Fixed Scarlet and 4K Projection.

[Norman B. Miller]

In light of the discussion going on in the Recon section.... How well would the Scarlet fixed blow up for 4K? Will it look good enough for theatrical distribution in 4K projection? It would be nice to have some RED input on this.... Also does anyone know what Avatar was shot in? I heard that the new 3D standard was 2K...Avatar looked quite good to me and I was pretty close to the screen in a stadium theater....

 

[M Most]

Also does anyone know what Avatar was shot in? I heard that the new 3D standard was 2K...Avatar looked quite good to me and I was pretty close to the screen in a stadium theater....

The vast majority of Avatar wasn't shot on anything because it was pure CG. The live action - whatever parts of it were live action - was shot on two Sony 950 variants, which are 3 chip, 2/3 inch 444 cameras.

 

[Norman B. Miller]

Thanks M...This is what I thought for the live action. It seems to me that the Scarlet could achieve a better picture than the live action sequences of Avatar, given the same lighting and environment. After all, the Mysterium X is a least one generation above the Sony chips... Is there something that I'm missing in this conclusion?

 

[Bastien Tribalat]

It seems that 1080p is allready good for the big scren as seen on movies like Public Enemies. I Agree that it's not êrfect or as good as a good 35mm film, but considering that Scarlet, EPIC and Red One can record "beyond HD.... Between 6 and 10 times HD" (Ted) I think it will be no big deal to do so with your Scarlet. (even if, in that case, it would be better to have an interchangeable Scarlet to be able to have the benefits of prime lenses)

 

[Gary Paul Walker]

RE: Fixed Scarlet and 4K Projection

RE: Fixed Scarlet and 4K Projection

In light of the discussion going on in the Recon section.... How well would the Scarlet fixed blow up for 4K? Will it look good enough for theatrical distribution in 4K projection? It would be nice to have some RED input on this.... Also does anyone know what Avatar was shot in? I heard that the new 3D standard was 2K...Avatar looked quite good to me and I was pretty close to the screen in a stadium theater....

I was reading the same discussion, and thought much the same as you. Also it got me thinking about how 'future-proof' you'd need to be for Televisions... how high can a resolution on a 42" television (given that I can only get a 42" in my house) go? 1080p looks great... 3K would probably look really great- but beyond that what will my eye ever be able to register?

 

[Paul Whittington]

I recall reading somewhere (either at RED or some other site) that the Scarlet will have a 2.35:1 anamorphic setting. If so, then even a 3K, you should be able to achieve roughly 4K from left to right.

Can someone confirm if Scarlet will in fact have an anamorphic setting? This would be a great feature to have.

 

[David Mullen ASC]

I recall reading somewhere (either at RED or some other site) that the Scarlet will have a 2.35:1 anamorphic setting. If so, then even a 3K, you should be able to achieve roughly 4K from left to right.

That doesn't make any sense -- if the sensor is 3K wide, you can't get more than 3K out of it.

The ANA setting on the 4.5K RED, after all, reduces the recorded width to around 2.8K because you don't need more width than that if shooting with a 2X anamorphic lens.

So if the 3K 2/3" sensor is 3072 x 1728 (a guess) and there is an ANA setting on the 3K Scarlet for using anamorphic lenses, it would probably be in the range of 2074 x 1728 (1.20 : 1 aspect ratio with a 2X optical squeeze gets you 2.40 : 1.)

The other method would be to use spherical lenses and crop the sensor to 3072 x 1280 to get 2.40 : 1. But there is no way to increase the recorded resolution beyond what the sensor can allow.

 

[Tom Lowe]

3K RAW is not a 4K finish camera. Period.

If someone tries to say that 3K Bayer RAW can be blown up to 4K finish, then they have to say that 2K RGB can be blown up to 4K finish, and that just isn't true.

 

[Norman B. Miller]

Tom would it be your opinion then the imagery from the 3k fixed could not be played on a 4K projector? Production at this level is new to me so just trying to get my bearings of what can and can't be done with the Scarlet when it comes out...

 

[Tom Lowe]

Maybe some argument could be made that 3K Red RAW footage is like 2.1K or something or 2.2K or whatever, but generally, you have to think of it as 2K or 1080p footage. Would you try to uprez 2K or 1080p to 4K? No, it just doesn't make any sense.

Sadly, I'm dealing with this exact situation right now myself. I held off as long as I could so that I could shoot my first film on Epic X and finish at 4K, but I cannot wait any longer, so I am going to start shooting on Red One at 4K and 3K overcranked. I wish I could talk myself into thinking that 3K RAW could be uprezzed to 4K finish, but that would be deluding myself.

But really, there will always be a huge market for 1080p finishes. Films like Star Wars, LOTR, Avatar, etc, are not going to disappear just because they are locked at 1080p or 2K. Would I much rather finish my film at 4K? Yes. But reality is reality.

Deakins once said something along the lines of, "Every single shot I've ever done has been a compromise in some way."

 

[Alex Mack]

Tom would it be your opinion then the imagery from the 3k fixed could not be played on a 4K projector? Production at this level is new to me so just trying to get my bearings of what can and can't be done with the Scarlet when it comes out...

The real 3k resolution will be about 2.5k.
You could think of it as bonus resolution if a 4k release was to be made. That is, its ideal for a 2k release (which is the resolution that most will realistically see it at, with blu ray and now streaming). But a 4k release would also be warranted, because there is still significantly more detail that can be extracted.

For perspective, 2k is really quite good when analyzed from an 'eternal aesthetic' standpoint. When you consider that a lot of 2k today has been shot with 2k cameras that actually resolve less than 2k, it really is enough for delivery of a 'fully resolved image' to the human mind. And 3K Raw is not tpo far off resolution wise from the timeless standard of resolution, 35mm. In fact, given realistic distribution scenarios with degradation to much worse image quality, its on par with 35.

 

[Norman B. Miller]

Thanks for your overview Tom. Its good to get feedback from someone who is currently dealing with a similar situation in real life circumstances...

 

[Norman B. Miller]

Well Alex, that was very close my line of thinking on this topic...Tom seems to have had some real world experience with this and given it allot of thought...Guess we'll have to wait and see how things shake out to see what is possible. The fact that the fixed scarlet will have a new MX sensor may surprise us all with its image quality....Thanks for your opinion...

 

[David Mullen ASC]

A lot of people were impressed by the 4K projection of the digitally restored "Blade Runner" -- and that was from a 2K DCI file. So I don't buy the notion that 2K can't be blown-up to 4K without looking bad. It's really just an issue of whether you are wasting money doing the blow-up since you aren't gaining resolution. But you aren't losing it either.

The thing to remember is that as long as you are in the ballpark of what we consider "cinema quality" -- 1080P, 2K, 4K, 35mm, etc. -- then one format tends to only look better or worse than another when shown side-by-side or one after the other in comparison. Most movies are shown in a single resolution, by themselves (ignoring trailers). People have seen 1080P movies like "Return of the Sith" or "Benjamin Button" or "Avatar" on the big screen and thought the quality was pretty decent, but they aren't being shown side-by-side with some sort of "4K reference" or anything.

Uprezzing to a better format, whether 4K projection, 70mm print, IMAX print, doesn't in itself make a lower resolution format look worse. A lot of it depends on the degree of image enlargement on the screen of course. But I used to see a lot of great blow-ups to 70mm back in the 80's and 90's and basically thought of it as a "better 35mm print" rather than something originated in 65mm. Same goes for these IMAX DMR releases, I think of them as the ultimate presentation of that origination format, usually 35mm, but I don't think of them as being originated in 15-perf 65mm.

So even if 4K distribution and presentation becomes commonplace, it doesn't necessarily mean that 1080P or 2K movies are going to look any worse than they do now, just that 4K movies will look even better.

We just have to accept that we live and work in a world that has a lot of different formats of different qualities and that getting the highest resolution image is not always the primary goal. Look at "The Hurt Locker", nominated for an ASC award -- it was shot in Super-16 and I'm sure posted in 2K. The grittiness and roughness of the format was part of the visual design of the movie and it's pointless to say that it would have looked better if shot in 4K, just as it would be pointless to say that "Clerks" would have looked better if shot in IMAX.

Also, people are putting WAY too much emphasis on vague numbers like "4K" and ignoring a host of other factors that influence the perception of sharpness, fine detail, etc. Not to mention mitigating factors like the heaviness of the OLPF and the level of compression, the quality of the lenses, the focus of the lens on the camera and on the projector, etc.

I mean, one of the sharpest movies I've seen in a long time was "The Thin Red Line" and that was 35mm anamorphic through a photochemical post. Was it 3K, 4K, whatever?

 

[Tom Lowe]

I hear what you're saying David, but if the question is, "Can 1080p be blown up to 4K" then I feel like a direct answer is "Not really."

Regarding "The Thin Red Line", anamorphic 35mm would certainly resolve to 4K wouldn't you think? They used the best lenses, best cameras, and John Toll. I did actually use that example earlier, that well-shot, recent, and well-preserved anamorphic 35mm should look fantastic at 4K finish and projection. Another, more recent example, would be "Dark Knight."

If the question is, "Can I blow up 1080p to 4K" then the legit answer, IMO, should probably be "Not really." Why would you do that? Why not just call it what it is -- 1080p? If I shoot a film on SD right now, can I blow it up and call it "HD"? Not really. So what's the difference?

Frankly, I saw the DMR of "Superman Returns," and you know what it looked like to me? 1080p blown up to an IMAX screen. Nothing more, nothing less.

I am a big believer that you get out what you put in. There is no magic uprez formula, IMO. Can you show a 1080p picture on a 4K screen? Of course! But it won't actually be 4K.

 

[Paul Whittington]

That doesn't make any sense -- if the sensor is 3K wide, you can't get more than 3K out of it.

Hi David - Yes, I didn't mean to imply that the camera would 'record' beyond 3k (of course that would be impossible), but rather the video would playback beyond 3k.

My understanding of how anamorphic video works is that you first select the aspect ratio you want, say 2.35:1, which would black out the top and bottom of a 16:9 frame, right? And then the camera would stretch the 2.35:1 image back to 16:9 and record using the full top-to-bottom resolution at 16:9 so that all pixels (even the blacked out top and bottom parts) are effectively being used. Then, when the image is played back, it's horizontal resolution is squeezed back down from 16:9 to 2.35:1, pushing the left and right sides out beyond 3k. Technically speaking, this would be possible to do.

You see, I have an early 4:3 SD digital camera that did this when recording in the anamorphic mode - even though the camera was Standard Def, the image, when played back, was 16:9 (non-cropped) yet the dimensions of the video file were still 480x720 which means the camera still recorded the image using all of it's pixels rather than cropping the 4:3 to 16:9 and recording letterbox.

It's my experience with the 4:3 camera that led to my assumption of how anamorphic video works but perhaps I'm wrong. I'm sure someone out there knows more about it than I do - if so, I would love to know more.

Thanks.

 

[Joe Calabrese]

That doesn't make any sense -- if the sensor is 3K wide, you can't get more than 3K out of it.

The ANA setting on the 4.5K RED, after all, reduces the recorded width to around 2.8K because you don't need more width than that if shooting with a 2X anamorphic lens.

So if the 3K 2/3" sensor is 3072 x 1728 (a guess) and there is an ANA setting on the 3K Scarlet for using anamorphic lenses, it would probably be in the range of 2074 x 1728 (1.20 : 1 aspect ratio with a 2X optical squeeze gets you 2.40 : 1.)

The other method would be to use spherical lenses and crop the sensor to 3072 x 1280 to get 2.40 : 1. But there is no way to increase the recorded resolution beyond what the sensor can allow.

I think that what might be reffered to here is the idea that an anamorphic lens can increase the number of horizontal a camera can make out. Barry green tested this (and wrote about it in his DVX book). The DVX has 3 500 line CCDs, but with the anamorphic adapter can resolve 550 lines (according to Barry Green).

A lot of people were impressed by the 4K projection of the digitally restored "Blade Runner" -- and that was from a 2K DCI file. So I don't buy the notion that 2K can't be blown-up to 4K without looking bad. It's really just an issue of whether you are wasting money doing the blow-up since you aren't gaining resolution. But you aren't losing it either.

The thing to remember is that as long as you are in the ballpark of what we consider "cinema quality" -- 1080P, 2K, 4K, 35mm, etc. -- then one format tends to only look better or worse than another when shown side-by-side or one after the other in comparison. Most movies are shown in a single resolution, by themselves (ignoring trailers). People have seen 1080P movies like "Return of the Sith" or "Benjamin Button" or "Avatar" on the big screen and thought the quality was pretty decent, but they aren't being shown side-by-side with some sort of "4K reference" or anything.

Uprezzing to a better format, whether 4K projection, 70mm print, IMAX print, doesn't in itself make a lower resolution format look worse. A lot of it depends on the degree of image enlargement on the screen of course. But I used to see a lot of great blow-ups to 70mm back in the 80's and 90's and basically thought of it as a "better 35mm print" rather than something originated in 65mm. Same goes for these IMAX DMR releases, I think of them as the ultimate presentation of that origination format, usually 35mm, but I don't think of them as being originated in 15-perf 65mm.

So even if 4K distribution and presentation becomes commonplace, it doesn't necessarily mean that 1080P or 2K movies are going to look any worse than they do now, just that 4K movies will look even better.

We just have to accept that we live and work in a world that has a lot of different formats of different qualities and that getting the highest resolution image is not always the primary goal. Look at "The Hurt Locker", nominated for an ASC award -- it was shot in Super-16 and I'm sure posted in 2K. The grittiness and roughness of the format was part of the visual design of the movie and it's pointless to say that it would have looked better if shot in 4K, just as it would be pointless to say that "Clerks" would have looked better if shot in IMAX.

Also, people are putting WAY too much emphasis on vague numbers like "4K" and ignoring a host of other factors that influence the perception of sharpness, fine detail, etc. Not to mention mitigating factors like the heaviness of the OLPF and the level of compression, the quality of the lenses, the focus of the lens on the camera and on the projector, etc.

I mean, one of the sharpest movies I've seen in a long time was "The Thin Red Line" and that was 35mm anamorphic through a photochemical post. Was it 3K, 4K, whatever?

I know there is a certain point where resolution doesn't matter any more. Like with HDTVs, there is a certain distance where a 720p HDTV and a 1080p HDTV would have the same visible resolution because your eye can't "see" the extra resolution the different TV's have to offer (one may look sharper, but we still would see only a certain amount of detail). Would this be the idea with 4k projection: 2k, 4k, etc. would all have the same visible resolution because our eye would not be able to resolve the difference? Just asking.

 

[David Mullen ASC]

My understanding of how anamorphic video works is that you first select the aspect ratio you want, say 2.35:1, which would black out the top and bottom of a 16:9 frame, right? And then the camera would stretch the 2.35:1 image back to 16:9 and record using the full top-to-bottom resolution at 16:9 so that all pixels (even the blacked out top and bottom parts) are effectively being used. Then, when the image is played back, it's horizontal resolution is squeezed back down from 16:9 to 2.35:1, pushing the left and right sides out beyond 3k. Technically speaking, this would be possible to do.

You see, I have an early 4:3 SD digital camera that did this when recording in the anamorphic mode - even though the camera was Standard Def, the image, when played back, was 16:9 (non-cropped) yet the dimensions of the video file were still 480x720 which means the camera still recorded the image using all of it's pixels rather than cropping the 4:3 to 16:9 and recording letterbox.

All of this thinking really is left-over from the days of standard definition. In NTSC-land, a frame of video is 720 x 480 pixels, whether or not it is 4x3 of 16x9, it's just that the 16x9 version has less-square pixels so that the image appears squeezed (anamorphic) on a 4x3 monitor or normal on a 16x9 monitor. So if you had an SD camera with a 16x9 sensor, then you would get a good 720 x 480 "anamorphic" recording. But if you had a camera with a 4x3 sensor, then you had a few options to get a 16x9 recording. One was using a 1.33X anamorphic lens attachment on a camera would allow you to use all 720 x 480 pixels in the recording for the 16x9 image. The other would be to crop the 4x3 sensor to 16x9 and then stretch that image back out to fill 720 x 480. But whether you did that crop & stretch in-camera or in post, you weren't gaining resolution, it's just the some methods were better than other, particularly if the crop & stretch happened before compression.

Now in HD, all recordings are 16x9, whether 720P, 1080i, or 1080P. There was only one camera that had a unique in-camera process to get a 2.35 image that used all 1920 x 1080 pixels in the recording without needing an anamorphic lens, and that was the Thomson Viper. But this was only possible because the Viper used a unique sensor made up of smaller "sub-pixel" groupings that could be arranged for a 1.78 (16x9) or 2.35 image to be written out as a 1920 x 1080 signal. When in 2.35 mode, the recorded image naturally had a 1.33X anamorphic squeeze to it when viewed in 1920 x 1080. So there was some advantage over a normal 1080P sensor where you had to crop 1920 x 1080 to get a 2.35 image. But the gain in resolution would have only been in the vertical, not the horizontal, which was 1920 pixels across no matter what.

But all the other sensors out there don't use this sub-pixel technology -- you record what the sensor captures. With the RED cameras, as with most cameras, there are no electronic internal anamorphic tricks to gain resolution for 2.40 images. That was unique to the Viper and it was partly driven by the limitations of the fixed 1920 x 1080 recording format.

The only way to improve resolution for a 2.40 image is to use an anamorphic lens with the correct squeeze ratio so that you don't have to do any cropping of the recording to get a 2.40 image. In the case of a 16x9 (1.78) sensor, that would be a 1.33X squeeze ratio to allow a 2.40 image to fill the 16x9 sensor. And the gain in resolution over cropping to 2.40 would just be in the vertical dimension.

Think about it: if you merely "blocked out" the top and bottom of a 16x9 sensor to a 2.40 image area, basically a vertical crop, then stretching the image electronically back out to become a 16x9 recording would not gain you any resolution. The resolution would be the same if you just did the crop in post. There was a little improvement (very little) in the DV world with some in-camera sensor crop & stretch mainly because it took place before the heavy DV compression step. But otherwise, you're still working with the same number of pixels once cropped. Stretching what's left over back out to a bigger file does not add resolution.

Plus there is no point of an electronic in-camera crop & stretch with the Scarlet because you aren't limited to a 16x9 HD recording format, you are recording RAW, everything the sensor is capable of basically.

I suppose it's possible with this proposed 1080P mode on the Scarlet, which will do an in-camera conversion from 3K RAW to 1080P RGB, that there may also be some setting to allow you to crop the sensor to 2.40 and stretch that to fill the 16x9 1080P recording, though the quality would be no better than just recording 3K RAW and doing the crop to 2.40 in post (if not worse.) But none of these techniques can cause an increase in horizontal resolution beyond the max that the sensor can capture and record. Even if you could squeeze more horizontal resolution into fewer pixels, the result would be aliasing.

 

[Paul Whittington]

Ahhhh, so the SD camera merely stretched the pixels horizontally rather than squeeze the image vertically - gotcha.

Actually I am glad to hear this because if the Scarlet did in fact have a feature similar to what I described above I'd be so tempted to use it for filming 2.35:1 rather than cropping down from 16:9. So now I am forced to crop from 16:9 which is great because having the extra room to play with on the image helps immensely in fixing up composition of shots in post.

Thanks for the input David.

 

[Norman B. Miller]

Thank you very much for your excellent overview David...Its much appreciated and a real help to people like myself who are just entering production at this level..