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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Prometheus DI?

Tom Lowe

Tom Lowe

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Anyone know if "Prometheus" is doing a 4K DI? If they did, are there any 4K 3D projection systems that could even play it right now?
 
Probably a 4K 2D DI and a 2K 3D DI like Spider-Man. They shot 5K 3D according to the production company and that's all that is public at this point.
 
L. Langer said:
Probably a 4K 2D DI and a 2K 3D DI like Spider-Man. They shot 5K 3D according to the production company and that's all that is public at this point.
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What was shot is less relevant on a movie of this type than you might think. When it's done, my guess would be that upwards of 70% of the material in the movie is VFX shots, even if the effects aren't obvious. Unless all of those are done in 4K (very, very unlikely), it doesn't really matter what they claim the DI was done as.
 
M Most said:
What was shot is less relevant on a movie of this type than you might think. When it's done, my guess would be that upwards of 70% of the material in the movie is VFX shots, even if the effects aren't obvious. Unless all of those are done in 4K (very, very unlikely), it doesn't really matter what they claim the DI was done as.
Click to expand...

And how much does it really matter? I'm not knowledgeable of 3D technology at all, but it would seem to me that the net effect of combining dual streams in terms of perceived resolution is not as apparent as many would think. That is to say that 2+2 does not equal 4, or at least we won't perceive it that way. Is that the case? Does 4+4 even equal 4? I'm totally ignorant of such things. Please forgive me.

Have any of you seen a 4k 3D projection derived from 2, 4 or 5k streams? is there a perceptible increase in clarity or sharpness? Is there an enhanced feeling of dimensionality? I'm very curious.
 
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M Most said:
What was shot is less relevant on a movie of this type than you might think. When it's done, my guess would be that upwards of 70% of the material in the movie is VFX shots, even if the effects aren't obvious. Unless all of those are done in 4K (very, very unlikely), it doesn't really matter what they claim the DI was done as.
Click to expand...

So "Spiderman" and "Prometheus" effects are not being done at 4K??
 
Tom Lowe said:
So "Spiderman" and "Prometheus" effects are not being done at 4K??
Click to expand...

Not so likely. The probably upress a lot of stuff... 3D 4k renders is really a bitch. sometimes you can use higher light samples/number of polygons etc and render at a lower resolution and within the window of render time / power that you got receive better results than if you do the work with a higher pixel resolution.

For background stuff, or out of focus stuff then a little blur and grain will hide the fact that you are cheating on the pixel count and your renders will be faster and you can do more creative reversions and such. However the delivered clips, and used backplates are are 4k.
 
Tom Lowe said:
So "Spiderman" and "Prometheus" effects are not being done at 4K??
Click to expand...

I'll ask my friends who worked on Prometheus. If the FX are in 4k it's probably finished in 4k (especially since they are doing an imax release).
 
Seems crazy to me not to do Spiderman FX at 4K, but then again, I don't know much about the FX industry, or the bottom line in terms of money.
 
Tom Lowe said:
Seems crazy to me not to do Spiderman FX at 4K, but then again, I don't know much about the FX industry, or the bottom line in terms of money.
Click to expand...

It's not just money. It's time. It takes orders of magnitude longer to render 4K CG elements (many hours per frame in many cases), and a great deal of time to both assemble and render 4K composites, particularly when they contain hundreds of layers, as they often do in large VFX pictures. Time is the enemy on these huge tentpole features, as there is never enough time to really finesse everything to the degree desired. That's why some shots are better than others, and it's also why there's usually an army of VFX vendors on any large picture. The normal process of render, composite, view, get notes, and repeat until done pretty much ensures that the VFX team will run out of time as the release date approaches, regardless of how much money is available to be thrown at it.
 
In case anyone was intrigued by the question I posed earlier I will share a link to an abstract I found. http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=4607634 I don't know how reliable the site is, but they state that it is best to reduce the resolution of one of the two views, since only one full resolution track is required to create the perception of a single full res 3D image. Is this the common practice? If not, might this kind of approach save time when rendering 4k 3D effects? Could this discrepancy between tracks contribute to the headaches some people experience when viewing 3D material?

Am I asking the wrong questions or the wrong people?
 
Like M said, it's largely about time. If I have to wait 3 days to see a revision instead of overnight then if I work on a shot for 2 weeks I can make 4 revisions instead of 16. Sometimes you have to see the final render to decide it needs another pass. Not everything can be fixed in post. I would prefer really good seamless VFX to high resolution renders.

And sure you could buy 4x as many render nodes but now you need 4x the power (maybe the grid doesn't have enough capacity in your area) you also need 4x faster disks, 4x more SANs, 4x the software licenses, 4x faster networks... your backups take longer... etc etc. These costs don't increase linearly. A 4x larger render farm can easily cost 10x as much. And there's that detail that... nobody really cares. That's 10x the expense for no extra profit.

And that's just on the capacity side. If you are going to render 4k vfx then you need 4k worth of detail. And detail in VFX is often 3D so you're looking at 16x more volumetric detail. Your matte paintings have to be 4x as good etc etc.. There are a lot of knock-on effects to working in 4k than just throwing money at the problem.
 
The film is now being color-timed by Steven Nakamura over at Company 3 in Santa Monica, which I believe is an all-daVinci Resolve facility. Don't know how much is 2K and how much is 4K. My bet is that they're working with 2K proxies just for the decision-making process, and then applying the same corrections to the 3D 4K files at the end.

There are some very, very sophisticated up-rezzing processes that can and do go on, especially in situations where the effects work has to be done in 2K due to time and money problems (often more to the former than the latter). My bet is that the final film will be a combination of both, but I honestly don't know.

The trailers do look stellar (no pun intended).
 
Yep. Especially when shooting out via Laser Recorder. Upres & sharpen is standard fair when coming from a 2k image and exporting to 4k. Effects in general cost more to pull off at 4k, 6k, and 8k. More artist hours, more import time, more disk space, etc... We're moving towards a native 4k world though and that will eventually become a baseline for VFX studios and features will be finished entirely at 4k. At this point it's going to be sooner than later.
 
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