- NightoftheFury
- 19 Jun 2014, 18:21
I'm not talking about the "mastered in 4k" marketing crap that Sony has. I'm talking true 4k, you know 3840x2160, 12 or 16 bits per channel and final size (for a movie like Dragons2) somewhere north of 150GB. This would be the same quality as the DCPs that digital movie theaters get. DCPs are Digital Cinema Packages and arrive on encrypted hard disk drives at theaters. They range anywhere from ~ 150-250GB depending on the movie length. I would guess that Dragons2 DCP is about 150GB (compare that to the ~25gb M2TS stream from the Blu Ray for the first movie).
In my opinion, these are values you can only dream of at the moment.
Remember that h264 supports a maximum of 12 bit and that only with a 4:4:4 chroma subsampling. There would be needed completely new decoders in all players. The most TVs/projectors don't even support a color depth of 16 bits. 8 bit with 4:2:0 subsampling is the
current standard, there is a long way to go before we'll get more. At the moment, 4k is in my opinion a big joke for the consumer section.
Of course it would be awesome to have this at home, but it will take at least 5 years until we will really get it.
- NightoftheFury
- 19 Jun 2014, 18:21
I mentioned Sony because they, along with others, are experimenting with tri and quad layer discs to surpass the current BD-XL spec (50gb limit). They have tested BD up to 300gb which would be enough for a DCP quality 4k stream. But like you said, for that to work you'll need new BD players and 4k TVs. So it probably wont happen. We might get a 4k stream via Netflix using the shiny new HEVC 265 codec but that's also debatable.
In my opinion, the Blu-Ray is a dead end. It's the same like with the DVD --> more layers instead of more information per layer. Who on earth uses a double layer DVD this days? HVD is the future of transportable media storage (if the clouds don't take over everything).
- Zer0x
-
Normally, animated movies are filmed in 6k.
Don't know if DreamWorks would bother outputting 6k. True for animations you can just set your resolution and color depth when you render, but like I said above DCPs don't go past 4k and TV and BD don't use 4k so I don't think they would render 6k. Would just put unnecessary strain on their storage subsystem and compute resources. My best guess...they rendered a high quality 4k DPX sequence (sequence of individual frames) with final size about 4.5TB. That quality should be plenty.
[/quote]
Sorry, I don't have a source for the 6k rendering, I read somewhere in the past that it is a standard for animated movies. It is also a better option when the movie will be shown in IMAX to scale it up to the 8k+ resolution. But why should they render in an DPX sequence? There is no special effects department after the rendering, the scenes will only be cut together. It would need much more computing resources to do that with single frames instead of simple uncompressed video files which just have to be compressed to the version we see in cinemas.