4K Digital Cinema Technology with Blender
The Dutch SARA Computing and Networking Services have rendered a clip of Elephants Dream at a resolution of 4096×2160 pixels, and played it back on their 4K visualization setup which consists of 15 LCD displays.
SARA Computing and Networking Services has built the first 4K visualization setup on which highly detailed movies can be shown. SARA has recently demonstrated this facility to the early adopters of 4K cinema in the Netherlands.
The world of cinema is on the eve of a great breakthrough. Movies in the near future will be digital and highly detailed. The new technology that is being used is the so-called 4K technology. 4K refers to resolution of the movie, which is 4096×2160 pixels. This resolution gives a more detailed image than can be realized on contemporary HD-TVs, plasmas, computer screens or digital projection systems.
4K recording equipment is scarcely available at the moment. Therefore the content has been created with a virtual camera (computer animation). SARA has used the movie “Elephants Dreamâ€, world’s first Open Movie. A short clip has been rendered in 4K resolution and was demonstrated on one of SARA’s high-resolution visualization facilities.
Bram also mentions that their display is capable of displaying images of up to 8448×3824 pixels. The mind boggles..
I think it’s great how Elephants Dream being Open Source is helping projects such as these (and earlier the first European HD-DVD title) to gather content. It’s a side effect that I hadn’t anticipated when the movie was released.
Check out the full article which also contains a high-resolution photograph of Bram and his setup.
hehehe, cool.
wish one onto my wall…
Hehehe the idea is amazing, only thing that they should fix it getting rid of the borders of those screens, and you have an amazing screen. I wonder how huge a movie of 1 hour on sucks resolution would be on your HD :)
look at that image… you can count Proog’s hairs!!!
that’s incredible
can you really go to the render buttons and set a resolution of 4096×2160 pixels?!
While it is an interesting and surely funny experiment to make a 4kx2k screen, it’s totally pointless, as this, as I suppose, even surpasses the resolution of the human eye. If this really gets a standard in cinemas, I can only say “waste of resources”. But hey, resources are plenty, aren’t they ;-)
About the image itself: I highly admire all the detail that has gone into producing that movie, but PLEASE. NOBODY looks at the HAIR on the skin of a character! I think the work goes into the wrong areas here. Better spend more time on animation and story than on hair on skin (and rendering!)…
Sorry, my stupid, naive farmer-from-the-forest view on things :)
Sorry, my stupid, naive farmer-from-the-forest view on things…… but basicly – your´r right Alexander.
Okay, Okay – but its intresting to see at how many places you see,read or find something including ED.
So this first Opensource movie can be declared as a really succesfull projekt!!
“even surpasses the resolution of the human eye” – hmmmm…I think you should stop eating those mushrooms from the forest floor. This would only be the case when the 4k is shown on too small a screen, and quite clearly they are not aiming at the small screen market.
As for totally pointless, 4K is only the resolution of a 10MP digital still camera, imagine being able to view your photos at native quality. If this helps to drive the creation of display devices that give the ability to view higher resolution images I am all for it.
This is great news for the Elephants Dream team, and Blender.
Both previous years, Siggraph projected 4K animations on the festival. It’s breathtakingly beautiful. Same quality as goes for 70 mm film. Much more details than in 35 mm film (2k). The “resolution of a human eye” has nothing todo with it. An eye is not an lcd screen.
@Alexander, blendercross: wow, within one comment you guys declare both the researcher and the Orange team to be complete idiots – impressive! And you’re not even *sure* that the resolution is too high to be seen. Maybe next time, make sure you know what you’re talking about before writing such comments.
howly shit !!!!!!
howly …….
Yes, 70 mm film and 35 mm film are uncomparable. 70 mm can be shown on humongous screens where 35 mm would look like you’ve cranked up the blur node’s X and Y values… :)
…Besides nothing was “wasted” of project orange’s resources, as I believe they’re not really involved in this. SARA did all the work on this, even the rendering, am I right?
On the other hand, I agree somewhat with Alexander’s point. Letting technology overshadow creativity and art is not the way to go…only that this really hasn’t got much to do with that point, the way I understood it at least.
//Mathias
If one pixel goes beyond the scale of 0.5 mm², then it should be a greater resolution,as the eye can see ;)
But 15 LCDs together having a resolution of 4KPix / 2KPix, one Pixel stays greater than tihs, I think…
3×5 Screens….
4096/5=819,2
2160/3=720
819,2/720=1,13777…
Three or six screens aren’t used completely!
These screens must have 1152×720 or, which looks better, 1280×720, right?
@Alexander – Human vision is in excess of 300 megapixels… and thats a conservative estimate.
http://www.clarkvision.com/imagedetail/eye-resolution.html
I’ll have to agree with Bart that your comments seem spewed out without any thought whatsoever.
I was lucky enough to see a 70mm print of 2001: A Space Odyssey a while back, and even sitting from at least 20m back from the screen, the difference was astounding. I guess they don’t have any IMAX screens out in the forest either.
I’m really glad to see that the open source aspect of ED was taken advantage of here. It’s always pleasantly surprising to hear about things like this and the HD-DVD production, that none of us knew anything about. To think that not only has it served as entertainment for millions but also been used to help further technological development is very nice.
Am I the only one who agrees with Alexander Ewering? While the human eye might be capable of resolving more detail than a 4k screen can provide, the 4k screen itself is by no means any technological breakthrough, especially when one consider the fact that the screen is made up of 15 LCDs with ridiculously wide bezels. While we should celebrate the achievement of Orange studio and blender in general, I don’t think this deserves to be a news headline on its own.
/goes and hides in a hole
Geez,…. forrest guy, how come you are connected to the internet at all?
What a total nonsens is your remark.
First of all: Some people do the art, others do the technology. More technology makes more art possible. Pretty stupid to tell philips to stop making displays and put more effort in story just because they show movies on that display (Geez man, even the frogs in your soup understand that).
Secondly: The resolution of your eye is endless, it’s an analog process of moving muscles that shift focus and attention over 3d space,… your brain is not a ccd camera.
Thirtly: There are numeros scientific experiments with celuloid image loss because of grain and prevention of that by using larger areas of single image celluloid (ie 8mm 16mm 35mm and 70mm film) not to mention frames per seconds (yes not only chicken can see TL flicker) Just as everybody experiences the difference between 8mm (home movie) and 35 (cinema movie) you can also extrapolate that towards the other end; 70mm and imax.
Must be a real pain to edit 4k footage. I’ve seen some 4k projections at the IBC SONY booth, it’s realy incredible. Specialy one shot of an birds eye that zooms out to a flock, where one still can see the features of that eye, try that with a PAL image, you should be lucky to still be able to see what kind of bird it is.
“the screen is made up of 15 LCDs with ridiculously wide bezels”
LOL. Presumably the bezels are why this remains ongoing research…
I don’t really want to get into the battle here. Alexander’s taking a pummelling enough already. I think having wildly high quality screens is great and I don’t think the human eye is a limiting factor at the moment. Again, as people have pointed out, remember that it means you can project things bigger. Think of an IMAX movie with the quality of a glossy magazine. In that sense this isn’t quite directly analagous with, say, audio, where I think the limitations of the human ear play a much bigger role in where you draw the line in using resources.
The important aspect of the ED content here was that it was free, open-licensed, and high quality content that the researchers could use. Highly detailed, richly textured, visually stunning content like this doesn’t just drop out of the sky, ordinarily, and it usually isn’t free to work with. The orange team has provided a really invaluable resource to researchers like this. I think this will wind up being what secure’s the orange project’s place in motion picture history.
Great news. I’m thinking that one of the major points of ever-increasing resolutions for larger screens is that, at some point, the viewer’s perception of the screen will disappear. What they see on the screen will have the same clarity and resolution as reality itself. I think that will do a hell of a lot to help drive the storyline.
http://www.carltonbale.com/blog/2006/11/1080p-does-matter/ just extend the argument a bit to 4k: it just doesnt map the view size, just the resolution, at greater distance the 480p video would be itty-bitty and a bother to watch. That 4k demo pic shows it better.
wow 4k, pretty soon you’ll be able to view feature length bluray movies at home.
SIZE DOES MATTER
I think this is a fantastic example of what can be created with Blender. I have to disagree that too much time was wasted on the image quality of ED. What it has shown is that the tool is powerful enough to do work on par with any Hollywood studio out there. They were showcasing the tool, not the artists (though the artists were awesome too). The point is, if we prove that Blender is awesome, then highly skilled animators can use it to create awesome CG. If all we proved with ED was that people could animate, then we haven’t really proved anything about the program.
Anyhow, I think it’s awesome that this stuff looks so sweet at 4K. 35mm is roughly equivalent to 4K, and this proves that Blender is on par with anything out there. And I love the detail of movies in 35mm. The image is so much richer in the theater than at home on your tiny NTSC display. It feels more real, more alive.
My thoughts anyway.
Last I heard LOTR was filmed in 4K. Film is normally edited in 2k or 4k. 4k only being used for epic style movies. Anyone want to correct me on this?
This article calls it “Digital Film”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_resolution#Television.2Fmovies
The sweet thing is that the old SGI onyx 3000 machines running Discreet Inferno or Flame could composite and play back 4 4k streams or 8 2k streams, real-time at full frame rate. Try that on your home pc!
What a great screen size for my Playstation!
Thanks Bart! :)
(…within one comment you guys declare both the researcher and the Orange team to be complete idiots.)
…mayby my english is too basic to discus that.
1. The Orange Team has made a great job! No Question!
2. Technical System like that talked about here,is part of technical “evolution” we have anywhere in the Computer
universe. The shown details are “wow” and bring us mayby closer to an pure digital cinema ( George Lucas
dream )
BUT i think high resolution is not THE important part of movie making. Thats this guys take a part of the ED movie for there presentation, keeps that movie ( and the open source idea ) still in mind of many people- and this is good!
I hoped that i make you understanding what i mean, and yes: sometimes i posting faster then i read.
Sorry my master! ;)
@Joeri:
Whatever view you take of Alexander’s comment artistically, there’s been more nonsense spoken in reply to his post than there was in his post to begin with.
“The resolution of your eye is endless, it’s an analog process of moving muscles that shift focus and attention over 3d space”
No, sorry – that’s not true. The retina sends an image down the optic nerve as a response to light falling on individual rods and cones, and the resolution of these is measurable. In the fovea (the central part of the eye, with the highest resolution), the density of cones is about 150 million per square millimeter.
Now we’ll be generous and assume that resolution persists over the entire retina, which it most certainly does not. But of course there are some time-integration effects too, so we’ll say that this trade-off is roughly equal.
150,000 cones per square millimeter
= 387 cones per millimeter (in the dpi sense)
= 98,374 cones per inch, *on the retina*.
(@Ryan Malm – this doesn’t mean we can view images at this resolution at any distance we choose).
Therefore with an image at 20m (which was given as an example cinema-viewing distance above), no human can hope to resolve detail (or even notice the difference) at anything greater than 50dpi. (Assuming a 1cm eye diameter, which isn’t unreasonable.)
This means that a 4K image, viewed at 20m, would have redundant resolution at a size less than 83 inches (7 foot). Of course, nobody’s proposing to view a 4K screen this small at this distance, so we’ve shown that 4K will give a noticeable improvement. Moving up to 8K, we could expand the screen to 14 foot and still be at the most generous limit of human resolution. Since we’re now at the right order of magnitude for small cinema screens, you have to ask how ridiculous Alexander’s comment was in the first place…
There is a huge problem with people here (also directed to Bart!) feeling personally offended all the time even though this was not remotely the intention.
Of course Elephant’s Dream is a huge piece of work and certainly deserves admiration. My comment was purely technical and also a bit political.
These days, lots of companies (or not so many anymore – most have concentrated into a few huge ones) make stuff that nobody really needs – i.e., huge screens, cellphones, huge, fast cars, etc…
As resources are running out and capitalism is facing its due end (due to the decline of resources and also, in part, due to people starting to think), companies are trying desperately to keep their market position. They do this by constantly inventing new products and inciting new desires in people for stuff that people don’t really need.
One simply has to ask the question of balance between “Usefulness” and “Use of Resources”. The 4k screen is probably incredibly expensive, and soon, cinema visitors would probably stop visiting cinemas that don’t have 4k screen just because “hey, they’re not cool, they don’t have a 4k screen”. So, many cinemas will close.
On the other hand, I personally did and do video stuff for clients. Because of all this “higher, bigger, better” craze, I’ll soon be forced to close this part of business down because I simply can’t afford the computing power anymore to produce 4kx2k movies, which clients will probably soon demand (but not even remotely need – but they’re told they need them anyway by marketing departments)…
So, it all boils down to: No personal offense intended. Just a little, cautious pointer to the fact that the general direction technological development is going is questionable.
Alexander – sorry, I’m really an outsider to all this 3D stuff, but there’s considerable pushing-of-borders going on in my field of work (audio technology) aswell, so I can’t resist:
I’d say the decision whether an up-and-coming technology is superfluous or not is best left to its recipients, no? It’s not as if the world is full of mindless zombies who buy everything that’s crammed down their throats by evil industry overlords. Technology that doesn’t make any sense within people’s living rooms usually won’t end up in people’s living rooms on a large scale, simple as that. Last time I checked, the much-anticipated consumer craze over HDTV stuff was rapidly dwindling into a mere “when I get me a new TV, I might aswell take one of those HD doohickeys” kind of thing. Surround rigs for home use have been around for how long, 20 years? Why is their market share still negligible? Because (as much as I lament that fact on a personal level) Jane Sixpack couldn’t care less if her noise is coming from two direction or six. Besides, the people behind this experiment would probably burst into laughter at the implication of their 4k stuff ending up in people’s living rooms. It’s simply happening in a whole different league.
In all seriousness, I’m with you that natural resources are being wasted on an alarmingly large scale all over the world; but I can see far more efficient ways to keep this within limits than artificially slowing down R&D in media technology. The argument that “it’s not really needed” doesn’t exactly resonate with me aswell, since when you get literal, that applies to everything except sleeping, eating, and procreation.
As for you having to close down your 3D business in fear of clients suddenly demanding 4k resolution: then don’t try to acquire your clients in the segment of large-scale digital cinema facilities, d’oh! :) The whole mobile phone craze has probably spawned 100 times more demand for low-end material in all areas of media production than this stuff will ever create in the high-end range.
“…that applies to everything except sleeping, eating, and procreation.”
Sign me up! ;)
No, seriously, I think Jan has nailed it down pretty well…… If people WANT to spend their resources on (what you perceive as) seemingly useless technologies, nothing’s really going to stop them…..
quote
It’s not as if the world is full of mindless zombies who buy everything that’s crammed down their throats by evil industry overlords.
end quote
this world IS full of idiots (me included) because we don’t want the earth to heat up, but now we buy mini microwave ovens to heat up our local/personal atmosphere: at the back of a microwave oven the label clearly states 2,45 GHz, same as wifi, most specifically heating up water(vapour) because it resonates with the wavelenth of water.
all wifi broadcast energy slightly heats up our atmosphere.
that being said,
the great thing about Elephants Dream @ 4k is it demonstrates blender/opensource-movies to be re-renderable to fit the screen of your desire.
with all these diffrent formats available, it’s hard to get fullscreen AND the right eh.. ‘x/y-relation'(my disturbed mind won’t give me the right word)
I truely doubt the mediacompanies will will ever allow consumers to recompile fromsource, and if they ever come up with movies in diffrent resolutions, yule just have to pay for every diffrent format you want it in.
it not like you can get a 80% discount on DVDs if you can show the receipts of your VHS-collection, which is mostly licence-fee, and
my 2 cents…
(to second alexander et al a little bit)
the human eye has an area where you see sharp. (yellow spot) And the eye has an area where you are completely blind (where the nerves from the retina leave the eyeball, the so-called red spot)
Do you recocgnize your environment with black spots caused by the blind spot in your eyes?
NO because brain calculates off the blind areas. HOW? Because your eyes move always.
And that’s the point. 4K Images are great. You can let your eyes wander around the image from quite a distance and recognize every single detail.
But imagine a fast-paced action movie with e.g. a car-chase. Where do you look at? The car, the shootout whatever. The rest of the screen is filled with motion-blurred surrounding.
so….. well…
that could be a brilliant idea for a movie-codec…..
you definitely don’t need hi-res on fast, blurred parts of the image, so few dpi would do well.
If the camera moves slowly and you want to analyse everything in the scene, you have to keep the detail
(where 4K absolutely makes sense).
so let’s create a codec called ActionX: the more action (=blur) the smaller the movie ;)
Jan:
You make a few good points.
The funny thing is that I work in the audio field as well, and there, I have exactly the same opinion. People start buying 96kHz (or even 192 kHz!) A/D D/A converters, if possible with 32 bit resolution, because they think that there is an audible difference or because they fear that the industry might push standards that support such sampling rates (blueray etc. for sure do?) .
Again here, the nyquist frequency for a CD recording is 22.05 kHz, and the human ear of a very YOUNG person can hear up to 20 kHz. This is – again – the end of the story :) Add the necessary and not infinitely steep lowpass filter to the 22.05 kHz, and you end up somewhere around 20. Oh, and with people today constantly going to parties where the music is far too loud, even a 17 year old can barely hear 16 kHz anymore.
Of course, you make a good point saying that the world isn’t full of mindless zombies. Well, I don’t agree entirely, because as much as I regret it, the world *is* full of mindless zombies (no offense to the zombies – they’re made that by economy). BUT they are STILL not zombified enough to buy stuff that makes no sense, sometimes. I mean, people still buy CDs, and if not, they download 192 kbps MP3s, both of which are far lower quality (even though indistinguishable to the ear anyway) than the 96/192 kHz 32bit craze.
Maybe I applied my “capitalism is wasting resources for its own desperate survival” argument at the wrong place. As far as the “nothing apart from sleeping, eating and procreation is needed” argument goes: It’s not an easy black and white case. I also have stuff that isn’t absolutely necessary (though not a lot of it). Sure, I have a guitar because I like playing guitar, and I wouldn’t die if I didn’t. However, it’s a question of balance. A guitar is something someone could build hundreds of years ago in his backyard, and probably has the potential to give more real sense to someone’s life than a 4k screen whose development, production and shipping used as many resources as 1000 guitars.
Anyway. This is turning far too general and philosophical, and I should get on with my CMS (or with the – indeed necessary – sleep :)
Alexander – I share your sentiments about 192kHz converters being utterly pointless (though your technical details are a bit skewed – no 32bit audio converters on the horizon, and you won’t find a decimation filter design that leaves phase and attenuation remotely intact around 20kHz with a 44.1kHz back-end, so moderately higher sample rates do make a difference in the audible spectrum), but I think the example actually proves my point – it’s true, high-bandwidth converters do get widely adopted, but not because everyone is convinced that they’re the best thing since sliced bread, but because the majority of audio converters out there supports this sampling rate out of the box now. Need a few more I/Os for your DAW? Well, good luck getting 48kHz converters. And considering 192kHz converters have been there for at least half a decade now, it’s interesting that we still have to see even 96kHz being widely adopted in production environments. I’m sure that there are lots of corresponding examples in the CG field.
My point is: There are two ways a technology can enter the main stream on a large scale. Either there’s a genuine need for it (=quick adoption), or the manufacturers just take the old stuff out of the shelves, thus leaving new customers no choice (=slow adoption). In both cases, there’s little room for resource savings without sacrificing useful development for them (which would indeed take the discussion to a philosophical level we probably should avoid ;)
Hey Jan,
last comment here now not to abuse the board :) I actually already had that problem when I bought my current DAW stuff (around 3 years ago) – my RME Multiface already has 96 kHz, 24 bit (IIRC) converters. The first thing I looked for back when I bought it was the 44.1 kHz button ;-)
Fortunately, such a setting is still offered. If it weren’t, I would be forced to buy far more capable hardware (in terms of CPU, bus speed and diskspace) in order to even use the converter.
Well, the “you won’t get an entirely perfect LP filter for 44.1 kHz converters” point has been addressed like a decade ago – with 48 kHz converters :-) I should really try, go downstairs and check if I can here any difference between 48 kHz and 96 kHz, like, when playing a plugin…
Anyway. I still do most production for CD, and I guess that if I did work with 48 or 96 kHz, resampling that to 44.1 kHz for CD would probably give more artifacts than losing the absolute top-end when recording with 44.1 kHz right from the beginning. I don’t know, because I never had to resample nor dither at all :-)
OK, that’s it. :)
> Well, the “you won’t get an entirely perfect LP filter for 44.1 kHz converters†point has been addressed
> like a decade ago – with 48 kHz converters :-)
That relaxes the problem a little, but it doesn’t solve it.
> I don’t know, because I never had to resample nor dither at all :-)
If you’re using plug-ins, there’ll be a ton of dithering and often resampling (oversampling and decimation) going on behind the scenes in your DAW. Whenever a calculation yields a larger wordlength than your signal flow can handle (and a simple multiplication can do that), the respective processor should dither the result. That also applies to the DAW’s output stage.
Forgive me, but isn’t that an 8k res (8 megapikel?). Running 5k (5 megapixel) Quicktime movie isn’t a problem on a MacPro. So whats to great about an 8k res?? If you can make the source footage then playing back is no bit woopy?
Everyone is being totally conned!!
What the crooks and liars running this industry are calling 4K is in fact less than 2:5K what they call 2K is in fact 1K and a scope movie shown in a digital “2K” cinema is only 858 lines!!
The digital culture is like Middle Ages Mysticism pre scientific enlightenment where
emperical evidence means nothing.