Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Percentage of DCPs and Auditoriums 4k?

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Posted by Harold Hallikainen (Member # 5405) on 02-05-2019, 08:01 PM:

Does anyone have a feel for how many percent of movies are released in 4k? What percentage of auditoriums are 4k?

Thanks!

Harold

Posted by Dave Macaulay (Member # 813) on 02-05-2019, 09:36 PM:

Around Toronto there are few 4K projectors, VIP rooms and "premium" rooms mostly but there are a few I don't understand: one room in a multiplex (and not the biggest room) may have one but there is no marketing about it.
As for DCPs, I don't do day to day projection and don't see many of them but 4K doesn't seem very common. Blockbuster movies mostly but lots of them are 2K as well. I think the quadruple storage space and processing time required for VFX and post production is prohibitive. If 4K TVs get a lot of penetration the number of DCP releases might go up?
The bigger production shops like Technicolor generally have DP4K-P projectors.

Posted by Frank Cox (Member # 6258) on 02-05-2019, 09:36 PM:

Of the movies that I play here, maybe 5 to 10% say "4k" on the server. I just have a 2k projector, though, so it doesn't make any difference.

Posted by Marcel Birgelen (Member # 6801) on 02-06-2019, 04:23 AM:

Sony kept an incomplete list of 4K cinema releases, mostly of their own studio, but it hasn't been updated since 2017.

I'd say that among Hollywood releases, the amount of 4K content would be roughly 20% and for independent releases it's more like 10%. Some 4K releases seem to be format-specific, like Dolby Cinema or IMAX only, where they don't seem to bother to release a 4K version for general distribution and if a movie is released in 3D too, they seem to give up on a 4K 2D release by default... I guess that's a revenue-pushing way to motivate you to play the 3D version.

I'd expected more releases in 4K, especially since many movies are afterwards being released on 4K Blu-Ray, which in many cases is probably nothing more than an "auto-polished" 2K release.

If I'd draw a 50 mile radius around where I live, that would cover 3 countries already. The install-base of 4K projectors would probably amount to roughly 20%. But in this case, it's mostly Sony projectors pushing the average.

The multiplex chains operating within a 50 mile radius are Pathe, Kinepolis, Vue (formerly JT Cinemas), Euroscoop, Cinestar (being acquired by Vue), Cinemaxx (also being acquired by Vue), UGC, Cineplex (Germany) and UCI Kinowelt. Maybe I'm forgetting one or two, but since there are three countries involved, the competition seems bigger than it actually is.

Practically all those chains do have some kind of "PLF" or other "premium" offering, which practically always offers 4K projection on a rather large screen. Some venues have multiple premium rooms, pushing the average of 4K machines, but I'd say amongst the multiplexes the 4K install average is somewhere around 15%.

Also, recent refurbishments, where premium rooms have, for example, been fitted with 3P/6P laser setups, have somewhat increased the 4K install base, where the 4K Xeon projector often found its way into a "lesser" room.

Smaller, independent and alternative cinemas are a bit of a mixed bag, due to budget limitations, you rarely see a Barco, Christie or NEC 4K machine, but rather often a 4K Sony, where 4K is obviously the only option. So, here it's Sony pushing the envelope to about 20%.

So, in general, I'd say you see an increase in 4K installs around here, primarily due to investments into "premium formats" but the amount of actual 4K content is still severely lacking. I'd say the amount of 4K installs somewhat exceeds my expectations, whereas I'm almost flabbergasted at the lack of 4K output from the studios.

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 02-06-2019, 09:06 AM:

To get a good idea of just how little native 4K content is being produced just check out the offerings on the Ultra HD Blu-ray format. I'd say at least 95% of of the content on that platform is blown-up from 2K sources. I have the feeling that Dolby Vision and HDR-10 deep color formats are being hyped out of sheer desperation to give UHD Blu-ray some kind of justification to merely exist. I currently have zero desire to buy a 4K TV or 4K movie disc player.

quote: Dave Macaulay
I think the quadruple storage space and processing time required for VFX and post production is prohibitive. If 4K TVs get a lot of penetration the number of DCP releases might go up?

Graphics technology is so much more powerful now than it was just 10 years ago when some movies were already being digitally shot and post-produced in 4K. The real problem snuffing out 4K work in CGI and other post production efforts is bean counters. A 100% 4K work flow is do-able now. It's not cost/time prohibitive at all. Unfortunately each time a new breed of CPUs, ultra-fast RAM and bleeding edge graphics boards comes out to make 4K even more feasible the fucking bean counters look at the equation and see 2K can be done at least 4 times faster than that! Why do we need to bother with 4K when 2K can be done so much faster and therefore cheaper? It's all about the bottom line, not delivering a better quality product to the audience.

I get the feeling the only way 4K is going to finally break through as a de-facto, bottom floor standard in all levels of movie production is if it can be rendered all in real time. If there is any waiting at all in terms of render time the bean counters will almost always opt for 2K. They're just cranking out this Save the Cat Hollywood product out in churn and burn style after all. Standards of "good enough" are going to reign supreme in that.

With that mind set I feel like the AMPAS should ditch the visual effects category in the Oscars. Put that category on a hiatus until Hollywood studios start actually wanting to try something innovative (and risky) again.

We're a very long way from the days of analog effects and the tight rope walk the technicians had to take, often having only one shot at it to get it right. With everything being CGI and all the road maps firmly established there's no uncharted territory. Now it's about farming out as much "mole monkey" CG work to third world sweat shops just to up the profit margins.

The consumer electronics industry is trying hard to push 4K. It's a little like the personal computer business. Users have to see a real need to upgrade. The industry isn't going to be doing very well if people only replace their TV sets when the old one finally breaks. That's where we are with the personal computing industry now. But without much native 4K content there's really no reason to bother upgrading. To make matters even more ridiculous 8K TV monitors are being introduced. There are no 8K cinema projectors and AFAIK there are no development plans for such projectors in the works. Personally the only use I could see for a 8K TV is using it as a really big computer monitor for graphics & photo editing purposes.

Posted by Dave Macaulay (Member # 813) on 02-06-2019, 10:15 AM:

Well of course it's always the bean counters!
But regardless that "Graphics technology is so much more powerful now than it was just 10 years ago", the 4x storage space and render time strains the resources of production houses. I service several projectors in VFX and post houses with multi petabyte storage and massive render system racks: what I hear from the techs I work with (projectors are generally under the IT department) is that hardware and storage bottlenecks are common: data has to be shuffled on and off tape constantly and the render farm is running close to capacity most of the time.
Archiving is another constant problem - the production team wants to keep everything "just in case" even after the project goes gold, the IT team wants to archive as little as possible.
I don't see any big demand for 4K for cinema or TV. New cinema builds here are not 100% 4K (except the ones going for Sony, and in Canada those add up to roughly none). There is not a lot of content coming out in 4K now, maybe that will change. I'm at a 10-plex now: out of 24 features on the TMS, 3 are 4K - Cold Pursuit, The Upside, and Vice.
Even at exhibition 4K is a PITA if you don't have a 4K projector. The 4K DCP size is less than 4X 2K from what I see but it's still lots more than for 2K, older servers with 1TB or even 500GB drives in the content RAID already often need to have titles swapped out and back in during the week to accommodate mixed schedules.
4K TVs are not running out the door and I don't see any "budget" models at all that would indicate a demand: when HD first hit cable and OTA there were a lot of offbrand "HD" TVs on the market (many were spec'ed 720p or even 720i in the fine print below the "FULL HD!" in war font) - the visible "WOW!" difference between 480i and 1080p was pushing demand hard. The difference between 1080p and 2160p is not nearly as eye-popping. HDR 2160P is pretty amazing but there is next to zero content available, and except for the 1% with spare cash and video geeks - who will buy these TVs? In a "normal" house with a reasonable size TV and normal viewing distance the difference between 2K and 4K is pretty meh.
Anyone here own a Pono? Didn't think so.

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 02-06-2019, 01:46 PM:

If I'm looking at content on a good quality 2160p UHDTV set it's pretty easy to tell the difference between regular 1080p and truly native 2160p content. The difference is pretty obvious if the material is well photographed. To me it's like the difference between a 70mm blow-up movie versus a film shot on 5/65mm negative. Most people in this forum can distinguish the same difference.

There are some really great 4K OLED TV sets on the market now, and at increasingly affordable price points. Sadly there is just not many "reference quality" native-4K movies out there for the public to buy to fully show off the capabilities of those TV sets. The movie studios don't put any warnings on UHD Blu-ray discs saying the movie was upscaled from a 2K source. The customer has to go hunting around for that info. The same is true on the theatrical side. 20+ years ago you could see theater directory ads listing if the show had Dolby Digital sound or if the movie was being presented in 70mm. Modern ads don't do squat to delinate whether a movie presentation is 2K or 4K. It's just "digital." Considering some of the soft projection quality I've been seeing it would be tough to tell the difference between a 2K or 4K show with the picture dialed slightly out of focus.

I think both the consumer electronics industry and movie industry are trying to take advantage of a general public that just isn't very technically astute. But the general public can deal it back at them in spades with "who gives a shit" apathy. Why do I need to pay $30 for a UHD movie disc when it looks just as good streaming from Netflix on my phone?

quote: Dave Macaulay
But regardless that "Graphics technology is so much more powerful now than it was just 10 years ago", the 4x storage space and render time strains the resources of production houses. I service several projectors in VFX and post houses with multi petabyte storage and massive render system racks: what I hear from the techs I work with (projectors are generally under the IT department) is that hardware and storage bottlenecks are common: data has to be shuffled on and off tape constantly and the render farm is running close to capacity most of the time.

The 2K CGI standard has been around for nearly 30 freaking years, the entire time members of Generation Z have been alive, and now they're reaching adulthood. I couldn't imagine having to go back to 1990's era computer technology to do my sign design work. It would really really suck. So I have a hard time feeling sympathetic toward production companies having data bottleneck issues with that same old 2K. Not only do these guys have much more powerful hardware (and far more storage capacity) at their disposal than post production crews 20 years ago. They also have much better, far more mature software. Today most effects can be done right out of the box in apps like Maya and Houdini. Back in the 1990's crews at ILM and Digital Domain had to literally engineer a lot of new software, plug-ins and other work arounds from scratch to realize a visual effects sequence. Their render times were far longer. Any errors and resulting render do-overs would be costly. Remember all the controversy over the 6 month production delay on Titanic? The movie literally went from being a summer release to a holiday release due to technology limits. The kids these days have it so much easier.

The main burden post production crews have now is the burden of making more effects sequences in a single movie while given shrinking production deadlines. That is a real problem. Another problem is a bunch of Americans doing this kind of work are seeing their jobs get outsourced to Korea, India, etc. Many have left the movie industry for jobs in the gaming industry and manufacturing. That doesn't really foster the kind of environment necessary for "ground-breaking" new visuals in movies.

Posted by Marcel Birgelen (Member # 6801) on 02-06-2019, 03:09 PM:

Id's say, given the budgets of many modern Hollywood movies, producing FX in 2K rather than 4K is pretty much bean counting...

I mean, even all we do has been 4K for the better part of the last 5 years now. Also, although 4K means 4 times as many pixels in the raw output, it doesn't necessarily mean it takes 4 times as long to render and everybody that kept their rendering farms a little up-to-date over the last years, has seen tremendous improvements in rendering speeds as GPUs started to become part of the equation.

Also, the availability of cloud solutions like AWS, Azure and Google's cloud have allowed many production firms to off-load some of their peak loads into such almost endless scalable clouds, without the need for huge one-time investments in hardware.

But I think the bottleneck and the decision to fall-back to 2K as intermediate output format for many FX work is because of another reason.

Look at the credits of the average big budget Hollywood movie. About 20 to 25 years ago, when CGI first started to become mainstream in Hollywood productions, you would have an ILM and maybe a Digital Domain working on special effects, whereas one would focus on more practical effects and the other more on digital effects. So, you had like two different effect companies at most, working on the same material.

Nowadays, you've got like anywhere between 15 or 25 small, medium and large special effect houses from all over the place working on the same thing. They obviously need to share a lot of data with each other. Not just raw video, audio, but also stuff like tons of stills, textures, 3D models, the works...

Now, it's one thing to store a few petabytes worth of data in a single location, it's an entirely other thing to effectively share them between so many parties involved, including all the updates that happen in the process. I guess this is were, due to time and technological constrains, the corners get cut and the decision to go for a 2K workflow is primarily established. Simply because of a practical feasibility constraint of sharing such amount of raw data between so many parties involved.

Would Hollywood be willing to take more risks and would those effect houses be more consolidated in both structure and geographic locations, introducing a streamlined 4K or even 8K process would meet far lesser constraints. Obviously, you would need to get rid of those outsourced digital animation sweatshops that now do a lot of the more menial tasks of modern day CGI effects...

But, unfortunately, only Disney seems to understand the potential benefit of having a major SFX house in-house... (And even they run a few sweatshop locations as part of their business.)

Posted by Monte L Fullmer (Member # 2797) on 02-06-2019, 04:32 PM:

quote: Frank Cox
I just have a 2k projector, though, so it doesn't make any difference.

Your installer added a macro to recognize 4k content where the content is scaled down to 2k presentation. Otherwise, the image would over fill the respected ratio - like cropped scenes, letter being cut off and the similar.

Upside is in 4k and next week's release, Cold Pursuit is also in 4k

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 02-06-2019, 05:44 PM:

quote: Marcel Birgelen
Look at the credits of the average big budget Hollywood movie. About 20 to 25 years ago, when CGI first started to become mainstream in Hollywood productions, you would have an ILM and maybe a Digital Domain working on special effects, whereas one would focus on more practical effects and the other more on digital effects. So, you had like two different effect companies at most, working on the same material.

After the introduction of CGI it didn't take long for major studio productions to job-out lots of different tasks to multiple VFX and post production firms. Even with multiple firms involved on a project the movie production will typically have one firm working on a specific set of sequences and another firm working on another set of sequences.

But there is a lot of shared common data. They have to use the same 3D models, texture maps and other assets to keep the look consistent. Again, this kind of work flow has been going on for many years. Meanwhile Internet speeds are much faster than they were 20 years ago. That makes sharing all that data between firms a whole lot easier today than it was in the past.

Posted by Steve Guttag (Member # 268) on 02-07-2019, 07:15 AM:

quote: Monte L Fullmer
Your installer added a macro to recognize 4k content where the content is scaled down to 2k presentation. Otherwise, the image would over fill the respected ratio - like cropped scenes, letter being cut off and the similar.

That's not how it works. The server merely extracted teh 2K container from the 4K file. DCI compliance required that all servers and projectors to be able to handle both 2K and 4K images. A 2K system needs no special macros or presets to work with 4K. It just plays them like if they were 2K.

Posted by Bruce Cloutier (Member # 9615) on 02-07-2019, 07:19 AM:

IMHO 2K content upscaled to 4K for rendering is just fine. Sitting 10 feet from an 86" screen the issue is more about pixel size than source resolution. As I have mentioned I have one of the first LG 4K panels.

30 years ago I got one of the large Pioneer Elite rear projection TVs and moved from the 4:9 raster images to 720p and even 1080p. Yes, there definitely was a WOW factor there. We relied on a lot of upscaling then too. Um, that beast still holds the carpet down in an unused sitting room (supposed to be a living room but its too small).

What about frame rate? It becomes painfully apparent on large screens like IMAX and even my 86" when some content pans or credits scroll that the image jumps/jitters unacceptably. That adds to storage issues, right?

There is a real problem in rendering higher resolution images when it comes to gaming. I had setup a Nintendo with HDMI converter and no amount of skill prepares you for that 1/4 second delay. Keeping surround audio in sync is a challenge. I believe I've programmed a 5 frame+ delay if my memory serves.

I do compare my home situation to what I experience in the cinema in deciding when to employ delayed gratification.

Posted by Monte L Fullmer (Member # 2797) on 02-07-2019, 02:44 PM:

Thanx Steve for the updated info.

For when 4K was coming out, tech had to do a macro of sorts to do the down scaling.

For our images were all blown up on the screen prior.

Posted by Marcel Birgelen (Member # 6801) on 02-07-2019, 03:54 PM:

quote: Bobby Henderson
But there is a lot of shared common data. They have to use the same 3D models, texture maps and other assets to keep the look consistent. Again, this kind of work flow has been going on for many years. Meanwhile Internet speeds are much faster than they were 20 years ago. That makes sharing all that data between firms a whole lot easier today than it was in the past.

It depends a lot on where you're physically located on whether or not any kind of high-bandwidth connectivity is possible. I've had an hard time linking up remote branches in some far-away places where they decided to dump some menial tasks to the head office. Problems range from simple lack of any decent connectivity in the neighborhood to simply getting licenses for connections that could potentially bypass local government mind-control attempts...

Now you can imagine there is a bit of a difference between syncing some corporate e-mail and heavy workloads with sometimes hundreds of gigabytes of deltas between two or more sites every single day, even in this day and age it's not really a given that you can have "unlimited" bandwidth everywhere at prices that at least somewhat make a business sense.

Even nowadays around here, when it concerns high-res video and video-related assets, I still see a lot of tapes and hard-drives being sent back and forth, instead of sharing it over the Internet, some of it also due to the lack of proper sharing infrastructure at some places, not even due to the lack of bandwidth.

quote: Bruce Cloutier
What about frame rate? It becomes painfully apparent on large screens like IMAX and even my 86" when some content pans or credits scroll that the image jumps/jitters unacceptably. That adds to storage issues, right?

Resolution is not just about pixels per frame, it's also about pixels per second, obviously. So, sure, a higher frame-rate increases storage demands.

Now, modern compression codecs (not those used for your average DCP), can handle higher frame-rates pretty decently. So, you won't usually see a 1080p60 HECV encoded file grow double the size of a 1080p30 file.

But, it doesn't only add size, it obviously also slows down rendering times for special effects and post production. If you go from 24 fps to 48 fps, you already doubled the amount of frames, so that's most likely also roughly double the amount of rendering time spent on it.

There is another problem though, and that's while High Frame Rates or HFR mostly fixes problems with judder in panning movements, it often introduces new problems. One of the most common issues is the "soap opera" effect.

Essentially, if you break the 24 frames per second "rule" of cinema, it's like you're sucking the magic out of the frames. Everything with a human actor in it, starts to look more like a recording of a theater performance, rather than a movie.

A prime example is the way the three Hobbit movies looked in "HFR". Those were the first mainstream full-feature digital releases that used the possibility of higher frame rates, in this case 48 fps instead of 24.

Now, in my opinion, it's not so much the "High Frame Rate" itself that's the culprit, but due to the shorter shutter times needed for higher frame rates, there is a lot less motion blur in the frames. This makes movements by primarily human actors look less "film like" and look much more like a cheap soap opera, which historically were often recorded in i60 or i50 video formats. Some scenes also look like they're weirdly sped-up.

The amount this bothers people seems to differ wildly between people, but for many people, including me, the weird look can be sufficient to break my "suspension of disbelief".

quote: Monte L Fullmer
For when 4K was coming out, tech had to do a macro of sorts to do the down scaling.

For our images were all blown up on the screen prior.

AFAIK, the DCI specs have always included 4K, so what server was this?

I'm repeating Steve here, sorry, but the point is, there is no scaling involved in properly encoded JPEG2000 DCPs.

The simplified version: The 4K image consists of the "2K core" plus additional information for more details for the machines that support 4K. If your projector only supports 2K, your server will only read the "2K core" data. That way, there should be no scaling involved.

Would you be scaling, then you would read the entire 4K frame and calculate the resulting 2K image based on a scaling algorithm. The DCI solution at least ensures consistent results between setups and prevents potential nasty scaling artifacts by going this route.

Posted by Carsten Kurz (Member # 5396) on 02-07-2019, 04:43 PM:

On some systems, formats needed to be adjusted indeed for 4k, when subtitles were involved. Because there is a choice for 2k/4k scaling in either IMB or the projector. But then the resolution reference for the subtitle rendering changes, so you need to make sure that the subtitle size and position were adjusted to the proper display raster.

But the 4k image playback itself is indeed transparent for all DCI compliant servers/projectors.

Since late 2017, I added format indicators to our ongoing dcp list, that is, every movie we played since 2017 has an indicator for aspect ratio, 5.1/7.1 and 2k/4k. 4k is certainly increasing. Very often not for mainstream content (3D/VFX being a major reason), but very often arthouse titles or documentaries, even some low budget films. The basic editing needed for this kind of release makes it easier to do 4k than for 3D or VFX loaded blockbuster. Clearly, we do see more independent movies in 4k than mainstream from the big hollywood studios.

I could try to filter for 4k to give some numbers, but then, our own list as a singlescreen is not really representative.

We do, however, have a '4k releases' thread in our german 'film-tech equivalent forum', where I am sure all international 4k releases are listed.

https://www.filmvorfuehrer.de/topic/13529-4k-filme/?page=21

- Carsten

Posted by Steve Guttag (Member # 268) on 02-07-2019, 05:49 PM:

Carsten, yes on a 4K projector one has to be careful of the PCF on some IMBs to ensure the correct image and subtitle placement. However, Monte was discussing a 2K projector where all you will get is 2K, no matter what the DCP is.

Posted by Carsten Kurz (Member # 5396) on 02-07-2019, 05:58 PM:

Isn't it the other way round, Steve? On a 4K projector, the subtitle placement is always correct, as the 4k is passed through, and the subtitle size and placement stays valid. However, if you play a 4k DCP through an IMB with a 4k license or general 4k capability into a 2k projector, the IMB can decode either full 4k or 2k, and the ICP may need to rescale to 2k. That's when the subtitle size/image resolution reference is lost.

That's a pretty common issue when playing subtitled 4k content through IMBs on 2k projectors with the wrong PCF.

- Carsten

Posted by Justin Hamaker (Member # 2165) on 02-07-2019, 06:14 PM:

Looking at the recent content we have received it appears that about 20% of the content is 4K. Of course this will vary throughout the year and likely be higher during blockbuster seasons.

Posted by Steve Guttag (Member # 268) on 02-07-2019, 07:55 PM:

Carsten,

Nope...it is always the 4K projectors once has to watch out for. On 2K, the server should only extract the 2K portion to begin with.

However, on a 4K system, if you don't use a 4K PCF, then the scaler will do wacky things with the 4K image (magnify it). If you always use the 4K PCFs, the image is always right but if the DCP is 2K with subtitles, they will be buried below the image so the 2K PCF will tell the projector to place the subtitles relative to a 2K image, not the 4K image.

For IMBs that do scale the image (Rather than the projector) and those that can do their own subtitles, all bets are off on how it will interpret each type of content. One would hope it would be smart in that if it is handling subtitles, it knows where to place them.

The disconnect on a traditional IMB/ICP system is that the subtitles are done by the projector (ICP) the ICP scales the subtitles unless told it is only 2K (I believe the IMB always claims 4K to the projector when the IMB is configured for a 4K projector).

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 02-08-2019, 12:24 AM:

quote: Marcel Birgelen
It depends a lot on where you're physically located on whether or not any kind of high-bandwidth connectivity is possible. I've had an hard time linking up remote branches in some far-away places where they decided to dump some menial tasks to the head office. Problems range from simple lack of any decent connectivity in the neighborhood to simply getting licenses for connections that could potentially bypass local government mind-control attempts...

The fact remains that Internet access speeds overall are way extreme the hell better than they were 20-30 years ago in the earliest days of 2K CGI. Yet those folks were able to manage getting 2K done back when getting 2K done properly WAS VERY DIFFICULT.

Today it's possible for people living way out in the sticks to get satellite-based Internet with speeds up to 25 megabits per second. How many movie post production studios choose to build way the hell out in the country in places where people have to get their water from underground wells, flush their toilets into septic tanks, have no access to traditional cable TV/Internet infrastructure and are forced to rely on satellite for that kind of stuff? Probably NONE.

Putting it another way, movie productions from 20 years doing 2K work and doing so in still uncharted territory, having to custom engineer a bunch of stuff were basically doing the equivalent of a production trying to do everything in 8K today. 4K is still too hard to do today? Either the current crop of CGI people are a bunch of pussies or (much more likely) the bean counter assholes won't give the CGI people a few extra seconds to get the job done in a quality standard better than the fucking 1990's!

Posted by Marcel Birgelen (Member # 6801) on 02-08-2019, 02:37 AM:

There are always possibilities to get it done. There is an old quote that neatly catches the essense:

"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."

So, sending a bunch of tapes or hard drives via courier services will eventually get the job done, if connectivity isn't available. It's still the preferred way we distribute DCPs nowadays, so it does have its merits.

quote: Bobby Henderson
Today it's possible for people living way out in the sticks to get satellite-based Internet with speeds up to 25 megabits per second. How many movie post production studios choose to build way the hell out in the country in places where people have to get their water from underground wells, flush their toilets into septic tanks, have no access to traditional cable TV/Internet infrastructure and are forced to rely on satellite for that kind of stuff? Probably NONE.

Well, you're talking about bean counters yourself... How often do you think that the decision to locate your office somewhere is really made based on all the merits, including the availability of the necessary infrastructure? In practice, this is often really just an afterthought... let the techs figure it out.

And you'd be amazed what locations in what countries are chosen. India for example, has a very active film industry. I know a few production houses that outsource quite a few post production and animation jobs to those locations. And I can assure you, bandwidth in India is a heck of a lot more expensive than in most parts of the "western world".

Satellite links that allow you 1:1 usage of e.g. 25 mbits UP and DOWN in many parts of the world are horrendously expensive (I've been there). And even 25 MBit/s isn't all that great. Let's say with overhead and on a dedicated 1:1 connection you can get a throughput of 3 MByte/s. That's roughly 11,25 GByte/hour or about 270 GByte a day. So, if you want to transfer a Terabyte worth of data, you're already waiting the better parts of 4 days, given the fact that nothing breaks down and you can use those 25 mbit/s exclusively.

As you can see, that's not terribly efficient and a UPS shipment of a bunch of tapes will probably be more efficient and faster in such cases.

quote: Carsten Kurz
We do, however, have a '4k releases' thread in our german 'film-tech equivalent forum', where I am sure all international 4k releases are listed.

Great, at least someone is building somewhat of an archive. Now we only have to look up every second title to see what the original title was. [Wink]

Posted by Carsten Kurz (Member # 5396) on 02-08-2019, 03:03 AM:

Bandwidth doesn't seem to be such an issue any more. First of all, 4k DCPs have the same data rate limit as 2k DCPs, so, in general, they don't need to be larger.

Also, we do receive quite a few DCPs through IP based broadband, using a 200MBit/s cable connection. Very often we receive e.g. a 3D OV, although we don't have a 3D system. Typically, we get foreign language VFs even if we don't request them. Obviously, it is easier to distribute full content packages like this than to care for the unnecessary transmission load.

- Carsten

Posted by Marcel Birgelen (Member # 6801) on 02-08-2019, 03:42 AM:

Yes, much of Europe is currently either transitioning or already receiving their DCPs via IP, although there are still plenty of locations, receiving their DCPs on disk.

But, it's DCPs you're talking about, which are already compressed. It's not raw video data and assets, like in VFX or post.

Also, your cable connection might be 200 mbit/s down (on a shared profile with the rest of the neighborhood, which in some cases can be a problem), but how much upstream do you get? 20 MBit? or if you're lucky, maybe 40 MBit?

Posted by Carsten Kurz (Member # 5396) on 02-08-2019, 04:14 AM:

I don't care for upstream, as long as downstream is fast enough for DCP transmission. This is a dedicated line, and few things travel up.

As for 4k post production - yes, 4k streaming, UHD, and IMAX/Dolby Cinema may enforce 4k post production for mainstream. I remember Star Wars 8 was 4k.

If independent movies can be created in 4k, it shouldn't be an issue for the big releases as well nowadays. But, there are many factors. Many VFX loaded movies have their VFX jobs split out to many different VFX companies, and each one has to comply with the general 4k production line. It is not easy to qualify the results for 'real 4k', or 'close to 4k', or a simple uprez before it's handed back.

There are some creatives who claim that 4k is mostly wasted for feature film production because all feature films follow the 180degree shutter rule at 24fps, which means that the largest part of these movies comes with natural motion blur that reduces 'resolution' even below 1k.
Now, even blur shows jaggies if it is sampled at lower resolutions...

- Carsten

Posted by Bruce Cloutier (Member # 9615) on 02-08-2019, 07:48 AM:

quote: Marcel Birgelen
Essentially, if you break the 24 frames per second "rule" of cinema, it's like you're sucking the magic out of the frames. Everything with a human actor in it, starts to look more like a recording of a theater performance, rather than a movie.

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.

Posted by Scott Norwood (Member # 30) on 02-08-2019, 08:08 AM:

I've seen film shown at 30fps (Oklahoma in 70mm). It doesn't look like film or television to me. It is a different look, but a pleasing one. Even going to 26fps (This is Cinerama) is an improvement over 24 (though I cannot tell the difference between 24 and 25, personally). I'm sure that there is a point where increasing the frame rate is either pointless or starts to look bad, but I don't see it at 26fps or 30fps. I'm not convinced that there is anything magical about 24fps, specifically, except that it has about ninety years' worth of history behind it (which should not be discounted). I have never seen Showscan (70mm at 60fps), but am told that it looks great.

As for 4K DLP--I've never actually worked anywhere that has it. Some places wanted it, but ended up going with 2K for reasons of cost or physical installation issues (the 4K machines are (or were) larger). I can think of a few of them in the Boston area, but those are mostly at the big multiplexes. For "film" festivals, 4K is just an annoyance, since it takes longer to ingest, while providing no benefit (in a 2k house). It would be great if 4K were more common in the real world, but, for now, it seems not to be. There may be a chicken-or-egg problem here, since no theatre owner will buy a 4K machine without a significant amount of 4K content to show on it. There is also some question as to whether 4K is marketable to the moviegoing public.

Posted by Carsten Kurz (Member # 5396) on 02-08-2019, 08:20 AM:

quote: Bruce Cloutier
I had figured that to be a processing issue.

Many people think that the soap opera effect is the result of bad frame interpolation only. However, as it stands, the impression is the same for both original higher frame rate capture and (good or bad) frame interpolation. The whole 24fps issue is quite complicated (and fascinating). You can enjoy high frame rate in panning shots, documentaries, sports, whatever. The moment you see a person acting - the magic is gone...weird...

Douglas Trumbull is one of the key proponents for higher and highest frame rate (+120fps). And he said:

---
'I love high frame rates, because I like to make simulation rides and reality-based experiences that are looking to be as realistic as they possibly can, but 24 frames is what I call the “texture” of feature films. And I don’t think anybody’s really ready to see what you would categorize as a feature film shot at 60. And that was one of the tests I did when I was at Showscan; we shot a fully dramatic short film with sets, props, actors, the whole thing at 60 and it was very disturbing. Because it was like live news, or sports, or something.'
---

'Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk' was the la(te)st attempt to use high frame rate in a feature film. Literally a few days before the release date, Sony pulled the plug and it went out in 24fps. So far, the three Hobbit movies have been the only HFR releases, and even they only had HFR in 3D, not in 2D. And when Peter Jackson noticed the amount of irritation the first Hobbit caused, he applied loads of processing to the following two to reduce the alienation.
Since Billy Lynn, it appears to me that studios, producers and film makers have eliminated the term High Frame Rate from their vocabulary. It's burnt.
Let's see what James Cameron does with Avatar 2. It was James Cameron who said that 2K HFR produces sharper images than 4k/24fps (because of reduced shutter times and less motion blur). He didn't cover the soap opera issue, though. I think directors' statements need to be taken with a grain of salt - other than us mere mortals, they see actors, props, etc. without the capture/shutter/color grading, when shooting the movie. They are used to that. What they see in high frame rate is closer to their on-set experience, so, they may not be as irritated as we when watching high frame rate in cinema and expect to see the magic.

When I see Gandalf in 24fps, I see Gandalf the Grey. When I see Gandalf in 48fps, I see a cheap sack robed pretzel seller on a medieval market startling kids.

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.

- Carsten

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 02-08-2019, 09:06 AM:

quote: Marcel Birgelen
Well, you're talking about bean counters yourself... How often do you think that the decision to locate your office somewhere is really made based on all the merits, including the availability of the necessary infrastructure? In practice, this is often really just an afterthought... let the techs figure it out.

In any technology-oriented business they do think about that stuff. A big enough business will actually get local governments and utilities involved to solve any problems and/or improve the infrastructure situation. That all comes as part of sweetening the deal to get that business to locate there.

This hypothetical scenario you're trying to pitch, implying CGI businesses are deliberately locating their offices way the hell out in the boonies where decent Internet access is scant is very absurd. Aside from acceptably fast Internet access, what about highway access and travel time to and from airports? That's not going to be for shit if you're way out in the sticks. And it's really going to suck bad if the long drive is in a place like India. What about all the creature comforts that come with living in an urban or at least sub-urban area? You get very little of that "roughing it" out in remote areas.

Here in the United States people are leaving small towns and rural areas in droves. Poor Internet service and dodgy phone service is a lesser factor but one of many driving the migration of people to big cities and suburbs. It takes a solid tax base for a small town to maintain a public school system, police department, fire department, trash removal, water & sewage service and keeping the streets paved. Many small towns are struggling to afford those things. I know of several small towns near Lawton which have no local police departments anymore, relying on the country sheriff instead. If the town doesn't have enough job opportunities and social life the kids will leave town when they get out of school. Plenty of small rural towns here in Oklahoma are aging and threatening to die out because of this cycle. And I'm talking about the situation of small towns in the United States, a "developed first world" nation.

I don't know the much about the Internet infrastructure in India. I'm betting the back-bones must be pretty good in the big cities there. We wouldn't be getting countless numbers of telemarketing robo-calls from India otherwise.

quote: Scott Norwood
I've seen film shown at 30fps (Oklahoma in 70mm). It doesn't look like film or television to me. It is a different look, but a pleasing one. Even going to 26fps (This is Cinerama) is an improvement over 24 (though I cannot tell the difference between 24 and 25, personally). I'm sure that there is a point where increasing the frame rate is either pointless or starts to look bad, but I don't see it at 26fps or 30fps. I'm not convinced that there is anything magical about 24fps, specifically, except that it has about ninety years' worth of history behind it (which should not be discounted). I have never seen Showscan (70mm at 60fps), but am told that it looks great.

I've only seen Showscan a couple times. That was over 20 years ago. To me the imagery didn't look like a soap opera, but it didn't look like film either. The imagery basically looked real, kind of like looking through a window into another reality. For dramatic productions that could have the unintended effect of making something look like a live on stage show. But I think that can be avoided with dramatic use of camera angles, color/lighting and overall production design.

Posted by Marcel Birgelen (Member # 6801) on 02-08-2019, 10:09 AM:

quote: Bobby Henderson
This hypothetical scenario you're trying to pitch, implying CGI businesses are deliberately locating their offices way the hell out in the boonies where decent Internet access is scant is very absurd.

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.

It even happened to a local business that happened to do a lot of video production. They decided to locate their new, shiny office on the other side of a river, where nobody could deliver any kind of decent connectivity. The nearest fiber was miles away or across the river. Crossing the river or digging miles of fiber was a little bit beyond their expected budget.

In the end, the stuff got semi-solved using a wireless link across said river. Still, when the weather was exceptionally bad, their uplink would suffer.

quote: Bobby Henderson
I don't know the much about the Internet infrastructure in India. I'm betting the back-bones must be pretty good in the big cities there. We wouldn't be getting countless numbers of telemarketing robo-calls from India otherwise.

So, why are you making random assumptions then? I'm not pulling stuff just out of my *ss...

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.

If you want to do serious FX or post production work, even a 100 mbit symmetric connection is just about nothing fancy. Try getting that in Bangalore for any reasonable budget and even if you get it, maybe you get 100 MBit on the local tail, that's no guarantee you'll be getting 100 MBit all the way across the globe towards your head-office. And not everybody has ILM-sized budgets.

We've got a symmetric gigabit connection at our office, some VDSL2 backup connections and a cable connection at 500 MBit down, I'm not expecting to get gigabit speeds to all destinations. The Internet is a big shared medium in the end...

We've got a VPN to an office in Germany, that's behind a 100 MBit symetric fiber connection. I'm lucky if I'm pushing 6 MBytes per second over that VPN. Obviously, there is overhead in encryption, but transferring feature-sized DCPs is still pretty much a painfully slow process.

quote: Bobby Henderson
Aside from acceptably fast Internet access, what about highway access and travel time to and from airports? That's not going to be for shit if you're way out in the sticks.

I'd say, Skywalker Sound qualifies pretty much as "way out in the sticks." [Wink]

Posted by Adam Martin (Member # 641) on 02-08-2019, 03:16 PM:

Here's the list of 4K releases that I have from 2018:

quote:

releasedate title
2018-10-10 22 July
2018-11-22 24 Kisses
2018-08-17 Alpha (2018)
2018-09-20 American in Paris, An: The Musical
2018-10-11 Aravindha Sametha Veera Raghava
2018-11-16 At Eternity's Gate
2018-05-04 Bad Samaritan
2018-11-08 Ballad of Buster Scruggs, The
2018-08-24 Beautifully Broken
2018-01-26 Bhaagamathie
2018-12-13 Bird Box
2018-11-02 Boy Erased
2018-12-21 Cold War (2018)
2018-01-12 Commuter, The
2018-07-13 Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot
2018-02-16 Early Man
2018-06-15 Eating Animals
2018-07-13 Eighth Grade
2018-11-09 Girl in the Spider's Web, The
2018-09-07 God Bless the Broken Road
2018-03-30 God's Not Dead 3: A Light in Darkness
2018-08-24 Happytime Murders, The
2018-07-27 Hot Summer Nights
2018-12-14 If Beale Street Could Talk
2018-10-26 Indivisible (2018)
2018-09-14 Lizzie
2018-12-06 Mercy, The (2018)
2018-10-18 More Than Funny
2018-07-12 Muse: Drones World Tour
2018-02-16 Nostalgia (2018)
2018-08-29 Operation Finale
2018-11-30 Possession of Hannah Grace, The
2018-10-02 Power of Zero, The
2018-01-12 Proud Mary
2018-03-30 Rangasthalam
2018-11-21 Roma (2018)
2018-06-15 Sammohanam
2018-02-16 Samson (2018)
2018-11-06 Sarkar (2018)
2018-11-02 Savyasachi
2018-11-30 Sicilian Ghost Story
2018-08-10 Slender Man (2018)
2018-05-25 Solo: A Star Wars Story
2018-10-26 Suspiria
2018-03-16 Tomb Raider (2018)
2018-03-23 Unsane
2018-12-25 Vice (2018)
2018-10-26 Viper Club
2018-12-21 Welcome to Marwen

Posted by Marcel Birgelen (Member # 6801) on 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]

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 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.

Posted by Marcel Birgelen (Member # 6801) on 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...)

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 02-09-2019, 12:14 AM:

quote: Marcel Birgelen
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.)

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.

By the way the "specific" examples you gave where shit. One was a story about "a local video production company" and the other was an anecdote about Skywalker Ranch.

quote: Marcel Birgelen
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 said earlier that it's bullshit that Hollywood won't do any CG-heavy movies in 4K. They're just cranking out 2K material faster and faster to save money. I said they ought to eliminate the "best visual effects" Oscar award until Hollywood wants to actually do something truly challenging or innovative like they were doing 20-30 years ago. All you've been doing in your follow-up responses has been an attempt to defend their status-quo 2K policy -that 4K is just too damned hard for them to do. If that's not the motivation behind your argument then what is it? Just trolling?

quote: Marcel Birgelen
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?

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. And if the work is getting jobbed out to countries where the ethics of handling copyrighted assets is a little iffy the project managers are probably only going to give those remote workers only the materials they need to get their task done rather than give them everything.

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.

Posted by Marcel Birgelen (Member # 6801) on 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.

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 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.

Posted by Marcel Birgelen (Member # 6801) on 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.

Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 02-09-2019, 11:43 PM:

Not feeling brave enough to jump into the Bobby vs. Marcel ring, but FWIW, I have noticed that a disproportionate number of 4K releases tend to be either arthouse titles, or archival restorations. I would guess that these are two unusual situations in which using 4K doesn't add anything significant to the production cost.

Your typical arthouse movie doesn't use much in the way of CGI or fancy post, while the cost of film scanning and local RAID storage has now come down to the point at which archival workflows in 4K are a no brainer. I can't see any scenario in which either activity would require much in the way of shunting raw footage around the Internet, either.