Sintel 4K Available

Bart · February 20, 2011

The Blender Foundation have released the 4K version of Sintel – well, the ‘8 bits per color’ version. At a whopping 160GB of data, I’m sure this is not for everyone.

Even better, they’re currently uploading a ’16 bits per color’ version. Download: 650GB. Creative commons have interviewed Ton Roosendaal about the importance of this release.

Links

Sintel.org: Sintel 4k version available
Creative Commons: Sintel, 4k edition (and why it’s useful)

Author Bart

I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Community Lead at n8n.

25 responses

iTorx

20 February 2011 at 11:26

wow I don’t even have enough harddisk space to download the 16bit version :O

Bananaft

20 February 2011 at 12:02

clicked on image, expecting 4k hires

radiant

20 February 2011 at 13:19

I have a 2Tb internal harddrive and 3.5 TB external hard drive and 130 gig download per month. I might download a fighting scene or two and upload it to the tube in 4k.

Question:

I have prem and after effects. what codec exports in 4k that youtube will allow

ginoskotheon

20 February 2011 at 14:12

Lovin’ it.

Pascal

20 February 2011 at 15:52

Radiant : don’t expect 4k on Youtube, 1080 max, 720p recommended. MP4 video with MP3 audio is recommended by Youtube. Read youtube help you will find a lot of answers.

ArMan

20 February 2011 at 16:11

If possible i would like to see some good 5 sec clip from ’16 bits per color’ version to see how allmighty it is. :)

David

20 February 2011 at 18:39

ArMan : Do you have a 16 bits per color monitor ?

darkcg

20 February 2011 at 19:34

Question: does it need a “special” video player to be played? Is VLC usable to play it? And lastly, can someone explain me what “16 bits per color” means?

David

20 February 2011 at 20:11

darkcg : Almost all current computer monitor use 8 bits for each red, green and blue color. This mean that a monitor can display 16777216 = 256 x 256 x 256 ( 8 bits = 256 different color).

a monitor that display 16 bits per color 65536 x 65536 * 65536, display 2 x 10^14 different colors.

Also 4K video mean 4 * 1920 x *1280 = 3840 x 2560 pixels.

So even with the right video player you need a 5000 $ professional monitor to play a 4k video.

twitcher

20 February 2011 at 21:11

OK, I get it, allright… You can render big res… Wanna medal? ;)
If you guys came up with another copy, huge so much that only can be visible from Moon… THIS IS STILL THE SAME MOVIE…
Love Blender, I quite like the movie but it wasnt a blast. I am sure you could render even bigger Sintel – dont do that though ;) I believe you! Just move on with Blender itself, please.

unfa

20 February 2011 at 21:55

Downloading one frame in ’16 bits per colour’ version will take half an hour for me…

jacques

20 February 2011 at 23:29

For my own education, I’d like to know who finds this useful and for what purpose?

David

21 February 2011 at 00:07

jacques : For digital cinema who have 4K projector to get better image quality.

4K rendering is not for end user like me.

Marimba

21 February 2011 at 00:47

Not even movie theaters can display 4k videos. Guess it might be the next big thing but c’mon this blows the download cap of most people.

I’ll wait to watch this in 5 years.

Pascal

21 February 2011 at 06:50

To Jacques : follow the links above (Creative Commons: Sintel, 4k edition (and why it’s useful)), Ton explains why it’s usefull.

Joeri67

21 February 2011 at 08:01

ArMan
Feb 20th, 2011 at 4:11 pm
If possible i would like to see some good 5 sec clip from ’16 bits per color’ version to see how allmighty it is. :)

How are you going to display that? Do you have a 16bit p/c videocard?
And how about your monitor, doesn’t that need to be 16bpc too?

Does anyone here own a 4k display? That’s not standard equipment i hope.

Grandmaster B

21 February 2011 at 09:20

Insane in the membrane!

joeri67

21 February 2011 at 14:25

I see some 16bpc frames are 35Mb… compressed… This must be production hell.
4096×1744 thats what, 40Mb mem per frame?

Why is blender taking this route?
Are movies actualy made in this resolution?
I heard Alice in wonderland was shot in 4k but edited HD with the queens head in 2k.
Does Blender expect a creating audience in this highend of the market?

Maybe its needed for cinema to give a better experience than the home HD, I can see that.

But, I think I’d be more happy with 10 bpc 2k 200fps.
Modern movies have more scenes with faster cuts, and motion blur is of the past ( no really, its an error of the camera ).
Faster cuts can be made with more fps. And more accurate.

Saving private ryan/Gladiator has jerky shots because of lack of frames and demanding no mblur for sharpness.
Humans dont see mblur and humans dont see 24fps, stop using these faulty settings made up in 1895. :)

Anyway, cool torture test for blender to see it work under extreme conditions.
I’m glad I don’t need to make all my textures ready to be in a detail shot of a 4k projection.

Chrome Monkey

21 February 2011 at 15:01

“Humans don’t see motion blur”… Really? You must have some amazing eyesight if you can put an electric fan on even low speed and see the individual blades! Without blur, scenes becomes a meaningless strobing of disconnected images. Unless I’m not interpreting the statement right?

HumanBlade

21 February 2011 at 17:58

For those wondering (or wandering aimlessly, it seems) why blender is ‘going this way’; i think it has quite a bit to do with looking towards the future. In the 3D field with free and open source often getting written off as second-class citizens, little elbow-nudges like this are total brownie points in the cred department. Certainly 4K holds not much meaning for the average user, but then again knowing that the software can scale to something of that size and on what kind of equipment to render/what problems were faced+fixed… now these are great things to know. besides, what better stress test than a recently produced movie completely built with the 2.5 betas and aiming towards feature-quality character animation etc. to try this out on. It answers the questions of naysayers who would always say ‘yes, but it can’t do….’ for a rare case, blender is ahead of the game for having tackled some of these issues now. plus with features such as node-particles CL-compositor coming our way, these technologies will really shine when doing multiple concurrent operations at once.

i know no one intended to denigrate the work that’s being done, but have a little imagination towards the future and how it will continue to be brighter with the devs pushing the tech so hard and so far. i mean the first IMAX film i ever saw was a real snore made up of 15 minutes of semi-3D visualizations of the mars surface and didn’t particularly wow me in and of itself, but it certainly enlivened me to the prospect of future IMAX films. i was able to recognize that the flagship might have been a dud but the design of the fleet more than made up for it.

/endrant

joeri67

22 February 2011 at 01:51

@ Tin Monkey.
– ” You must have some amazing eyesight… ”
Well yes, and the rest of the world too:
”
The frame and field rates that have been used for television since the 1930s cause problems for motion portrayal, which are increasingly evident on the large, high-resolution television displays that are now common. In this paper we report on a programme of experimental work that successfully demonstrated the advantages of higher frame rate capture and display as a means of improving the quality of television systems of all spatial resolutions.
”
*M Armstrong, D Flynn, M Hammond, S Jolly, R Salmon

http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rd/pubs/whp/whp-pdf-files/WHP169.pdf

@HumanBlade:

Cool passion you have, love that.
But I don’t agree that standing out as OpenSource should be focussed on technology. It should be focussed on enabling creativity. Here’s the rant:

– “Certainly 4K holds not much meaning for the average user, but then again knowing that the software can scale to something of that size and on what kind of equipment to render/what problems were faced+fixed”

Sounds cool. But why do you say ‘can’ scale?
I would find it hard to judge a decompressed file giving me this result:
[img]http://www.joeri67.nl/sintel/sintel_hair.jpg[/img]
Was that there before the compression or only after decompression?

I’m just a little in dismay that an animation packages visitors favour resolution over framerate.
Even Cinegrid talks about 60hz when the image is 8k in the far future. ( http://www.bright.nl/upload/07/06/070625-cinegrid1.jpg )
Wouldn’t that be total mad, to see cars driving in real life realism but with backspinning wheels…
You can already see that on the Cinegrid boat demo, the image is crystal clear, but the water is really weird, because you can’t see how it’s moving, there are not enough frames to capture the little movements that have pixels enough to display.

Can all still image lovers please move to the Gimp site? And the animators talk about motion?

Just kidding, I love Ton making movies, I hope he will be the greatest animation producer Holland ever had, probably already is. If checking out 4k film grading crap is a step on that path then so be it. He has my blessing.
And yes it would be great if blender could render 300dpi truck posters, although all I hear is complaints that my files are way to big and it takes hours for photoshop to open them. I think 4k is more a cinema technology thing happening now, not really a story creative thing. And for the BF/BI/Bwhatever to succesfull pull-of a 90m movie they should focus more on story. And they should break ( visual / graphical / inspiral ) creative boundries, not technical ones, because only then you prove blender is ‘as good as’.
That’s what I think. Just expressing my thoughts.

Marimba

23 February 2011 at 03:39

Engaging the community’s curiosity with contempt only alienates the product from it’s audience. Guess why Linux never captivated the general public.

vidrazor2

23 February 2011 at 09:19

Well, that’s kinda cool, I guess. I mean, who’s going to be able to watch it at full res except rich spoiled kids? LOL!

Chrome Monkey

23 February 2011 at 16:13

@ joeri67, who is this “tin monkey” you speak of? :o)

At any rate, we are not in disagreement as to the specifics in the PDF you provided, just this notion that humans don’t see motion blurring. I find it impossible to believe that you don’t perceive the blades of a fast-spinning electric fan as some form of continuous blur. I do agree that the best way to film things is by exceeding the limitations of the human eye, and that getting in excess of 72 frames per second is a superior way to do that. But the end result is still the same, viewers will still perceive a blur. So I don’t see where “humans don’t see mblur” is coming from.

@ Marimba, who is engaging the community’s curiosity with contempt? I’m not quite clear to whose comments you were referring.

Cedal

20 March 2011 at 01:28

Hey guys,
Just for fun: I saw a picture of Sintel when I was installing the DivX web movie player.
that’s not the first time I see Sintel coming up somewhere unexpected :D
Here’s the link
http://img861.imageshack.us/img861/8062/divxsetupsintel.png

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