Is Four Times Bigger Better for the Industry?

If you’ve finally got that 2K DI pipeline up and running the way you like it, the last thing you probably want to hear is a studio bigshot telling you that 2K isn’t good enough. Already. But if you were in attendance at the Digital Cinema Summit over the weekend preceding this year’s NAB, that’s exactly what you heard from Warner Bros. Entertainment CTO Christopher J. Cookson, who suggested the 2K DI symbolizes a “dark age” of film production that locks archived films into a level of resolution that’s lower than what could actually be captured on a 35mm film negative. (Read more from Cookson’s keynote at the Studio Daily Blog.)
The industry’s position in recent years has been that 2K is indeed good enough for post. That argument is based around the assumption of a lower-than-4K effective resolving power for film prints as well as the idea that most theater patrons won’t be able to discern 4K’s worth of pixels from their seats two-thirds of the way back in a movie house anyway. But, Cookson said, 4K digital projection renders the idea of release-print resolution irrelevant, and state-of-the-art stadium seating designs mean many theatrical viewers these days are sitting relatively close to the screen, Imax-style.

But the roll-out of 4K projectors has been slow. And officials from companies that supply DI hardware to post production told F&V on the NAB show floor that, following a sudden surge of interest in 2004 (the year of Spider-Man 2, I, Robot, Ocean’s Twelve, and the ill-fated Catwoman), the idea of the 4K digital intermediate hasn’t exactly spread like wildfire in the Hollywood post community. But da Vinci General Manager Bill Robertson pointed to Technicolor’s work on a 4K DI for Spider-Man 3 as a model for a 4K pipeline.

A Two-SAN DI System
Technicolor has standardized on da Vinci’s Resolve – pulling data from an SGI SAN with its CXFS file structure – for its DI pipeline, Robertson said. On a 2K DI project, the color-corrected frames could be written back to the same SAN, but Robertson said the 4K workflow demands time-critical isochronous playout and record that couldn’t be guaranteed on the pipes heading back into the SGI system. Instead, the system is built with two SANs – the data is pulled from the CXFS-based SGI SAN into the Resolve, where it is graded and then saved out to an ADIC-based Bright Systems SAN. According to Robertson, the Resolve system bridges the file systems, and the Bright Systems technology makes sure the data is recorded in contiguous order.

Elsewhere at the show, even users without a pressing, tentpole-sized need for 4K had a chance to consider workflow options coming out of the woodwork. Quantel suddenly upgraded the spec for its iQ and Pablo DI systems to 4K out of the box like it was no big deal. (It also upgraded HD-level systems like the eQ and Pablo HD to HD RGB.) And the company introduced a new initiative called Genetic Engineering – officials promise a fully configured system can run three 4K streams simultaneously (!) out of up to 80 TB of RAID-protected storage in a system dubbed the “GenePool.” Fotokem is the first customer for the system, using it to hook up four DI suites and allowing simultaneous scanning, dustbusting, conforming, grading, and film-outs on multiple machines.

Cameras Make 4K a Buzzword
Companies like Red Digital Cinema and Dalsa were showing sexy new 4K cameras (the only-under-glass prototype for Dalsa’s next-generation Evolution camera showed that Dalsa intends to put its hefty camera system on a rigorous weight-loss program) that fairly begged for equally alluring post workflows to handle their images at full res. And finally Apple, whose everything-in-one-box business mantra overwhelmed its competitors in terms of buzz at the show, said its new 10-bit ProRes 422 codec, designed to compete with Avid’s DNxHD, would allow industrious editors to get 4K files into their ubiquitous MacBook Pros – via FireWire.

Whether you want your 4K pipeline yesterday or you’re trying to put it off until it makes good business sense, the options are becoming more clear. What’s still not apparent is exactly how fast those transitions need to happen.

More info:
Da Vinci
Quantel
Red Digital Cinema
Dalsa
Apple