

John Hazelton wrote:

"I don't think the director would be willing to reduce the quality of the film output just to boost E-Cinema's reputation, especially knowing that the vast majority of the theater audience will see the movie on film. He would want it to look as good as possible for everyone."

But would Mr. Digital George Lukas do it with EP II just to try and make a case that 35 MM film is inferior? What do you all think?

Posted by Aaron Haney (Member # 747) on 04-05-2002, 05:08 PM:

Many current filmout devices are laser-based, not CRT-based. Kodak and Arri both make laser recorders, and I'm sure there are others.

Posted by Richard Topping (Member # 871) on 04-07-2002, 08:31 AM:

We have 2 copies of Ice Age and they are both soft at the best. We also have the Stuart Little trls and these run pin sharp!

Posted by John Pytlak (Member # 331) on 04-08-2002, 09:32 AM:

Richard Topping said: "We also have the Stuart Little trls and these run pin sharp!"

Sounds like cinematographer Steven Poster's insistance on 4K scanning and recording for "Stuart Little 2" shows up clearly on the big screen!

Posted by John Hazelton (Member # 898) on 04-08-2002, 02:26 PM:

John Hendrickson asks:

quote:
But would Mr. Digital George Lukas do it with EP II just to try and make a case that 35 MM film is inferior? What do you all think?

While I don't agree with Lucas's general assessment of HD Video vs. film, I think he's trying to make the film version of "Clones" look as good as possible.

I've heard that they are shooting out multiple negatives, so that each print run will come from, essentially, a first generation negative--no multigeneration elements involved.

Most directors I've encountered want their movies to look as good as they can in whatever medium they're being shown, be it film, digital video, NTSC, or PAL. It'd be hard for me to imagine a director deliberately reducing the quality of his or her movie just to make an ideological point.

Posted by John Pytlak (Member # 331) on 04-08-2002, 03:26 PM:

The paper "Assessing the Quality of Motion Picture Systems from Scene-to-Digital Data", published in the February/March 2002 SMPTE Journal, has data and pictures of 35mm film scanned at 4K, compared to 24P HD origination. Guess which looks much sharper?

Direct comparison of images on a big screen usually favors film originated images:
http://www.kodak.com/US/en/motion/students/filmtech/35hd24p.jhtml

The HDCAM format is sampled at Y=1920 pixels per line, and subsampled at only Y=1440 pixels per line:
http://www.smpte.org/smpte_store/standards/pdf/s367m.pdf
http://www.dps.com/pdfs/dps_white_papers/High_Definition_Video_1-0.pdf