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This topic comprises 3 pages: 1 2 3
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Topic: Percentage of DCPs and Auditoriums 4k?
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Marcel Birgelen
Film God
Posts: 3357
From: Maastricht, Limburg, Netherlands
Registered: Feb 2012
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posted 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.
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Dave Macaulay
Film God
Posts: 2321
From: Toronto, Canada
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 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.
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 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.
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Marcel Birgelen
Film God
Posts: 3357
From: Maastricht, Limburg, Netherlands
Registered: Feb 2012
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posted 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.)
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Marcel Birgelen
Film God
Posts: 3357
From: Maastricht, Limburg, Netherlands
Registered: Feb 2012
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posted 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.
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Carsten Kurz
Film God
Posts: 4340
From: Cologne, NRW, Germany
Registered: Aug 2009
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posted 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
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