"VV will replace S35" and other failed predictions

[Karim D. Ghantous]

Um, most of the time VFX is done on captured imagery!

Yes, I understand your point. I am referring to CGI, mostly. Like, if you rendered a CGI car at 2K, it would be pretty much as clean as a 4K photograph of that same car. Roughly. That's what I meant by 'pure imagery'. I should have written CGI to begin with.

 

[Robert Hart]

The whole film versus digital may become moot sooner than we may think if the AI folk and people inventing human neural interface devices get cracking on innovation. The limiting factors may become the content provider's own sharpness of eyesight and hearing. "Smellovision" might even make a comeback along with other sensor inputs like that earthquake simulator thing I have forgotten the name of. Was it "Sensurround". Whatever it was it made you think it rattled your gizzards if you were close enough to it. I wonder how many years that will take.

 

[Patrick Tresch]

Um, most of the time VFX is done on captured imagery!

If you need to replace a sky in behind an actor... the VFX team will load the footage DOWNSAMPLED TO 2K, replace the sky, then the 2K shot will go in the movie.

They won't try to go and merge it with the 4K original because actually the 4K original didn't really contain much more detail. Not worth the effort.

So really if it was shot 2.8K or 4K or 6K or 8K... doesn't really matter as long as the footage makes a nice 2K image.

That's my submission for something REDUSERs failed to predict in 2007 - that 10 years later you could still do that on even the highest budget projects.

Bruce Allen
www.bruceallen.tv

858 pixels higth on a big cinemascope screen in 2022 is probelmatic for me Bruce.

 

[Bruce Allen]

858 pixels higth on a big cinemascope screen in 2022 is probelmatic for me Bruce.

Um, that wasn't my point - I kept writing 2017 and I'm talking about reality not personal preference - and sure, I agree with you.

Certainly I also count myself among the REDUSERs in 2007 who would have expected 4K to take over in 10 years.

Personally, I would have 100% expected and hoped that studios would have increased the budgets so that masters could have be done at, say, 3K at least!

But the interesting thing is that public didn't complain and the money and time wasn't allocated.

I guess the main thing is that it wasn't like anyone tried to really push above those quality standards - we have for the most part good 2K projection for the studios competing against kinda janky 4K post shown compressed through streaming services.

It's not like there's a new studio saying "we're going to pay PROPERLY" for the highest quality 4K HDR pipeline on every shot.

Bruce Allen
www.bruceallen.tv

 

[Alex Waugh]

I would really, really love the S35 Raptor so have faster frame rates and lower resolution. Give me 6k/240 or 4k/400. I was having a discussion about the Raptor being a poor mans Phantom the other day and it's so close. It's a shame the HFR over 240 starts to look a bit rubbish without a lot of post because I think a lot of REDs market (fashion / wildlife / sport) would LOVE to be able to get into the 400-600 FPS space cleanly.

I know thats not going to happen, and the 240FPS is going to use an even smaller sensor area than the VV due to being 8k/35, but it's a shame.

 

[Blair S. Paulsen]

My point would be conditioning and compared to what. If your local Cineplex was showing most features and pre-show content at 4K, and you got used to that, then they dropped in a 2K feature you would likely notice. Of course if they don't have a proper projectionist and are keeping the lumens down to extend bulb life its academic.
At home, the over compression of 99% of what is shown makes the argument moot.
IAC, VistaVision was never going to become dominant for most motion work. Its wonderful for some projects/shots, but Super35 is not a hinderance for most use cases. Not to mention that despite the release of large format cinema glass from the usual suspects the last few years, I would wager that over 95% of the lenses in people's kits or on rental house shelves is Super35. Moreover, back to the conditioning note, Super35 is what we are used to - so it looks like expected. Not likely to create blowback there.

Cheers - #19

 

[Karim D. Ghantous]

The whole film versus digital may become moot sooner than we may think if the AI folk and people inventing human neural interface devices get cracking on innovation.

That's so far out that I don't even have an opinion here. All I can predict is that it will only work if the interface is non-intrusive, in the same way that 3D spectacles are non-intrusive. You can put them on and take them off at will.

Blair, I don't know what you mean when you say that S35 has a look, unless you are specifically referring to film. After all, 16mm has a look, too. But for digital, those metrics are very elastic.

 

[Marc Wielage]

Roger Deakins also said 2k is enough for Imax. :congratulatory:

I've worked on a few 2K productions that wound up released on IMAX, and we got zero complaints. I won't name them, but trust me, they're out there. DMR -- Digital Media Remastering -- is a multi-step kind of processing that they use, and it can be very effective.