If history is any guide, dictating best practices across an industry is
a tricky business. When that industry is as multifarious and
perfection-oriented as Hollywood post-production, the task can be
downright hairy. But, with new DI-oriented workflows demanding new ways
of thinking about and specifying color – and with an array of new
viewing technologies vying for mindshare among fickle consumers –
attendees at last week’s Hollywood Post Alliance Tech Retreat in Rancho
Mirage, CA, had standards on their mind.
The real trick, according to Jim Houston, who spoke on behalf of the
File Format Committee of the Science and Technology Council at the
Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, is to get rid of the
“secret sauce” that’s currently deployed by various post houses in the
name of accurate handling of image and color data. The Committee is
developing a new framework for exchanging color information among all
the parties that have to work with a given piece of image data, from
shooters to VFX artists to post houses and digital colorists.
What the Committee has found so far, in a nutshell, is that the OpenEXR
format developed by Industrial Light & Magic is a pretty good
start. It supports 16-bit floating-point, or “half-float” color, with
more than 33 stops’ worth of dynamic range, which Houston said should
be “more than enough for the foreseeable future.” Building on that, the
new format-in-the-making will be engineered to integrate digital and
film workflows, which makes sense, Houston said, because AMPAS expects
film and digital to coexist for the next “couple of decades,” and to
standardize calibration targets for film recording and scanning.
Speaking at the same session, Jeremy Selan of Sony Pictures Imageworks
said he’s all for a standardized file system, noting that certain shots
in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the
Wardrobe involved composites with elements from different VFX
houses in the same frame, demanding precise color matching from
facility to facility (if not some slick work on the back end to make
everything look like a match).
Is Blu-ray the New SACD?
If any one organization has the muscle to enforce a technology
standard, it’s AMPAS. But even the Academy has little power to make
consumer-technology giants play nice with each other. Jerry Pierce,
senior VP of technology at NBC-Universal, ruminated on the future of
video distribution by comparing it to the current situation in the
audio market – with consumers ignoring the format war between DVD-Audio
and SACD en masse in favor of MP3s and iPods. He sees similar potential
for the video industry to sabotage itself, and to prove his point about
quality, he projected a sample of video from his iTunes playlist,
encoded at 768 kbps at a resolution of 320x240, onto the big screens at
the front of the room. Quantitatively, that’s a disaster area. But it
held up surprisingly well.
“We’re selling [TV shows] like crazy on the iPod,” Pierce noted, while
cautioning that competing DRM schemes could slow the adoption of mobile
devices. “I want DRM interoperability. But I don’t know if it’s doable,
and I’m not going to wait for it to happen.” Either way, he argued that
the proliferation of new viewing formats spells “a great opportunity
for post,” noting that he may have 15 to 20 versions of a film like
The 40 Year-Old Virgin in circulation at any given
time, including some formats that may only be purchased by 10,000
people.
On an unrelated topic, some frustration was obvious in the room as
representatives from Sony, Panasonic, eCinema Systems and Texas
Instruments trotted out information on the latest developments in SXRD,
plasma, LCD and DLP displays. Asked why there are so few options
available for the pro market, where image quality is critical and CRT
displays still reign supreme, Sony’s Gary Mandle said it’s just a
business decision. “There are huge economic issues,” he said. “It’s a
very low-volume market, and it requires the absolute maximum in
performance. You can’t put the funding into something like this.” The
bottom line seems to be that pro users can expect new technology to
surpass and replace CRT displays – but not in the near future.
What's Higher Than High-Def? Plenty
As far as cameras were concerned, there was a lot to satisfy your
megadef jones. Arri’s Stephan Ukas-Bradley gave another D20 update
(pre-production units are currently “in the field,” and the D20
FlashMag 112 recording system will be available after NAB), and then
the real fun began. Olympus actually had its “Octavision” camera, which
runs at a 3840x2160 resolution the company calls “Quad HD,” at the
event. It uses four 2/3-inch CCDs offset by a half-pixel. It can send
an hour of video to the 480 GB SH-880TR hard-disk recorder via a
four-channel HD-SDI fiber connection, or record to a PC via Gigabit
Ethernet. Rentals have already started in Japan, and Olympus’s Nick
Koyama, assistant general manager of IS business projects, said the ASC
will test it this year.
Finally, NHK’s Hiroshi Shimamoto, a visiting scholar at Stanford
University, previewed what NHK calls “Super HiVision” – an 8K by 4K
(7680x4320 at 59.94 Hz) camera. (Data is transferred over 16 channels
of HD-SDI.) The camera uses 1.25-inch CMOS chips (each with an
effective resolution of 3840x2160) and four-pickup color imaging, with
a diagonal pixel offset between two green imagers. Each pixel is just
4.2 nanometers square. At NAB, NHK plans to demonstrate the camera
using MPEG-2, a 400-inch screen, and a 22.2 multichannel audio system.
(None of those numbers are typos.)
Someone in the audience asked the sensible question of how much sense
it made to sacrifice dynamic range for the sake of sheer pixel
resolution, and the answer came back that everything is a compromise.
“That’s the nature of stepping up the technology, one by one,” Koyama
said, suggesting that once resolution had been ramped up, engineers
would start working on dynamic range.
Digital Cinema Rising
On the digital cinema front, there was lots of talk about workflows for
creating DCPs, or digital cinema packages, with studio reps explaining
both 2K and 4K processes. Wendy Aylsworth, VP of Technology for Warner
Bros. Technical Operations, noted that the studio is already
test-promoting 4K releases in Japan as “4K Pure Cinema.” The releases
to date have been Tim Burton's Corpse Bride, a 4K
animation that was given a 2K DI (due to costs) and then upresed to 4K
before distribution; Batman Begins, a 35mm film
project scanned at 4K, and Harry Potter and the Goblet of
Fire, another 2K DI upresed to 4K. Aylsworth noted that on
the Warner lot, where separate facilities for posting and distributing
these releases were created, XYZ color conversion and JPEG 2000
compression both happened at the in-house post facility, rather than as
part of distribution.
D-cinema glitches? Warner noticed the random appearance of black frames
in 4K screenings of Batman Begins, eventually
deducing that the sheer amount of data involved was simply overwhelming
the buffer of the decoding chip from time to time. Disney’s Howard Lukk
noted that the Narnia release suffered from what he
called “Harry Potter hangover” because some projectors, having just
screened Harry Potter, incorrectly used that film’s
color profile for Narnia as well. And both Lukk and
Wade Hanniball, director of content technology at Universal Pictures,
expressed concern about the need for a “clean-aperture” scan. If you
scan a piece of film from perf to perf at a horizontal resolution of
2048 but you can’t use the full width of the neg because part of it is
outside of a specified safe area, then your resolution is compromised
because you have to scale up that smaller, usable portion of the image
to fill the 2048 frame.
Comin' at Ya
There was also a session on 3D, which is enjoying another resurgence
that may or may not be a passing fancy. Sony has the next big 3D
picture, Monster House, on deck with a scheduled
July 21 release date. Rob Engle of Sony Imageworks said it will likely
open in 3D on 200 digital screens, and noted that while 3D was an
“afterthought” after the movie had been conceived and designed, the
studio did have time to “tune” the film for 3D, changing some
compositions and altering depth of field in some shots. Meanwhile,
In-Three, which has a system to “dimensionalize” existing 2D content,
announced a deal with Christie/AIX and 3D glasses maker NuVision
Technologies to install 3D exhibition equipment in digital auditoriums.
In-Three’s system uses the original source material as the “left-eye”
image, and then creates a virtual right-eye image as a post-production
process. “It’s good-quality 3D that does not give you a headache,” said
co-owner and Senior VP Neil Feldman. George Lucas has said he wants to
remaster all of the Star Wars movies in In-Three’s
process.
Finally, the big picture on the broadcast side involved a little bit of
anxiety over the new law mandating the DTV switchover in 2009, which
apparently contains a clerical error related to a Medicare provision in
the same bill that will send it back to Congress. Since the original
bill passed by slim margins in both the House and the Senate, it’s not
clear whether it will pass a second time. In another legal turnaround,
a federal appeals court last year overturned the “broadcast flag”
legislation that TV networks say will keep their content from being
redistributed online. According to the MPAA’s Executive VP and CTO Brad
Hunt, there is work to clarify the jurisdiction of the FCC so that the
next version of the broadcast-flag law will stick.
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