Category Archives: 'Ware

Hardware and Software, Miscellaneous. Typically, connecting equipment that doesn't fit into the other categories.

Hard Times for Hard Disks

November 7, 2011 Like Tangents In The Rain Leave a comment

Nothing much to say in addition except that suppliers are all saying that prices have doubled and they expect them to double again.

The Future Holds...

High Frame Rates – The New Black, Getting to Speed

October 27, 2011 Like Tangents In The Rain Leave a comment

On 26 March 2011, Barry Clark posted The Path to 3D4Kp48 – The Next Step for Cinema. While there had been some behind the scenes discussion on the topic at that point, the subject was not really mentioned online. Most any conversation ended quickly since no one really had the answers of what one set of manufacturers could do, or how long it would take, especially since there was no standard to work to. Everything in the dcinema world had been done to a standard, recently ratified by SMPTE, and many manufacturers were still working flat out to catch up to those.

Regardless, it has been a busy 7 months since then – there are still many questions waiting to be answered about the science involved. However, as ShowEast ends with a major announcement or three, perhaps it is time to summarize the situation.

First background point: There has long been agreement that capture should be done at higher resolutions than the final product requires. In the digital world this is most true since most every manner of manipulation of audio and video loses bits. In the press discussions and press releases there has been some slippage about making points that may be important in image capture that may not be as important in exhibition, or vice-versa.

Second background point: On the last day of CinemaCon 2011 (March 31), James Cameron showed experiments that he had done with actors and 3D cameras, captured at 24, 48 and 60 frames per second, each being displayed on a very complicated set up at 24, 48 and 60 fps. The full details can be read here: Cinemacon 2011 – High Frame Rate 3D Demonstration by: Reiner Doetzkies of TI and Geoff Burdick of Lightstorm. MKPE also has a write up at: Cameron, Showscan, and 3-D

Since then, Director Jackson and Director Cameron announced that they will be releasing their next big tentpoles in high frame rate stereoscopic; The Hobbit in 48 fps (December 2012), and Avatar II at 60fps (December 2014).

Where? How? With what equipment? With full encryption? At some standard? For, though this is entertainment, we need a product at the other end that will play the entertainment, probably on a variety of equipment since the studios are always on the lookout for anti-trust problems… and there isn’t a lot of time…and perhaps even people. (Obligatory science statement: Work=Force times distance, but only the magnitude of the force in the direction of the objective is un-wasted and significant.)

In fact, SMPTE has updated the standards for projection in the last year; where they were once exclusively US friendly, they are now world-friendly with 25 and 50 fps marks as well as US television friendly 30, and archival friendly with some sub-24 rates (in proposal/approval stage.) In doing this, equipment manufacturers – notably Texas Instruments (since Sony Projectors already could get to stereographic 60 fps), and the server manufacturers who one by one announced that they could meet the output challenge with full security and with the required open and closed captions.

The question quickly became, what is the input challenge? Neither Cameron’s nor Jackson’s groups appear ready to tell the world what they expect for the post-production deliverable. Critically, all the dcinema equipment in the field is set for the bar of 250 Mbits/second. It is unlikely that anyone would want the added compression that doubling the number of frames would require to fit in the same datastream.

And so, to now. At ShowEast USL announced that their new IMB (internal media block) has a compressed JPEG2000 data rate at 500Mb/s, with a data rate into the projector of 10.0098Gb/s. This produces full frame 2048×1080, 12 bit color planes at 60 frames 3D

Again, to compare, current servers deliver a DCI-specified maximum of 250Mb/s compressed JPEG2000 data rate and deliver a little less than 3Gb/s over two HD-SDI coax cable links to the projector. DCI also allows these devices to be 10 bit.

This will probably be the typical ‘standard’ since the math pretty much points there. So, what the manufacturers are being asked to do is double the compressed data rate from the server to the IMB and more than triple the decoded video data rate to the projector.

Given that there is approximately 50% penetration of equipment in the market, none of which can do this, one speculates what the rest of the industry will do. Will this type of speed require a large bump in costs, or will it become the expected, de rigueur, for systems in the future.

GDC announced that they would be showing something similar, with their IMB and SMS (media server) in a Barco Projector at an August convention in Japan. GDC to Showcase High Frame Rate Digital Projection System at BIRTV 2011. GDC has a relationship with Barco in the Far East.

Then at ShowEast, with USL’s IMB announcement, there was also an announcement from Christie. They will be including an IMB capable of high frame rates. Their release was also more publicity rather than a tech announcement…you know, because all the people using and buying these devices only need publicity because these are all commodity items now.

One thing that we do know is that the 4K TI units needed an IMB. Doremi has one. We see that GDC has one. Dolby showed theirs at CinemaCon. Qube showed theirs at CinemaCon as well, and announced that they are showing a working unit at ShowEast.

Finally, Digital Cinema gets the words “Future Proof”. It is on the GDC PR and on the Christie PR. One can presume with surety that previous units were not future proof. One company gave assurance with a 10 year warranty – which seems beyond reality if it is thought through.

One is also reminded that the VPF agreements are one-time affairs. The studios consider that they did their share and when the first tranche is over, they are on the road to saving distribution costs forever. Yet, here we see the exhibitors, some with equipment that is older than 5 years, getting to a reality junction. The next set of equipment will be bought from cashflow, not partially donated by VPF agreements. Future Proof…The New Black.

Back to high-frame rates: The following was also seen in someone’s PR. No need to mention whose since this style of hype will be with them all.

High frame rate technology also allows audiences to enjoy the 3D movie experience without the visual discomfort that has affected some 3D moviegoers.

So that is the reason that people have had headaches walking from the cinema! Wouldn’t you love to see those research papers? Because one reality can’t be unstated. Typically, only one plane is in focus in the human visual system and things that are moving by in the out of focus plane doesn’t have full motion resolution either…just like 24 fps film representation. So while stereoscopic can use some help, and while 48 fps and 60 fps material did look incredible compared to 24 frame, is it the panacea? Is it worth the cost?

The Cameron material shown at CinemaCon was also shown at 10 foot lamberts. Movies mastered for that level with the equipment tuned to consistently perform at that level sounds like a nice evolutionary step. Associated with that would be that every seat in the house have that level instead of the 50% falloff at 23 degrees off horizontal or vertical centers that high gain and typical silver screens ‘provide’. When most cinema auditoriums are at 3 foot Lamberts and most of the audience is seeing 1.5 or less, that seems like a more effective vector of attack for a larger number of patrons with the equipment available.

The Future Holds...

Lasers…somebody knows…Barco? RED???

October 2, 2011 Like Tangents In The Rain Leave a comment

The basic exception was Laser Light Engines (LLE), who have a deal with IMAX to put lasers into the big room cinemas. If ever there were a nice niche to start this adventure with, this is it. Specialized, contained to dozens and hundreds instead of 10’s of thousands, able to absorb any exceptional pricing, able to evolve. Delivery was scheduled to begin in Spring 2012.

Then the film maker turned digital imaging specialist Kodak shows a system that they clearly are not productizing. But they are playing in the game. They helped set up the organization which is working (throughout the world?) to take projection booth laser systems out of the field of laser entertainment systems, which require a special technology variance for every set-up. Kodak was able to get one by themselves, but the Laser Illuminated Projection Association – LIPA – includes Sony and IMAX, plus LLE and Kodak in this effort. In the US, the over-riding entity is the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health, which is in charge of ensuring laser equipment safety.

This spring, LLE showed up in Hollywood at that chapter’s SMPTE meeting with Sony and Barco giving powerpoint presentations. Sony had made a couple of public remarks previously, but one had to be culling their online tech papers to notice. And until this point Barco had been quiet…except that the week before they did a demo at the RED Studios Hollywood lot. Nice splash.

Then nothing. No remarks from anyone at CineExpo or CineEurope. The idea has gelled that digital laser projection is 2 years away, or more.

Then this week. The RED user group message board lit up after two pre-viewer comments placed at the head of a thread by RED owner Jim Jannard: Mark L. Pederson of OffHollywood and Stephen Pizzo, Co-Founder of Element Technica and now partner of 3ality Technica, make remarks about having watched a demo of RED’s laser projector. “Vibrant”, “clean”, “never seen projection so …”, etc. Then a few non-answers to poorly phrased guesses (for example, that 4K is a benchmark, and passive 3D did leak out, but both could mean several things) and that was that…25 pages of wasted time thereafter. [Can anyone please vouch for the merits of Misters Pederson and Pizzo as to their ability to discern whether the technology they viewed is comparibly better than what has been seen otherwise?)

Barco, on the hand (and yet similarly) have made an announcement that 9 and 10 January will be their big days. – D3D Cinema to Present Giant Screen 4K 3D Laser Projection Demo at 2nd Annual Moody Digital Cinema Symposium – Well, actually, no. Barco only said, “We’re fully committed to providing the highest quality solutions for giant screen theaters” and some similar non-relevent info about how wonderful their partner is. Basically though, their name is on a press release announcing that they will butterfly laser driven digital cinema light against 15 perf 70mm and 4 other “revolutions”:

The FIRST demonstration of Barco’s revolutionary laser light engine on a giant screen
The FIRST demonstration of true DLP 4K resolution 3D on a giant screen
The FIRST 4K 3D comparison of ‘ultra-reality’ 48 frame/sec & 60 frame/sec content
The FIRST giant 3D 500 mbps comparison, nearly double the current cinema bit rate standard

Not withstanding the lack of filtering for marketing bits, and regardless of how some of the terms have been ill-defined in the past (4K 3D, for example), this is still a pretty good line-up.

Prediction: 2012 will be the year that several studios tell their exhibition partners a final date for film distribution (in 2013) and 2012 will have more than one commercial laser system in the field.

Prediction 3 – there may not be more than one DCI compliant system in the field though. RED might find that, if they thought bringing a small camera to market was a difficult trick, supporting projectors is a whole different matter…even if it is only to post-houses and their owners.

Regardless, this is mostly good news. That the RED is using passive doesn’t exactly mean silver screen passive. Perhaps Dolby passive, which would certainly be good news. If it is silver screen passive, that is bad news. Since silver screens don’t comply with SMPTE standards, they may end up on the scrap heap of history. But that is a different story for another article.

The Future Holds...

Major IPv6 Cisco Upgrade (IOS)

June 4, 2011 Like Tangents In The Rain Leave a comment

“Our biggest goal in IOS now is to have parity between IPv4 and IPv6,” Faraz Aladin, Director, Marketing Cloud Switching and Services at Cisco told InternetNews.com. “Whatever you can do in IPv4, you should be able to do with IPv6.”

From an article at: Cisco Upgrades IOS for IPv6 – www.enterprisenetworkingplanet.com

While Cisco has been providing support for IPv6 for nearly 12 years on its network equipment, IPv6 isn’t just about basic packet forwarding. Joel Conover, Director Marketing, Borderless Networks at Cisco toldInternetNews.com that getting IOS ready for IPv6 is a big job that includes a lot of incremental bits.

“When you look at the massive size of IOS, with over 2,500 features, if every single one needs to be re-written to support IPv6, that takes time,” Conover said.

One feature that has taken time to land in IOS involves time itself. The Network Time Protocol (NTP) is now available in IPv6. Conover noted that it was previously not supported by IPv6 and needed to be re-written.

Security is also now being improved in Cisco IOS for IPv6 with a technology called first hop security. Aladin explained that a possible risk that had existed with IPv6 before was that another device could have been sitting on a network, spoofing a user’s address. First hop security provides a degree of authentication, to ensure that the address server is authentic and the user can trust the IPv6 address information.

Cisco is now also leveraging the Location/ID Separation Protocol (LISP) to help network administrators deploy IPv6 with IPv6 over IPv4 tunnels. LISP is an emerging standard for routing Internet traffic.

Who Wants IPv6?

With the exhaustion of the free pool of IPv4 address space, the need for IPv6 is now well understood. According to a Cisco survey of 101 U.S IT leaders, 78 percent are currently planning for an IPv6 transition.

Security is the top concern in IPv6 transition efforts with 92 percent of survey respondents noting that their IT organization’s security department is part of the IPv6 migration.

As organizations move to IPv6 though, they still expect certain things to work that did in the IPv4 world.

“When we talk to customers — they tell us they want to implement IPv6, but here is a list of things that I can do with IPv4, and unless I can do them in IPv6 I can’t make the transition,” Aladin said.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.

Connectivity

DCI Compliance–Stuck in the Projector

May 19, 2011 Like Tangents In The Rain Leave a comment

Doremi has done it again, this time with an IMB.

Projector manufacturers were the first to get their paperwork saying that they got through the Compliance Tests, one by one the TI OEMs. Then recently Sony managed to get the 4K and its SMS through. But since their entire assembly is one huge secure chamber, the SMS almost becomes an internal media block…which is a technicality that shouldn’t interest anyone.

Logically, an IMB would be the next to roll-out of the Compliance Test Lab. And it was. Still, no server has been through which is an interesting political situation. If a manufacturer can get the IMB Compliant, so much of the SMS is redundant. To get it tested by both NIST and the Compliance Lab – that’s a big cost for something that is going to be outmoded in a couple years.

Still, they have come this far – but what a moving target, getting through the InterOp to SMPTE transition – when do you call it quits, shot the engineer (off to a new project) and get things tested? It would be tough to get through the tests and then find you have to make a big change somewhere. (Little changes in the code can be mutually looked at through the AskanceLensing System.)

None of this matters to the Doremi IMB team. They got through this week. Salutations!

Connectivity

3Questions: OpenDCP – Now with GUI

April 27, 2011 Like Tangents In The Rain Leave a comment

Open Source tools are described throughout the DCI specifications, and the nuance of using them is detailed in the myriad SMPTE (and ISO) documents of Digital Cinema. The Digital Cinema Package (DCP) is a complex joining of various video and audio standards coupled with several security protocols that make the transport, local storage and playout of entertainment able to be used by any combination of the available ‘compliant’ media players and projectors.

Since official compliance is a new part of the dcinema world, this hasn’t been an easy task. It is made more complicated by the several transitions that the equipment is going through; Series One and Series Two projectors, external to internal media blocks (IMBs), InterOp to SMPTE compliant systems are a few of the major examples.

For the last 10 years packages have been made by the classic companies, Technicolor and Deluxe, and more recently by some of the integrators such as Cinedigm, ArtsAlliance and XDC. Dolby has long had a separate group making packages.

There are several manufacturers who make package creation systems. The two most popular are from Doremi (CineAsset) and Qube (QubeMaster Pro and Xpress). Fraunhofer makes a package named EasyDCP. All of these systems cost in excess of $5,000. All are using somewhat user-cuddly front ends to steer the user through the many details and choices available. It is well known in the field that any product that pops out the other side needs to be tested on each variation of cinema player and projector to make certain that it will play when needed.

OpenDCP is no different², but until now its interface was by command line (CLI), which added a layer of complexity to the learning curve. This month a new release was posted on the open source code site http://code.google.com/p/opendcp/.

The package roadmap tells of some of the features that hold it back from being the perfect tool for all users. One item not listed is that the GUI version will only create single reel packages (though the CLI will create multi-reel packages). And like all DCP creation packages, the user needs to test the package on the target system.

This brings up the point of “Why”, which becomes easily understood if one searches the net for requests by film-makers and directors who want their product played at film festivals and local cinemas that use digital projection systems. These artists commonly have eaten their relatively small budgets getting the entertainment shot and edited, where there is enough format and standards confusion. Often the festival site doesn’t know the answers either since this is yet another technical area in flux, manned by volunteers who only get fragments of data to pass on to their constituents. The topics of using DVDs or Blu Ray discs comes up. There is a commonality of panic as each question brings up further confusion. The nuance of multi-track audio and going from TV-centric HD standards to truly HD cinema standards (wider color space, 4:4:4 color depth instead of 4:2:0 and different White Points for example) brings up more decision points that can’t be universally answered.

Thus, one more complication in the road to cinema salvation by Alternative Content. While there are many good arguments that these details are best handled by pros who have experience with permanently set-up and maintained professional tools, the reality is that many of these artists just don’t have the money (or rather, they have time that they are forced by circumstances to value at less per hour.) One recent local film festival worked with a patron who charged a flat 200€ fee for the transfers, while the Venice Film Festival transfers materials gratis (in exchange for publicity, which Qube and D2 have taken advantage of for the last two years.)

There is also a need at cinemas to create and package local commercials or theater policy trailers for insertion into the pre-show of the movies and sport and concerts that they show through their digital projection systems. This might be easily handled in larger cities where there are companies who can make economies of scale work in their favor. But spending thousands getting a DCP made will eat all the profits from a quickly shot local pizza parlor ad. New tools such as the RED Scarlet, the Canon 5D MkII, GoPro or Drift cameras and easy to use editing software make this a nice adjunct to a clever facility…only held up by the expense and ease of creating the DCP.

With this background, we spoke to Terrence, the lead programmer for the OpenDCP project. He is a cinema owner of a 7 theater cinema facility which was one of the first independent complexes in the US to go completely digital. He has had extensive experience in the computer field as well, and it was just this need for making local commercials that got him on the project. After listing some of the features of this new DCP creation system with the Graphical User Interface, we’ll ask our Three Questions.

Features

JPEG2000 encoding from 8/12/16-bit TIFF images
Supports all major frame rates (24,25,30,48,50,60)
Cinema 2K and 4K
MPEG2 MXF
XYZ color space conversion
MXF file creation
SMPTE and MXF Interop
Full 3D support
DCP XML file creation
SMPTE subtitles
Linux/OSX/Windows
Multithreaded for encoding performance
XML Digital signatures
GUI

One last point – Open Source does not necessarily imply free. There is a lot of nuance in just this point, but for example, the EasyDCP system of Fraunhofer also uses tools that follow Open Source standards within its structure, yet it is a highly priced (and highly valued) package. More detail can be found at: GNU, Free Software, and Open Source Software – Linux 101

Hello Terrence. For all the great and required features of the OpenDCP software, what in reality should a user expect as they dive into its use? Without knocking any other package, what advantages and disadvantages will one see when using OpenDCP?

OpenDCP: Let’s continue on the conversation about Open Source tools to illustrate some points. In the current version of the OpenDCP package we use an open source encoder named “openjpeg” that does the work of encoding from the TIFF images to JPEG2000 package. The commercial products can afford to license much faster encoders. Their highend tools might create packages at 15 frames per second (fps) while the OpenDCP packages are converted at 3fps. On long-form projects this can make a significant difference in time. Not quality, of course, and for the short commercial or under 20 minute project this would be an acceptable compromise.

Another advantage that open source projects seem to take better advantage of is the methods of communication with their users. Where commercial entities have to beware of odd statements that live forever on the internet, as well as hackers and spammers and the like, our control issues are not as great and so the OpenDCP user forum can be more open and vibrant. It fits our spirit of cooperation to point to the work of an independent expert in the digital signatures field like Wolfgang Woehl of Filmmuseum Munich whose github digital_cinema_tools social coding site is filled with practical and historical information. He, as a support board monitor, and others of his skill are able to help guide the product and test it in ways that build on the fundamentals of Open Source. People can look through the code and make certain that the standards are kept, and that we don’t do things that commercial entities are often tempted to do.

It isn’t out of the question that we could license a faster JPEG 2000 encoder. We’ve discussed ways to do this on the site – there is a yearly cost of $10,000 to meet. Maybe we could do this with a Pro version, spreading the cost over a number of users. Or maybe we can help spur the OpenJPEG programmers along…anyone out there who is a math genius that wants to help?

DCTools: That’s out of our league, but hopefully there’s someone out there who can apply their genius to the task. How did you decide to take on this OpenDCP task?

OpenDCP: The origins of OpenDCP started in Oct 2010. I had wanted to create a policy trailer for my movie theater. Unfortunately, the cost to have one converted was around $2000 and the cost of the commercial DCP software was in the $5000 range. After some research I came across some people that were attempting to create DCPs using various open source tools. They had success, but the process was a bit involved. It required a half dozen tools, some knowledge of the DCI specifications, compiling of tools. I had some programming experience, so I decided I could take what I had learned and create a tool everyone could use. The first version had a command line interface and it’s feature set grew over a few months. It simplified the process a lot, but I really wanted to add a GUI and last month I released the first GUI version of the tool.

There is certainly a lot of interest in film festivals. A couple have floated the idea of an OpenDCP Film Festival. Unfortunately, I have neither the time or knowledge to plan that sort of thing.

DCTools: There is a great deal of interest toward the inclusion of the hard of hearing and the hearing and visually impaired audience into the great culture known as “Going To The Movies”. Indie producers who I’ve spoken to point out that there are thousands of professional movies shot but only hundreds get finished. Of those, only a small percentage get distribution. So added features like closed captions, narrative tracks and even sub-titles for other markets gets put on the “If List”.

On the other hand, the US Department of Justice will be handing down their directives or rulings soon on how many open and closed caption movies should be played in the commercial cinemas, and the EU is walking toward that path with the recent inclusion of the UN Human Rights documents being used as the basis for inclusion of people’s with handicaps in the marketplace.

How does OpenDCP handle these things, and what else is on your road map?

OpenDCP: Right now, we handle one narrative track per DCP. [DCTools: Many HI/VI equipment manufacturers can switch up to 4 narrative tracks per DCP.] Thus far the typical user hasn’t been doing anything too complex in those regards. OpenDCP will create SMPTE subtitle tracks. But we’ll get there with more options. For example, the GUI currently limits you to one reel per DCP. The command line allows multiple reels and the GUI will as well, just didn’t get done for the first release.

Subtitles are probably the biggest thing people want support for. OpenDCP can handle SMPTE subtitle tracks, but it doesn’t do anything with MXF Interop/Cinecanvas. For my own personal needs, I don’t use subtitles, they are pretty rare in the U.S. However, it seems almost everyone outside the U.S. really needs that support. The problem is that the majority want the Cinecanvas because they mention that SMPTE compliant packages are still not in the field. Most cinemas think that they aren’t going to upgrade their software until InterOp stops working, which is another challenge for SMPTE in general. My issue is that I don’t really want to spend my limited development time implementing features that will be deprecated.

As different packages are usable in the field it seemed like the DCPs that OpenDCP generated wouldn’t play on different sets of equipment all the time. Some media players seemed finicky while others would accept anything. It took several weeks of trying, but it finally worked. It was good because it helped find some slight differences between the MXF Interop and SMPTE packages and flushed out some bugs in my code.

I actually wasn’t even all that aware of how closed caption support in DCPs was handled until a month or so ago. Most of the information I used building OpenDCP came from the DCI 1.2 specification and sort of reverse engineering countless DCPs I had collected from my theater. Then when somebody was having trouble getting a DCP working on the player they were using, they donated a set of SMPTE documents to the project. Reading through the various documents really helped and thats when I learned about the CC stuff.

We hope to have material at the next ISDCF Plugfest. That will hopefully give us more feedback from the professional users.

I’ve gotten feedback from people of all different skill sets that have been able to use OpenDCP to create DCPs. Some have been using it for preshow/commericals, a few are using it for archiving, and independent film makers are quite happy with the results. The current version takes a tiff image sequence and does the jpeg2000 and XYZ color conversion for the picture track. The audio track is created from 24-bit 48/96khz PCM wav files. It supports pretty much supports the entire DCI specification – 3D, 2K/4K, 24, 25, 30, 50, 60fps, digital signatures, etc.

Future features including being able to convert more image types, read directly from video files, image resizing, and simplify the process even more.

Developing OpenDCP has been a great process, first just trying to meet the needs I had as a cinema owner, then really putting my EE degree and programming skills to use. One of the neatest things has been meeting and discussing digital cinema with all kinds of people. I’ve been lucky enough to see some really excellent independent short films and learn so much along the way.

¹ GNU GPL v3

² The OpenDCP author wants to be clear that the project is still considered beta, and that the user should expect some issues depending on different factors. For example, while reading the forum this article’s author noticed that one user had difficulties with an older computer with a slow processor – changing the number of threads in the set-up let the build complete successfully. Thus, the recommendation is to start the DCP process with a small with 5-10 second clip. Get a successful workflow and then do a full conversion.

Connectivity

Thunderbolt FAQ – CNET

March 4, 2011 Like Tangents In The Rain Leave a comment

Its first inclusion in a computer is in Apple’s MacBook Pro line, which refreshed earlier today with Thunderbolt ports across the line (see CNET’s hands-on here). Intel followed up a few hours later with a press conference about the technology, as well as its plans to bring it to computers and devices over the next year or so.

To help readers better understand what the technology is and why it matters, CNET has put together this FAQ.

What is Thunderbolt?
Thunderbolt is Intel’s new input/output technology that promises to bring transfer speeds that exceed what is currently available with USB 3.0, as well as extending that speed across several devices at once. In terms of where you’ll see it, Thunderbolt will appear as a new port on laptops and PCs, as well as on devices that support it.

Taken from the CNET article:
Intel’s Thunderbolt: What you need to know (FAQ) | Cutting Edge – CNET News

Intel Promo with more pictures, and PR from potential OEMs: Thunderbolt™ Technology

The technology itself makes use of existing DisplayPort and PCI-Express data protocols to open up what you can do with a single port into multiple uses and at high speeds. This includes “daisy chaining” up to seven Thunderbolt-equipped devices together, while retaining full speed across all of them at once.

How fast is it?
Thunderbolt currently runs with a top speed of 10Gbps. Since there are two wire pairs, and the system is bidirectional, a single cable can have up to 40Gbps coursing through it at its maximum theoretical capacity (20Gbps upstream and 20Gbps downstream). Intel says that those speeds will one day top 100Gbps in data throughput when it moves from a copper wire to optical fiber. In the interim, copper wire has both speed and cable length limits, keeping cable length at 3 meters or less. The data transfer is also bidirectional, meaning it can both transmit and receive data at the same time, and at its top speed.

During Intel’s press conference about the technology this morning, the company demonstrated it working on a MacBook Pro, pulling four raw, uncompressed 1080p video streams through a Thunderbolt storage array, and feeding into a Thunderbolt-attached display, all the while topping more than 600MBps in its transfer speeds. An earlier test of just file transferring had gotten it up to 800MBps.

To put this in perspective of what’s been available up to this point, that’s twice as fast as the theoretical limit of USB 3.0, 20 times faster than USB 2.0, and 12 times faster than FireWire 800.

Here’s a demo from this morning’s Intel press conference that gives you an idea of what it’s capable of in a video editing and viewing work flow, as well as a file transfer:

When can I get it?
The long and the short of it is that you can get Thunderbolt today, so long as you buy Apple’s MacBook Pro, which is the first laptop to ship with a Thunderbolt port as a standard port across its entire line.

Following this is a good video and pictures. Read the rest of the article: Intel’s Thunderbolt: What you need to know (FAQ) | Cutting Edge – CNET News

The Future Holds...

KODAK Advances Lasers’ March on DCinema

February 24, 2011 Like Tangents In The Rain Leave a comment

The industry group is named Laser Illuminated Projection Association, or LIPA and was co-founded by IMAX and the company they have contracted with to supply laser light engines for their projectors, the New England based Laser Light Engines, plus Sony and according to their press release, “other cinema-industry players”.

Kodak made a statement in October 2010 that said they supported LIPA’s goals, but had already made an application to the FDA for a waiver on their projection design, which they expected soon. Soon has arrived. Following is the press release from Kodak.

Kodak has also said that they are laser system agnostic in their design, and though their demo unit uses Necsel devices (from California), they could also use a system from other companies, including Laser Light Engines. The two companies are a 400 mile (650 kilometer) drive apart.

So, let me guess? What does the public want to know? Ah! Time. This press release states “within two years.” Earlier releases have said, “12-18 months.”

For a concise look at the KODAK system at the time of its first demonstations in October 2010, see:
Large Display Report: KODAK Demonstrates Laser Projector

This magazine is editorially in favor of switching over ASAP. The advantages of an even wider gamut will be a great device for differentiating home entertainment from the cinema experience, and 3D will never look right until it is able to get out of the mud of <10 candelas. Lasers help this because they can not only push more light through the system economically, they can also put a coherent ‘spin’ on the photons. Typically, lasers put out a linear polarization which isn’t quite right for 3D…think about not having to move your head for 2 hours to keep the linear glasses aligned properly with the screen. But circular polarization is possible. It is just one more thing on the research plate, no doubt.

Cost? If a Xenon bulb costs $5,000 and a typical cinema spends that 3 times per year per projector, and if a laser system will last 10 years, that gives us a simple comparison to measure against; $150,000. Lenses for Xenon systems cost on the order of $15,000, while similar spec’d lenses of higher f# will be significantly less. Add savings for personnel costs (and the danger of handling Xenon bulbs) plus the advantages of 10 years of significantly lower air conditioning needs…against…against…hmmm…no one is talking figures for cost just yet.

FDA Greenlights KODAK Laser Projection Technology

ROCHESTER, N.Y., February 24, 2011 – The FDA (Food and Drug Administration) has approved a variance that allows for the sale of KODAK Laser Projector Systems using KODAK Laser Projection Technology to cinema exhibitors without the need for individual site or show operator variances. This is an important step forward in delivering brighter 2D and 3D images that provide higher dynamic range and a wider color gamut to theaters.

“The FDA approval brings KODAK Laser Projection Technology significantly closer to the marketplace and validates the work we’ve done to ensure that this technology is safe and dependable,” says Les Moore, Kodak’s chief operating officer for Digital Cinema. “In addition to allowing the sale of KODAK Laser Projector Systems using KODAK Laser Projection Technology, the FDA variance serves as a template to be followed by manufacturers that we license to incorporate this new laser technology.”

Typically, digital projection systems using high power lasers fall under the definition of a “demonstration laser” and must follow existing regulations for conventional laser projectors, such as those used in laser light show displays. Kodak has been working in conjunction with laser safety consultants and the FDA to address potential safety issues. The unique optical design of KODAK Laser Projection Technology manages the projector output so that it can be considered to be similar to conventional Xenon projection systems. The FDA variance allows the sale of KODAK Laser Projector Systems with KODAK Laser Projection Technology and theater/show configurations incorporating them.

KODAK Laser Projection Technology promises to bring vastly improved image quality to theater screens, including significantly brighter 3D viewing, and to dramatically reduce costs to digital projection in cinemas through the innovative use of long-life lasers, lower-cost optics and more efficient energy usage. Kodak introduced its laser technology in September 2010. The technology has been received enthusiastically by exhibitors, manufacturers, studios and viewers who have seen the demonstrations.

Moore notes that KODAK Laser Projection Technology is a key ingredient to potential improvements in digital cinema picture quality for both filmmakers and movie-goers. “This laser technology is a significant breakthrough that promises to have a positive ripple effect throughout the cinema world,” adds Moore. “We at Kodak have always endeavored to provide filmmakers with the best possible tools with which to tell their stories. That philosophy has served us well for more than a century, and we will continue nurturing that partnership long into the future.”

Kodak is in discussions to license this advanced technology, with an eye toward marketplace implementation within the next two years.

For more information, visit http://www.kodak.com/go/laserprojection.

About Entertainment Imaging

Kodak’s Entertainment Imaging Division is the world-class leader in providing film, digital and hybrid motion imaging products, services, and technology for the professional motion picture and exhibition industries. For more information, visit:

www.kodak.com/go/motion.

Twitter at @Kodak_ShootFilm.

Media Contacts:

Sally Christgau/Lisa Muldowney

760-438-5250

[email protected] / [email protected]

Connectivity

10 Rules When Buying a DCinema Projector

January 24, 2011 Like Tangents In The Rain Leave a comment

In this instance, some engineers at Barco go through the details of what to consider when deciding on which projector to get. Naturally, they point out what they consider as the advantages of the Barco projectors, but with this knowledge one can ask intelligent questions and interpret intelligent answers from other vendors.

What follows is a white paper that can be read here or downloaded from the attachment link below.

What to look for when buying a digital cinema projector?

10 Golden Rules to remember

When considering a new digital cinema projector, image quality, reliability, uptime and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) would seem to be the most obvious criteria. And with good reason. After all, stunning your audience with a crisp and bright picture at every show, while not having to charge an arm and a leg are of vital importance in cinema. But how can you recognize products that rank high on all these criteria? And what other parameters are relevant for your theater?

Below, we have listed 10 golden rules to help you make a decision when investing in digital cinema projection equipment.

Table of contents

DCI compliance: a no-brainer?

Total cost of ownership: look at the complete picture

Uptime: 100% is NOT the Holy Grail

Image quality: the magical mix of brightness, contrast and resolution

Engine cooling and sealing: protecting the heart of your projector

Choose a projector that best suits your auditorium

Remote monitoring: you don’t need to be in the theater to know it is running well

Consumables and peripherals: freedom of choice to best suit your needs

Serviceability and ease of use

There’s no business like cinema business – find a strategic partner that understands your needs

Conclusion

1. DCI compliance: a no-brainer?

The Digital Cinema Initiatives (DCI) is a joint venture of major motion picture studios, formed to establish a standard architecture for digital cinema systems. DCI authored the “Digital Cinema System Specification”, commonly referred to as the “DCI Specification”.

The specification establishes standards for the presentation environment (such as ambient light levels, pixel aspect and shape, image luminance, white point chromaticity) as well as the specifics of content protection, encryption, and forensic marking.

This specification is generally accepted as THE standard for the digital projection of features films. Official cinema content –from the major Hollywood studios– can only be played using equipment that has been certified to comply with the DCI Specification. Only a limited number of projector models have achieved this certification.

It may seem like a no-brainer, but the first thing to consider when buying a digital cinema projector is to verify whether the model you selected is DCI compliant. Using equipment that does not have this compliance certification will cause the protection mechanism to kick-in when you try to play your feature film. No show. An exhaustive and up-to-date list of certified projectors can be found on the official website of the DCI: www.dcimovies.com.

2. Total cost of ownership: look at the complete picture

Setting up a fully equipped digital cinema projection booth is a significant investment for many exhibitors. Faced with the upfront costs, it is easy to overlook the complete picture. This means that not only the investment in equipment should be assessed, but also the costs of operating that equipment over its complete lifetime. Taking this holistic approach can generate savings that are significantly higher than the initial investment cost.

The major contribution to operational cost comes from the high power lamps that drive the projectors. In order to achieve the light levels defined by the DCI Specification (see above), lamp light sources from 2kW to 7kW are used in digital projectors. These Xenon bulbs typically have a warranty lifetime of 2500Hrs to 500Hrs. This means that there are two major contributions to the operational costs of these lamps (and projectors):

Replacement cost: this is the purchase cost of new lamps, replacing the lamps in the field that have reached their warranty lifetime (or that have broken down before this time).
Running cost: is the cost of electricity, used to power the projector-lamp combination. Since in state-of-the-art projectors, the lamp takes up more than 80% of the power consumption, it is clear that it also constitutes the major source of running costs.

When buying a projector and/or lamp technology that comes with it, it is important to examine the complete cost, resulting from the two contributions mentioned above. Some manufacturers promote very high efficiency lamps, claiming that these produce more light using less power. This only impacts the running cost. However, these lamps also have a significantly lower lifetime and come at a higher cost, negatively impacting the replacement cost. Other manufacturers support using lamps similar to those applied in analog (35mm) projection. These lamps do have a longer lifetime (which has a positive impact on replacement cost), yet they require more power to achieve the same brightness (which has a negative impact on running cost). All in all, these two alternative lamp types have a higher TCO than standard short arc lamps (optimized for digital cinema projection). Remember: it is important to look at the complete picture. By selecting the best lamp technology you can achieve direct savings that will offset more than your initial investment cost.

Still, the complete TCO picture doesn’t stop at lamp costs. Operating a digital cinema projector also includes replacing air filters, learning how to use the interaction software, cooling your projection booth… Even though their contribution to Total Cost of Ownership may seem harder to quantify, their impact can be significant. As regards air filters, for example, two types are commonly used. Most brands use paper filters (so-called HEPA filters) to protect the internals of the projector against dust intrusion. Barco has a patented sealed engine design, which allows the use of metal filters. The link with TCO can be established in the fact that paper filters have to be thrown away and replaced when they are clogged with dirt and dust, while metal filters can be cleaned —even with just water— and re-used. At a cost of more than €100 per paper filter and a bi-annual replacement, the total contribution of filter cost to TCO can quickly add up to several thousands of dollars.

The same is true for the other contributions mentioned above. More detail can be found in our dedicated white paper on TCO or supplied on request.

3. Uptime: 100% is NOT the Holy Grail

For an exhibitor, there’s nothing worse than a missed show. Not only does the cost of refunding ticket hurt your revenue, the price you pay for a blemished image is probably much higher. The only way to prevent black screens is to make sure your projection equipment achieves 100% uptime. You might think that this is the unachievable Holy Grail of exhibition, since all components have a finite lifespan and all lamps are rated for a given lifetime (see above). How realistic achieving this perceived unattainable goal actually is may therefore come as a surprise to you.

In state-of-the-art digital projectors, maximum uptime is achieved in two ways:

Prevention: keeping the patient healthy is always the best course of action. In projection, keeping the optical chip (the heart of your projector) cool is an important first step. Barco runs its chips at an operating temperature 2°C below that of competitors. As a result, this critical component has a 30% longer lifetime. Another important contribution to maximum uptime is projector cleanliness. The exhibitor can impact this by keeping the projection booth as dust-free as possible; but the manufacturer’s filter design remains the most critical aspect. For more information on Barco’s patented sealed engine and the difference between paper and metal air filters, please see above.

Finally, prevention can come from projector intelligence as well. State-of-the-art devices are network-enabled and can send remote messages to a central management system. Some of these messages contain preventive maintenance alerts, informing the exhibitor that a service intervention should be performed before an intrusive alarm occurs. Barco projectors monitor more than 500 internal parameters and e.g. send notifications when lamp runtime is reaching the warranty lifetime.

Fast and easy correction: if something does go wrong, resolving the issue as quickly and smoothly as possible is crucial, preferably without the patrons in the auditorium noticing anything. A way to facilitate such an intervention is to have a projector built on a modular architecture. In such a design, the projector’s building blocks are easily accessible from the side and can be replaced quickly without the need for special tools or training. Truly modular projectors make switching components in-between shows possible (or in such a short timeframe that ticket refunding is not necessary if the show is interrupted). Barco has even extended this modularity to the lamps by being the only manufacturer to offer an easily replaceable lamp housing: not only does this format protect the projector’s interior in case of lamp explosion, it also allows the local technician close to the projector to replace the lamp in the shortest possible time.

4. Image quality: the magical mix of brightness, contrast and resolution

Once you have your DCI compliant projector, which is economical to run at 100% uptime… you want to be sure you get the best possible image on your screen. Unfortunately, no single metric can quantify image quality. However, three major factors contribute to everyone’s perception of image quality:

Brightness: this is quantified as the luminance (in cd/m² or fL) on the screen, which is related to the brightness (in lumens) of the projector. The DCI Specification sets a minimum luminance (both for 2D and 3D). Given the impact of the lamp/projector-combination on TCO (see above), it is important to find a setup that best matches your screen size. In this respect, Barco’s DP2K family of six projector models offers you more than 20 lamp/projector combinations to optimally fit the needs of your auditorium. Opting for on-screen brightness far beyond the DCI Specification is not necessary: the dimmed environment of cinema theaters and the wide color gamut of DCI compliant projectors do not require higher brightness. You would only blind your audience with the additional luminance.

Don’t forget, the lamp is only the initial source of the light and brightness. How efficiently you can transport this light from your lamp to your screen defines the actual setup. The state-of-the-art design, development and manufacturing of the projectors impact this setup greatly. A highly efficient projector (quantified in lm/W) needs a smaller lamp to achieve the same on-screen brightness; again helping you keep your TCO under control.

Contrast ratio: is defined as the ratio between the brightest possible output (white) and the darkest possible output (black). As opposed to brightness, more is better when it comes to contrast ratio. The human eye can adapt to a very high range of light levels; the better you can fill up this range, the more natural the image will look. Best-in-class projectors go beyond the DCI Specification, e.g. by applying intelligent coatings on the optics that prevent the occurrence of scattered light in the projector.
Resolution: this is the total pixel count on the screen. It is defined by both the resolution of the content that is put in and the resolution that the projector can handle. The minimum of these two values defines the on-screen resolution. It is typically quantified by the amount of columns in the image (e.g. “2K” for 2048 columns or “4K” for 4096 columns). Note that a 4K image actually has four times the amount of pixels compared to a 2K image. In the race for increased resolution, the acuity of the human visual system is a defining factor. Below a certain feature size (in cinema, this is the pixel size), a human eye cannot perceive additional detail anymore. This is important when comparing 2K to 4K: the highest resolution only makes sense on your premium screens. Beware when switching from 2D to 3D: some technologies do not maintain the minimum 2K resolution when projecting in 3D mode.

So, when trying to assess the image quality of the projector you’re considering, it is important to look at these three parameters. A bright projector model allows you to serve a bigger screen at a lower cost; a wide choice of models helps you optimize matching the projector to your screen. As for resolution: use 4K wisely for you premium screens.

5. Engine cooling and sealing: protecting the heart of your projector

Like in your car, the engine driving the projector constitutes the heart of the entire device. It contains the most precious components, the high resolution chips that actually form the image. In Barco, Christie and NEC devices this chip is based on DLP technology from TI. Sony uses proprietary LCoS technology. Being such a crucial component, it is important to protect it against any damages.

One form of damage can come from small —dust— particles entering the engine and interfering with the microscopic components of the chip. All projectors use air filters to minimize dust; Barco has a patented sealed light engine which takes this protection to yet another level.

Another form of damage, over a longer period of time, occurs as a result of the impact of heat on the chip’s materials. LCoS devices contain liquid crystal material, which is an organic substance. This means that a yellowing effect occurs as the chip is subjected to the light and thermal load of digital projection. This has an impact on the efficiency and color accuracy. DLP chips inherently have a longer lifespan, but still need cooling when used in the high-power environment of a DC projector. To show how important this cooling is, Barco has succeeded in running its chip at a temperature 2°C lower than that of its competitors, thus achieving a 30% improvement in the chip’s lifetime!

So, when choosing your projector, remember that you will be using it over many years. An intelligent design that combines dust prevention and state-of-the-art cooling will give you worry-free operation over the life of your equipment.

6. Choose a projector that best suits your auditorium

We mentioned above why it is important to optimize your TCO by selecting a projector/lamp combination that best fits your screen. Also from the perspective of investment cost, it makes more sense to have a wide choice of models so that projector and screen can be matched optimally. Let’s say a certain brand only sells one model; then you would have to put that same model in all your auditoria, irrespective of their size. Since this single model would typically be built to cover many brightness ranges, its output is bound to be excessive on your smallest screens. You would have to run it using a small lamp, not taking full advantage of the investment you made. There are six models in Barco’s family of DP2K projectors; this makes it possible for you to optimize your investment, adapting it to the variation and complexity in screen sizes that are common place in every theater. This high granularity makes sure that every projection booth contains the projector that best fits its specifications.

7. Remote monitoring: you don’t need to be in the theater to know it is running well

As mentioned above, a state-of-the-art digital cinema projector is an intelligent device that monitors its internal parameters and health status. Furthermore, it can share this data with the outside world. Barco projectors monitor more than 500 internal parameters and make these accessible through a protocol that runs over standard network connections. In its most basic format, this enables centralized control and monitoring of projectors across the theater.

But monitoring functions do not stop there: there are tools to distribute the projector parameters across global networks (i.e. the Internet) and set up centralized access and control over multiple theaters. This enables hooking up your equipment to a remote helpdesk for example. Another option is to run business intelligence and reporting tools on the collected data and perform preventive maintenance, budget estimates, etc.

With these connectivity and remote monitoring features, long gone are the days of analog projection: now you no longer have to be in your theater to know it is running well. When buying a DC projector today, keep in mind that the connectivity is an enabler for many services that are valuable to your theater.

8. Consumables and peripherals: freedom of choice to best suit your needs

A projector is not a stand-alone device. It uses its internal and peripheral components to generate the high quality on-screen image you expect. Typical internal components are the high power lamps and the 3D system. Typical peripheral components are the digital cinema server or alternative content scaler which provides the inputs.

It is important to know that no single brand supplies all of these components. Some brands focus on lamps (e.g. Osram, Ushio, Philips), while others focus on 3D technology (e.g. RealD, Dolby, MasterImage, Xpand). The choices and combinations in the setup of projector components and peripherals are almost infinite. When selecting you projector, the central node in this setup, it is important to select a brand that allows you to choose your preferred vendor and system, based on your own taste and best available deals.

Some projector manufacturers are only compatible with one type of 3D system, thus forcing you into a limited screen selection and pricing structure. Other manufacturers push one brand of lamps, reducing your ability to compare and negotiate between different suppliers.

Keep in mind that for many of these additional components there is no right or wrong choice to be made and much depends on the personal preference of the exhibitor. A projector manufacturer who understands this provides objective and open advice without pushing you into a model that’s not the best match for you.

9. Serviceability and ease of use

For every type of high-end electronics, you have to perform a minimal amount of regular maintenance tasks in order to enjoy your valuable equipment as long as possible. The same is true for DC projectors where these tasks involve cleaning filters, replacing cooling liquid, updating software… If you are operating multiple theaters and projectors, your technicians will appreciate not having to learn many different service manuals in order to perform these regular interventions.

When it comes to hardware related actions, be sure to check the following when analyzing the serviceability of your projector:

Modularity: How easy is it to access and swap the different —internal— parts of the projector? Do you need special training and tools?
Communality of spare parts: How big is the list of parts you need to familiarize yourself with and keep in stock? How fast and easily can you swap parts from one model to another?

When it comes to interacting with the projector through its software (either for maintenance or regular use), be sure to check:

Ease of learning: Does the software have a simple clear GUI? Is the GUI consistent over different models and generations?
Ease of use: Can you easily define and program presets? Does the software support different languages? Does the software support multi-projector setups, through remote control (see above), projector cloning, etc.?
Ease of diagnostics: Does the software support you in quickly finding and solving any issues? Does it support preventive tools for early alerts?

10. There’s no business like cinema business – find a strategic partner that understands your needs

Don’t forget: when you are choosing a cinema projector, you are also choosing a partner for a long-term collaboration. Often, what you are selecting is also a service partner that establishes a close collaboration with you and your projector supplier. Cinema is a global business that does not stop working at the weekend and after 5 pm. Not every supplier understands these specific needs. The job is not finished once the equipment is delivered and installed in your projection booth. You are entitled to the latest software updates; your personnel should receive hands-on training; a professional helpdesk should be on-call to solve your requests.

When comparing projector brands, be sure to also compare these after-sales support issues. A service team should be experienced in the business, locally present to service the equipment while having access to the most up-to-date tools. Whether this team is employed by your equipment supplier or by a dedicated service partner does not matter: the most important thing is that you receive the best possible service!

Be sure to select a partner that has sufficient focus (not too large) and bandwidth (not too small) to support your business.

11. Conclusion

We hope this White Paper will help you select the digital cinema projector that best suits your needs and preferences. Even though digitization of your theater may be very disruptive, there is no reason for it to be intrusive. The perfect image quality at every show and flexible programming of feature films and alternative content will open up new opportunities for revenue streams. However, this does not mean you should be overwhelmed with complex technology. In fact, best-in-class digital projectors were built to make your life easier. So, how can you identify a best-in-class projector? We hope this White Paper will guide you in doing just that.

Dr. Ir. Tom Bert
Product Marketing Manager
Barco

[email protected]

Wim Buyens
Vice President Digital Cinema
Barco

[email protected]

BARCO n.v., Kortrijk, Belgium

Connectivity

Optical Efficiency in Digital Cinema Projectors

January 23, 2011 Like Tangents In The Rain Leave a comment

What isn’t compared is the energy and materials that go into making a remarkably simple film projector against a remarkably complex digital projector, plus the energy and materials that are needed to create the media server and the local central storage, plus the data farms that create and store the movies in the distribution chain, plus the network operation centers that oversee their constant quality and security. Like projectors, data centers use an astounding amount of energy to keep the air cool and what it takes to constantly keep the disks moving and processors humming.

With just a little thought, one can make a long list of data centers in the digital cinema chain: at the animation studios, at each post-production house, at each specialist render farm, at the sites which create the master Digital Cinema Distribution Master (DCDM), and those facilities that create each separately keyed Digital Cinema Package (DCP).

The efficiency of a digital cinema projector was the topic of a side-discussion at a recent technical meeting, involving a number of engineers who have been intimately involved in the digital cinema evolution. There was only conjectured and estimations based upon hearsay. It was surprising. It came up again on an online chat, where engineers who are not centimeters deep/kilometers wide (as is your author), also didn’t have an answer. It was also part of the discussion in our article:
3Questions – Laser Light Engines

So it is a pleasant and interesting relief to be able to present this document from Barco on the subject. Created by Barco Product Marketing Manager Tom Bert, it lends detail into some of the nuance of optical efficiency inside a digital cinema projector.

Optical efficiency in Digital Cinema projectors

How to get as much light as possible from your lamp onto your screen?

1 Introduction

In this article, we want to discuss everything that has an impact on how much light falls onto the screen… except for the lamp. We will have a close look at all the components that influence parameters such as image quality, total cost of ownership and serviceability.

It is our goal to clarify the impact of product design, craftsmanship and manufacturing on projector performance. We want to provide you an inside view on what’s under the hood of the projector and how it really impacts performance.

We hope that, after reading this article, you better understand how a digital cinema projector works and what contributes to the stunning performance of these state-of-the-art devices.

2. The life of Ray

Digital Cinema projection is all about getting the light from your lamp onto your screen. In this paragraph, we will discuss the different impacting parameters on a ray of light leaving the lamp. We will try to do this in a sequential approach, following the build-up of the light path of your digital cinema projector.

The image below gives an overview of the components involved:

2.1 Reflector

The reflector is an elliptical or parabolic structure that is placed around the lamp, in order to capture as much light as possible from the lamp and send it into the optical path of the projector. An important parameter is the surface roughness of the reflector: high end devices use perfectly smooth reflector materials, while others use processing techniques that introduce small imperfections. This can have an impact of as much as 15% on the reflector efficiency.

Important to remember is that a badly designed and manufactured reflector can destroy all of the light concentration that comes from using short arc lamps. A well designed reflector also corresponds with the heat generation and dissipation capacity of the projector.

2.2 Filters

After being captured and sent into the optical path by the reflector, the light is filtered. First it goes through a UV-filter and later on through an IR-filter. These filters get rid of that part of the light that can damage the interior of the projector and have in this way a huge impact on the projector lifetime. Filtering out too much of the spectrum of your light, means you will have to compensate later on, leading to a lower overall optical efficiency. However, it is important to know that these filters work far from the sweet spot of the visible light in the spectrum. This means that their influence on image quality is low. Their impact on lifetime is much more important.

2.3 Optical engine

After being filtered from the dangerous components in the spectrum, the light enters the actual optical engine of the projector. This engine contains passive (light rod, lenses and prism) and active (chip) components. At the interfaces of these components coating materials are applied to improve performance.

2.3.1 Passive optical components

The optical engine contains relay lenses and a light rod to transport and spread out the light. The materials that these components are made off, have an impact on the performance. Badly designed engines use materials that absorb too much of the short wavelength (blue) light. This causes them to turn yellow (cfr. you get a sunburn when you forget to put on your sunblock) or even melt! It is clear that this has a major impact on image quality.

It also defines the energetic capacity of your projector, this is the amount of light you can send through. When not designed to transmit the high load that bright projectors bring, the material can break. The brightest digital cinema projectors, like Barco’s DP2K-32B, were specifically designed to carry the load that comes with projecting more than 32,000 lumens.

2.3.2 Active optical components

In digital cinema, two technologies are used for the active chip: DLP™ (from Texas Instruments, which has ~90% market share) and LCoS (from Sony, which has ~10% market share). A digital cinema projector contains three of these chips, one for each color channel (red, green and blue). This is by far the most important component of your digital cinema projector, also from an optical efficiency viewpoint. Its compact size and accurate angular performance makes it the central component that defines the design of all other optics.

For DLP™ technology, the overall optical efficiency of the chip is defined by a combination of:

The chip size: it is easier to “aim” light on a bigger chip than on a smaller chip. This is one of the reasons why projectors using the 1.2” DLP Cinema® chip have a 10% higher efficiency compared to those with the 0.98” DLP Cinema® chip. For that same reason, 4k projectors with a 1.38” DLP cinema® chip will have a higher optical efficiency than those using the 1.2” DLP Cinema® chip.
The fill factor: the fraction of the surface that is active and reflects the light.
The surface reflectivity: the amount of light that bounces back from each individual mirror. This is defined by the maturity of the manufacturing process and is close to the maximum achievable value for DLP™.
Diffraction: when hitting structures with a small features size, such as DLP™-mirrors, a small portion of the light is always diffracted (sent off in non-perpendicular angles). As technology miniaturizes, it will become more important to manage this aspect.

With LCoS projection technology, other parameters come into play, like the inefficiencies related to using polarized light. All this leads to DLP™-based digital cinema projection yielding higher efficiencies than LCoS-based projection.

To maximize the chips’ lifetime and maintain a high image quality over time, it is crucial to keep them away from dust. Sealed engines, as patented by Barco, keep the chip surface clean and help avoid scattered light and spots on the screen.

2.3.3 Coating

Two types of surface coating are typically used on the optical materials:

Anti-reflection (AR) coatings: these minimize the light being bounced off the optical materials and maximize the light being injected in and transmitted through the engine. A well designed engine uses these AR-coatings wisely and can achieve a transmittance of more than 99% through the passive optical components. The avoidance of reflection also reduces the amount of the scattered light in the engine, which has a positive impact on contrast ratio.

Be aware: any small dust particles on the interface surfaces undo the benefits of using AR-coatings. They also lead to dark spots or zones on screen. That is one of the reasons why the sealed engine design, as patented by Barco, is so important.

Color separation coatings: these are used in the heart of the light engine (the prism) to separate the incoming light into the separate red, green and blue channels that are sent to the 3 different chips. As the name indicates, the coatings have to provide a clear separation between the different parts of the spectrum. Just like you need a sharp knife to have a clean cut, you need a sharp filter to have a good spectral separation. This so-called cut-off of the filter has improved significantly of the last years by improved manufacturing techniques. High-end devices use filters with a sharp cut-off, leading to better color separation. This has impact on optical efficiency and image quality.

2.4 Color calibration

The DCI (Digital Cinema Initiative) standard emphasizes (amongst other things) the white point and color gamut of the image on the screen. These parameters do not 100% match the output of an uncalibrated projector (one where you build in the components, not tune or tweak them and power it up). Achieving the color points set by the DCI specification, means you have to slightly compromise on light output. This has an impact on optical efficiency of 5-10%.

2.5 Projection lens

The final component the light ray goes through before leaving the projector is the projection lens. In order to achieve the high level of focus that we know in digital cinema (and from the distances typical in theatre environments), this has to be a piece of optical top design. While we call it the projection lens, it is actually built up of multiple small lenses, each contributing to the overall performance. Like the other passive optical components described above, lens design also depends largely on choice of materials and careful coating of interfaces. State-of-the-art lenses yield an overall efficiency of about 85%.

2.6 Beyond the projector

Most people neglect the impact of parameters that influence the light after it has left the projector. This can go from dirty porthole windows to dirty screens (with low or high gain). Now that you understand what design and work goes into getting the most out of your projector, you should appreciate what a waste it is to loose your light on dirty material.

3 Putting it into numbers

In order to objectively quantify this, we typically use the unit lumen per watt (lm/W): the light output (in lumens) divided by the electrical power input (in watt). This unit helps taking a holistic approach, making it possible to compare across technologies and across brands.

A typical digital cinema lamp (only the lamp!) achieves 40-50lm/W. A typical digital cinema projector (everything described above + lamp) achieves 4-5 lm/W. This means that all the contributions we discussed before yield on average an optical efficiency of 10%!

4 Conclusion

Many factors influence the optical performance of your projector. Even more, we hope you understand that designing a projector is an art as well as a science. It takes know-how and experience in optics, electronics, mechanics and, cooling techniques to design a top class projector.

When selecting your projector, be sure to inquire on how the supplier took into account these aspects. Choosing a brand that cares for all of them will make your projector a high-quality, high-performance and safe choice for the future!

Dr. Ir. Tom Bert
Product Marketing Manager

Based on the inputs from: Rik Defever, Peter Janssens, Nico Coulier

Barco Digital Cinema

Noordlaan 5
8500 Kortrijk
Belgium

The Future Holds...

Iosono Surround Sound – a perfect companion to 3D releases?

January 19, 2011 Like Tangents In The Rain Leave a comment

Having been programmed with the actual dimensions of the replay space, and number of available playback sources, the Iosono decoder outputs audio signals tailored for the installation-specific loudspeaker channels. The result has been described as an ‘acoustic hologram.’

‘While it is possible to create a fairly realistic sense of acoustic space with conventional surround-sound technology,’ concedes Brian Slack, Iosono’s SVP of Studio Technologies, ‘there is one major drawback – the mix requires that the listener sits in the so-called ‘sweet spot.’ Outside of that, any sound will be perceived to originate only from a very general direction.’

Read the rest of this fine Mel Lambert/ProAudio Asia article at:
The art of mixing motion pictures – Pro Audio Central

In fact, this is part 2 of article:
As 3D conquers popular cinema, how are audio playback formats being developed to match?

The Future Holds...

3Questions – Laser Light Engines

January 6, 2011 Like Tangents In The Rain Leave a comment

As we understand it, the replacement of the Xenon bulb with lasers makes a better overall match to the etendue limits of the chip. By their nature, lasers have a very small emission area and a very narrow emission angle. Therefore, they can use less power to put more light at the proper etendue angles of the chip, and can therefore allow the chip to put more light through the projector’s lens. They also allow the use of lenses with higher f#, which in the real world means less expensive lenses.

The most notorious problem with lasers thus far is described as “speckle”, due in large part to the extreme narrow band of color that the laser emits. This speckle is known to cause not only color distortions, but unless reduced below obvious levels can also cause fatigue and even nausea and headaches. Lasers also require active temperature stabilization which in many cases requires a lot of power.

Against this background, we introduce and thank Bill Beck for this opportunity to ask 3Questions.

Bill Beck is a founder of Laser Light Engines Inc., based in southern New Hampshire near the famous R&D centers of Boston (MIT, Harvard, BU Photonics). Their website is polite but also light on detail – one suspects that they were in research mode with little to say, then exploded into development mode and have been too busy to say much.

Recent news items have announced a relatively large infusion of capital, both from typical venture capital sources, and also from the IMAX Corporation to develop a laser light source for their digital projectors. Secondly, they have helped found an industry group with Sony, IMAX and others – Laser Illuminated Projection Association (LIPA) – to help regulatory agencies differentiate the established needs of protecting the public who watch laser-light shows (and which require FDA exemptions for each show) from what they are hoping will be a new category called “laser-illuminated projection”. There is also word of another industry association that is trying to pin down how to quantify speckle: how to measure and what it does.

Separately, Sony has announced their research and development of laser engines (links below) and there are rumors of assistance from a French company which might imply that their development is not as advanced as the Sony website seems to indicate. Kodak also showed their first versions of a laser system for digital cinema which they speak of as being two years away from application.

Q1: We understand that the initial Laser Light Engine concept is to supply a module that replaces the Xenon light engine. Would that include replacing the optical block of condenser lenses and the prism?

Bill Beck: We see this as a multi-step process. In the future, there won’t be a need for a condenser and splitter as our laser makes narrow band RGB which could easily be delivered directly to the chips. But the optical block of the typical projector, which includes these items, is not part of the module that we can easily modify after the fact. We conceive that our first product offerings will be packages, adapted for each brand and model, which will work with existing optical blocks. It will be a one-time replacement of the lamp and reflector housing that that won’t require a great deal of customer difficulty.

Q2) The optical block is an expensive part of a projector, and your lasers must have costs associated compared to a bulb and the reflective surfaces they replace. Where is the savings?

A2) As you know, the human visual system responds to a very narrow band of wavelengths, and in that band, to some frequencies more than others. The typical xenon bulb is quite efficient compared to other choices. For example, they are quite white balanced. But they still generate significant amounts of infrared and ultraviolet light, which is all wasted energy (typically, ~95% of the energy created) and which requires special designs to eliminate both the heat and the O3 (ozone) created.

And, when you think about it, the design of RGB laser systems won’t require all the interband light between the frequencies needed to mix colors – more wasted light. Plus, the basic laws of physics apply, such that the light is incredibly bright at the arc point, but the power decreases inversely proportional at the square of the distance. By the time the light gets bounced around and focused to the very narrow slit cone the chip can accept, an incredible amount of the light is wasted and the energy used to create it is for naught.

So, yes. In comparison, it takes significant power to create the laser light, but we can generate just to amounts that we need, at the frequencies that we need, and supply it to the chip at the angle that it needs. This allows us to bring an exact ratio of power (which isn’t equal amounts of R and G and B by the way) at the specific frequencies we choose (615/546/455 nanometers.)

The nature of high pressure bulbs (25 atmospheres in an IMAX bulb) also requires them to be replaced quite often, often before their time – we’re talking 100’s, not 1000’s of hours of use. At 5 movie showings a day, 2 hours each, a thousand hours can be reached in 3 months. Because the special glass, and coatings on the glass, get bombarded with such high amounts of energy they become brittle – an exploding bulb can cause 10’s of thousands in damage. They are not inexpensive, so exhibitors have to turn them on and off between each show. Still, a single high duty-cycle projector might use 10,000 dollars worth of bulbs per year, or more.

While the first generation units won’t have all the power consumption reduction optimized, we estimate that we will ultimately get 2X the light to the screen for the same power consumption, without considering the reduced requirements for AC pulling heat away (which is not insignificant.)

Finally, and also not insignificant, our tests show that the system can use high f# laser input and achieve 4000:1 sequential contrast with DLP and 3300:1 with LCOS. With the appropriate f# projection lens, the contrast ratio could go even higher.

It is premature for us to speak about projected pricing for our systems. But even apart from direct costs, we feel that offering a constant source of more energy efficient light, which won’t required a projectionist to suit up in full-body protective clothing every 3 months, will bring advantages in every column.

Q3) It is hard to decide on the third question. Lumens per watt of RGB power, input v output to the screen, or how you got the speckle out, or whether you mean all the speckle or just enough that we don’t notice…or should we ask about what you imply about this multi-step evolution, or what this means for less expensive lenses or what the implications are for 3D, both for more light and, for example, we understand that lasers can, by their nature, coherently spin photons in one direction then another, obviating the need for expensive 3D solutions external to the projector. Please take your pick, but please keep it simple. It took me 20 hours of research just to understand etendue.

A3) Yes, the light people do speak in tongues sometimes. The same effect will often have a different name depending on if you are looking from the source point or if you are looking from the receipt point. I’m an optical fibre guy myself, so I’ll start with our concept and try to keep it in one language.

We speak in terms of lumens per beamliine. In the first system that we propose there can be up to 7 beamlines, each with about 30,000 lumens coming out, which combined, that is about 200,000 lumens going toward the chip and getting 60-100,000 lumens out. Depending on the projector efficiency, that is at least 2 times and approaching 3 times the brightness of a big (6Kw) Xenon lamp.

Our research shows that because of the low etendue of the source, we can keep scaling up, which has been a problem for digital cinema. As you alluded, lamp technology could not scale much further. Even with larger chip sizes, there was only minimal brightness gain in the system. With the ability to further cool the chips, we can foresee putting 3 times the light through each optical cable – that’s about 80k lumens per beamline; about 250 optical watts of white balanced of RGB light to the projector. Looking at this another way, that is about 5 times brighter than the brightest Xenon powered digital projector. [Editor’s note: Wow! Bill Beck’s note: Again, that will require not insignificant work to keep the chips cool.]

As far as alternating polarization of the photons pre-chip, that is another benefit of lasers, and the implications are huge…but it will take some work with the chip engineers. That subject can take up 3Questions on its own.

Links:

Sony Insider » The Science Of The Laser Projector

Sony Develops Highly Efficient RGB Laser Light Source Module for Large Screen Projectors

Sony Insider » Sony Details New RGB Laser Light Source Module For Projectors

Kodak Laser_Projection_Technology; Large Display Report article.pdf

KODAK Advances Lasers’ March on DCinema

Display Daily » Blog Archive » News on the Laser Cinema Front

The Future Holds...

DCI Talks NIST

November 17, 2010 Like Tangents In The Rain Leave a comment

There are many FIPS standards, since they are the codification for the use of all non-military computers allowed by the US government, which spans many fields. The security standards referenced by SMPTE and the DCI group are the 140 series which were passed in May of 2001 known as 140-2. There are four levels defined in this series beginning with Level 1, ascending with higher components of physical security to Level 4. Level 2 defines physical tamper evidence and role-based authentication, Level 3 adds tamper resistance, identity authentication and different physical and logical separations between different interfaces as data goes between them, complicated with security going back and forth. Level 4 adds more physical security, and focuses on attacks coming from the environment such as Side Channel and Cache attacks.

Currently, Digital Cinema uses Level 3 of FIPS-2. But FIPS has begun the final steps of their process to supersede FIPS-2 with FIPS-3, expected to be finalized for implementation in 2011 or 2012. DCI specifications (and SMPTE and ISO (the International Standards Organization which incorporated the DCinema SMPTE standards note for note) require that DCI Compliant equipment move with the current FIPS standard. What came as a surprise though was an “Annex A” that was changed in advance of FIPS-3 which changed 3 salient points of the way that keys are utilized in the process.

There has been a DCI statement recently that allows a “grandfathering” of equipment that has passed compliance under the “old” rules. (Compliance Test Plan Change Policy Statement) But manufacturers are still preparing equipment for compliance that will not make it under the old rules. As of now there are several manufacturers of projectors who have passed through the DCI Compliance process, but there are no servers (though some have FIPS compliance already.)

Michael Karagosian of MKPE Consulting points out:

A surprise was introduced in January of this year when NIST changed Annex A of FIPS 140-2, the NIST specification for which DCI currently requires compliance. The transition period for this revision is taking place right now, in this calendar year. NIST says that after December 31 of 2010, it will no longer accept test results from products that comply with the older version of FIPS 140-2.

There are some notable exceptions to this deadline that benefit the digital cinema community. But one very significant issue remains regarding dual use of the asymmetrical key-pair in the media block, for which the December 31 deadline is still intact. The primary use of the media block key-pair is to encrypt and decrypt the KDM. But the DCI spec calls for other uses of this key-pair, as well. The dilemma presented by FIPS 140-2 is discussed in my report in the September issue of the SMPTE Journal, which is online at http://mkpe.com/report/.

To summarize the problem: SMPTE 430-5, one of the standards that establishes the DCI-compliant Security Log, requires that the media block certificate (public key) be used to digitally sign the media block security logs. This behavior is mandated by the DCI specification, in addition to other DCI-specified uses. The older version of FIPS 140-2 allows this multi use of the media block key-pair through its normative reference to FIPS 186-2. However, the newer FIPS 186-3 forbids the multi-use case. FIPS 140-2 Annex A was updated in January 2010 to now require conformance with FIPS 186-3. Further, a NIST discussion paper on their website requires compliance to FIPS 186-3 after December 31, 2010.

Below is the relevant text taken from SMPTE 430-5, FIPS 186-3, and the NIST discussion paper:

* From SMPTE 430-5 Security Log Event Class and Constraints, Section 6.2:
“Each Signature shall be signed with the Digital Cinema Certificate of the Security Device that generates the Log Record or sequence of Log Records.”
(A copy of SMPTE 430-5 can be purchased from the SMPTE web site at http://store.smpte.org/product-p/smpte%200430-5-2008.htm.) Note that the other uses mandated in the DCI spec of the media block’s Digital Cinema Certificate is to create the KDM and to establish a TLS session between media block and projector.

* From FIPS 186-3, page 11 (http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/fips/fips180-3/fips180-3_final.pdf):
“However, a key pair used for digital signature generation and verification as specified in this Standard shall not be used for any other purpose.”

* From NIST DISCUSSION PAPER: The Transitioning of Cryptographic Algorithms and Key Sizes (http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/ST/key_mgmt/documents/Transitioning_CryptoAlgos_070209.pdf):
“New implementations designed to conform to FIPS 186-2 may be tested by the labs until December 31, 2010, after which only implementations claiming conformance to FIPS 186-3 will be tested for validation.”

If no action is taken by DCI, the result will be that the DCI specification will be in conflict with itself after December 31. The DCI spec will call for compliance to FIPS 140-2, which will no longer allow the media block key-pair applications that are also required by the DCI specification, including the KDM as it is defined today.

That was written to the InterSociety Digital Cinema Forum on 3 October 2010.

Against that background, DCI issues a document on 11 November 2010:
DCI Informational Bulletin NIST Standards Evolution & FIPS 140-2 to FIPS 140-3 Transition

Another analysis of FIPS-3:
Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-3

Connectivity

The ABCs (and 3Ds) of HDMI 1.4a

November 16, 2010 Like Tangents In The Rain Leave a comment

HDMI 1.4a isn’t just industry buzz, but also a time-saver. Because of HDMI 1.4a, there will be no format wars. This is the one and only spec to feature support for upcoming 3D broadcasts. To access the new content, users will need a device that’s HDMI 1.4a-compliant. Manufacturers have been announcing compatible TVs, Blu-ray players, receivers, and other electronics for quite some time now. Of course, you will also need an HDMI cable.

This article was written by tech geek and wired writer Rachel Cericola – consider her for your next project.

The article was first seen at the L-Com Global Connectivity website.

The difference between the old 1.4 and 1.4a is not what’s in the cable, but inside the spec. What’s so special about that little letter? Aside from being the first in the alphabet, there are two things that make 1.4a different:

The addition of Top-and-Bottom to the Specification
The addition of two mandatory formats for broadcast content: a) Side-by-Side Horizontal; and b) Top-and-Bottom

By creating the new spec, manufacturers and content providers will work together (and on the same page) to deliver 3D content. The mandatory 3D formats are:

Movies – Frame Packing: + 1080p @ 23.98/24Hz
Games – Frame Packing: + 720p @ 50 or 59.94/60Hz
Broadcast TV – Side-by-Side Horizontal: + 1080i @ 50 or 59.94/60Hz;

According to the 1.4a spec, displays must support all mandatory formats, sources must support at least one of the formats, and repeaters need to pass through all of the formats.

The Future Holds...

The Laser Trend

November 3, 2010 Like Tangents In The Rain Leave a comment

LLE then publicized an industry effort to shift the regulatory basis for lasers in cinemas. Sony has announced participation with that effort, though they haven’t made any further announcements since their 2008 technology release (or the recent rumor that they are working with a French group on a cinema-based laser project.) And now NATO, the US-centric national association of theater owners, is forming a laser task force

Here are a few paragraphs of the Optics.com article. Er note that the anti-green speckle effort that is mentioned in the article takes on significance when reports come back from Rochester indicating that they haven’t completely handled the problem yet.

Optics.org – Laser projectors promise brighter 3D experience – Excerpts:

“Xenon lamps have reached their practical limit for high-brightness applications,” said Bill Beck, a co-founder of LLE. “High-lumen projection tops out at about 30,000 lumens with an 8 kW power supply. Most of the size, weight and power consumption of these projectors is driven by the illumination system and supporting optics, which is why they are very big.”

Laser alternative
LLE’s alternative is a light engine producing red, green and blue primaries from the same laser source, with the output coupled to a digital projector using optical fiber. With virtually all the laser power successfully reaching the projector chips, the result is a system that can deliver two- to five-times the brightness level of a xenon lamp.

“Our design is a diode-pumped, solid-state laser system using very mature, low-cost GaAs pump diode bars, MOPA architecture, and non-linear optics for wavelength conversion,” commented Beck. “It satisfies all the key requirements: power for 3D brightness, a long lifetime, and high wall-plug efficiency for decreased operating costs. The beam also has a low etendue, which is beneficial for fiber delivery and for scaling the power to higher levels.”

The company says that it can scale up the power of its system by aggregating the output from several light engines. “Our strategy is to provide RGB engines in increments of 30,000 white balanced lumens,” said Beck. “These will initially be aggregated, so as to supply projectors with input powers of up to 60-90,000 lm. In terms of watts, these modules would output 75-90 watts of RGB.” The company envisages these multiple RGB engines being delivered to a digital projector by optical fiber, potentially 50 feet away, allowing “a very small box to become a very bright box.”

Speckle secret
LLE also says it has cracked one of the field’s particular headaches: green speckle. When a highly coherent light source is used for projection displays, viewers can sometimes perceive an interference pattern as an image artifact, although the severity of this problem can be very subjective. It just so happens that the green channel is the hardest to acceptably ‘de-speckle’, because of the eye’s high sensitivity to those wavelengths.

Beck is keeping the secret of LLE’s victory over green speckle to himself, but admits that it was not an easy fight. “Dealing with speckle was one of the key challenges, up there alongside the development of a low-cost middle-volume manufacturing platform. We have worked for three years to eliminate the speckle, and have existing and pending IP in this area. All I can tell you is that it is really, really hard and lots of people have tried.”

The LLE light engine is also green in spirit, contributing to the energy savings that the cinema industry expects to make as digital projection systems become more widely adopted. LLE predicts that RGB laser illumination will reduce operating costs for movie theater owners by potentially $10,000 per screen per year, by eliminating the need to replace expensive xenon arc lamp projector bulbs and reducing electricity use by as much as 50 per cent. As Beck noted: “Our business model is very much in line with the trend to replace low-efficiency lamps with solid-state solutions, offsetting higher up-front price with lower total cost of ownership.”

DCinemaTools

Category Archives: 'Ware

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Iosono Surround Sound – a perfect companion to 3D releases?

3Questions – Laser Light Engines

DCI Talks NIST

The ABCs (and 3Ds) of HDMI 1.4a

The Laser Trend

…Like Tangents In Rain