Tag Archives: digital

DCPC – Digital Cinema Package Creator

Functions:

– SMPTE / MXF Interop DCPs
– 2D + 3D DCPs
– 2k BW/Scope, 4k BW/Scope and HD resolutions
– 6 Channel Sound, 24bit/48kHz
– Film and still image creation
– MPEG2 DCPs for E-Cinema Server
– DCP “re”wraping of MXF files
– Source image formats: bmp, tif, dpx, MPEG2 ES (MPEG2 DCP)
– Source Sound format: PCM 24bit
– Framerates: 24, 25

Utility archive: This archive contains the required Imagemagick, and a helpful
Program to e.g. avi video files to split into individual images in order to create aDCP.

3D channel separation test DCP: The DCP contains two test images for you to consider the quality of the channel separation. The left image contains the test images, the right image is black.

DProVe | Digital Projector Verifier

Because it was originally marketed with the post-production-centric Digital Leader, which has the price of $2,500, it perhaps isn’t as well established in the industry. But for $100 it is a steal and should be used often and by everyone until everyone is an expert.

OK; not quite $100 you say. True. It is $100 per copy plus a $150 media charge. So, $250, or $350 for 3, etc. Except, the license allows that for a single site all copies over 5 are not charged for. In other words, there is a 5 copy per site charge, plus the media fee – total $650, then that’s it for a multiplex, even if it has 10 or 15 screens.

SMPTE Digital Leader Demonstration – YouTube

What is needed next is a checklist of questions and answers for the projectionist to run through, making sure that the presentation from the server and projector is as fine as can be.

This is where the DCinemaCompliance – Post Installation Checklist can come in handy, as well as the DCinemaTraining instruction set on how to make the checklist relevant to each of your employees.

SMPTE Releases Two New Digital-Cinema Products To Standardize Workflows, Enhance Theater-Going Experience

DPROVE_Order_Form.pdf

DProVe Flyer | SMPTE

DProVe | Digital Projector Verifier

Because it was originally marketed with the post-production-centric Digital Leader, which has the price of $2,500, it perhaps isn’t as well established in the industry. But for $100 it is a steal and should be used often and by everyone until everyone is an expert.

OK; not quite $100 you say. True. It is $100 per copy plus a $150 media charge. So, $250, or $350 for 3, etc. Except, the license allows that for a single site all copies over 5 are not charged for. In other words, there is a 5 copy per site charge, plus the media fee – total $650, then that’s it for a multiplex, even if it has 10 or 15 screens.

SMPTE Digital Leader Demonstration – YouTube

What is needed next is a checklist of questions and answers for the projectionist to run through, making sure that the presentation from the server and projector is as fine as can be.

This is where the DCinemaCompliance – Post Installation Checklist can come in handy, as well as the DCinemaTraining instruction set on how to make the checklist relevant to each of your employees.

SMPTE Releases Two New Digital-Cinema Products To Standardize Workflows, Enhance Theater-Going Experience

DPROVE_Order_Form.pdf

DProVe Flyer | SMPTE

Celluloid Junkie Hits Help Button

Sperling Reich’s Celuloid Junkie site has 5 informative articles online this week, but one of them begs for community participation.

Celluloid Junkie » Rural Theatre Hopes Pepsi Can Help Fund Digital Conversion concerns one clever exhibitor who has submitted a proposal to Pepsi’s Refresh Project to help them fund 50% of their Digital Cinema conversion.

Click on this link and hit Vote for this idea; 
Bring digital cinema to a non-profit rural theatre in Lincoln, KS | Pepsi Refresh Everything

A quick registration is required, but the opt in for further contact is not required. 

Good luck to Rural Theaters!

Request for Comments: DoJ: Movie Captioning, Video Description

Just above the questions that the Department of Justice requests answers to, is the paragraph:

Finally, the Department is considering proposing that 50% of movie screens would offer captioning and video description 5 years after the effective date of the regulation. The Department originally requested guidance on any such figure in its 2008 NPRM. Individuals with disabilities, advocacy groups who represented individuals with disabilities, and eleven State Attorneys General advocated that the Department should require captioning and video description 100% of the time. Representatives from the movie industry did not want any regulation regarding captioning or video description. A representative of a non-profit organization recommended that the Department adopt a requirement that 50% of movies being exhibited be available with captioning and video description. The Department seeks further comment on this issue and is asking several questions regarding how such a requirement should be framed.

Finally, to temper the conversation, we submit the comment that Suzanne Robitaille of ablebodied.com made in her article on finding a captioned version of Avatar: “Ironic, as Avatar is about a man with a disability.”

An RTF document of the questions are also attached. This author makes no claims on whether the two attachments have mistakes, but nothing was purposefully screwed with.

Related Items:
New Accessibility Law Passes | TV, Internet and ???
Presentation: Hearing and Vision Impaired Audiences and DCinema
Implementing Closed Caption and HI / VI in the evolving DCinema World

All 3DAvatar™, AllThe3DTime™ [Updated]

News Corp. chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch previously said …(excerpted)

FirstShowing.Net —James Cameron Delivers Updates on Avatar 2 and Re-Release

Yep, James Cameron and Avatar are back in the news again, but … First, he confirmed that he is producing Guillermo del Toro’s At the Mountains of Madness (announced a few weeks ago) and that they’ll shoot it in native 3D using next generation 3D cameras. [Surprise?]

We don’t exactly know what Cameron will be directing next, … he’s been getting inspiration for Avatar 2 by traveling down to South America and meeting with native tribes. “I have an overall narrative arc for [Avatar] 2 and 3, and there are some modifications to that based on my experiences in the last few months from having gone down to the Amazon and actually hung out with various indigenous groups who are actually living this type of story for real… but it’s not changing the overall pattern,” he said.

Finally, Cameron talked about converting Titanic to 3D and also complained about how terrible the Clash of the Titans 3D conversion was (as we all know). …

Marketsaw.blogspot — EXCLUSIVE: James Cameron Interview! Talks AVATAR Re-release, Sequels, 3D Conversions & Working With Del Toro!

[Listen to the audio interview on this page]

 

0:40 – Cameron confirms he is producing Guillermo del Toro’s AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS. The movie will be shot in native 3D using next generation FUSION 3D cameras from Pace. …

2:30 – Cameron talks about 3D conversions. TITANIC’s conversion is taking 8 months to a year to complete, not a fast turnaround like CLASH OF THE TITANS. Cameron: “(TITANS) showed a fundamental lack of knowledge about stereo space, …

5:00 – Cameron on how they are technically converting TITANIC. “You just can’t cut out edges, you’re going to get flat people moving around.” He will be using all his knowledge to put things on their right depth planes. They had tests for TITANIC from seven different conversion vendors on the exact same shots and they got back seven different answers as to were they thought things were spatially. “Some of them were not bad guesses and some of them were ridiculous.”

6:50 – The whole argument about conversion will go away for high end, first run 3D. Two years from now when there are thousands of 3D cameras out their shooting live feeds to 3D broadcast networks, how can a producer go to a studio and say…

9:05 – Cameron on talking with Steven Spielberg about converting his classic movies to 3D. …

11:20 – Cameron talks about AVATAR 2’s current status. …

12:04 – He is focusing his writing right now on the AVATAR novel (corresponds to the first film)…

12:45 – The AVATAR re-release will have 9 extra minutes, not 8 and it will all be CG. No extra footage of live action characters drinking coffee. Rainforest; some at night; a hunt sequence – …

15:45 – Cameron does not have the release timing of the 3D Blu-ray as …

Released en francais: DCinema Technical Best Practices [Updated]

Now In English, translated from the french by the EDCF – European Digital Cinema Forum; This excellent guide from the Federation National Cinemas Francais (FNCF) and the Commission Superieure Technique de l’Image et du Son (CST): TECHNICAL GUIDE FOR THE PROJECTION BOOTH IN DIGITAL CINEMA – Click the attachment link below.

End Update   — — 

La luminance de toutes les images, dans tous les formats de projection, doit être calibrée à 48 cd/m2. Le projecteur doit permettre la création de cette luminance.

The Federation of Cinemas and the Commission of Best Practices (La fédération des cinémas et la commission supérieure technique) has released a comprehensive document called The Technical Guide for the Digital Cinema Projection Booth (le Guide technique de la cabine cinéma numérique). The quote above, as an example, says that:

“The luminance of all images, in all the formats of projection, must be calibrated at 48 candelas per square meter. The projector must permit the creation of that luminance.”

And which professional digital cinema projector doesn’t create that level of light? One that is projecting a 3D movie would fit into that category. Please ask your local cinema manager if they are showing the latest movie at the required 14 foot-Lamberts (the 48 candela/m2 equivalent that the US and England uses) like they are supposed to.

If you are signed in, you can download the PDF version of le Guide technique de la cabine cinéma numérique here.

Red’s EPIC/Scarlett Problems {Update}

July 6 Update: A new Jannard post says the EPIC bug has been found and demented (and insinuates that it was the same bug that was holding back the Scarlet) and insists that they are back on the road of building the most best great and ultimate. A hint that the manufacturer is found, by saying that it will be built in the US, though that is not explicitly stated. The delivery dates are not hinted at, though some versions will definitely be in 2011 since the 28K sensor won’t be available since then. 


 

Jim Jannard continued his excellent client experiment by filling everyone in on further bug and manufacturing delays in a 14 June reduser.com post;

 

… we have a bug. It has held us up now for two months. We have working cameras, as you know. But we aren’t going to release anything until the cameras are done and bug free. And we have stumbled on an issue that has caused us considerable grief. It is unexpected and it has us baffled.

The fix could be tomorrow. Or not.

We have been a “lucky” company up to this point. The moon and stars lined up for us for the RED ONE (since we didn’t have a clue what we were doing in the beginning) and the RED ONE did all we asked. The M-X sensor is incredible… as you know. Our new ASICs for the EPIC and Scarlet are complicate times a million. And they work. Another miracle. Everything was late but on track. Then we hit a snag.

We have an army working on this. 24/7. Trust me when I tell you that we have been humbled. I have questioned our aggressive goals every day.

So what does this mean? Obviously another delay. To compound matters, the company that was to make Scarlet has made an incredible announcement recently and has significant issues. You can probably figure out who this is. This will force us to find a new manufacturing partner for that product. When we 1st got wind of this, we decided to make EPIC in the US, hoping that the company would find a solution in time for Scarlet production. That now seems unlikely so we are now scrambling for a new partner.

The manufacturing problem that is mentioned is presumed to be tied to Foxconn in China who is undergoing some major restructuring. It has to have several manufacturers scrabbling. For example, Apple has long made iPhone and other products with this group.

The EPIC and Scarlet camera are meant to bridge the original RED ONE, the Scarlet with 3K resolution and 5K or better for the EPIC. As recently as April, the EPIC was slatted for shipping in July, the Scarlet in August. 

Richard Lackey’s http://dcinema.wordpress.com/ has a great synopsis.

 

The State of Digital Cinema – April 2010 – Part Zero

What they came up with is called the tri-stimulus system since the primary idea is that there are nerve endings in the eye which act as receptors, some of which primarily deal with green light, some with red and some with blue. These color receptors are called the cones (which don’t work at all in low light), while the receptors that can deal with low levels of light are called the rods.

Now, for the first of our amazing set of numbers, there are as many as 125 million receptors in the eye, of which only 6 or 7 million deal with color. When (predominantly) only one type of these receptors gets triggered, it will send a signal to the brain and the brain will designate the appropriate color. If two or more of these receptors are triggered, then the brain will do the work of combining them much the same way that a painter mixes water colors. (We’ll pretend it is that simple.)

OK; so how do you create a representation of all that color and detail on the TV or movie screen?

Let’s start with film. We think of it as one piece of plastic, but in reality it is several layers that each have a different dye of different sensitivity on it. Each dye reacts in a different and predictable manner when exposed to light through the camera lens. In the lab, each layer goes through a different chemical process to ‘develop’ a representation of what it captured when exposed by the camera system. There are a lot of steps in between, but eventually the film is exposed to light again, this time pushing light in the opposite manner, through the film and then through the lens. That light gets colored by the film and shows up on the screen.

One of the qualities of film is that the chemical and gel nature makes the range of colors in the image appear to be seamless. And not just ‘appears’ with the definition of “gives the impression of.” In fact, there is a great deal of resolution in modern film.

Then TV came along. We see a smooth piece of glass, but if we could touch the other side of a 1995 era TV set we would feel a dust that reacts to a strong beam of electricity. If we look real close we will see that there are actually different color dots, again green, red, and blue. Engineers figured out how to control that electric beam with magnets, which could trigger the different dots of color to make them light up separately or together to combine into a range of colors, and eventually combine those colors into pictures.
That was great, except people wanted better. Technology evolved to give them that. Instead of lighting up magic dust with a strong beam of electricity, a couple methods were discovered that allowed small colored capsules of gas to be lit up and even small pieces of colored plastic to light up. These segments and pieces were able to be packed tightly against each other so that they could make the pictures. Instead of only hundreds of lines being lit up by the electron gun in the old TV set, now over a thousand lines can be lit up, at higher speeds, using a lot less electricity.

Then a couple engineers figured out make and control a very tiny mirror to reflect light, then quickly move to not reflect light. That mirror is less than 25% of the size of a typical human hair.

Hundreds of these mirrors can be placed next to each other on a chip less than 2 centimeters square. Each mirror is able to precisely move on or off at a rate of 144 times a second, which is 6 times the speed that a motion picture film is exposed to light for a picture.

This chip is called a DLP, a Digital Light Projector, because a computer can tell each mirror when to turn one and off, so that when a strong light is reflected on an individual or set of mirrors, it will create part of a picture. If you put a computer in charge of 3 chips, one for green, one for red and one for blue, the reflected light can be focused through a lens and a very detailed picture will appear on the screen. There is a different but similar technology that Sony has refined for their professional cinema technology which uses crystals that change their state (status).

Now for the 2nd in our amazing set of numbers. There are 1,080 rows made up of 2,048 individual mirrors each for over 2 million 2 hundred thousand mirrors per chip. If you were to multiply that times 3 chips worth of mirrors, you get the same “about 6 or 7 million” mirrors as there are cones in each eye.

Without going into details (to keep this simple), we keep getting closer to being able to duplicate the range and intensity of colors that you see in the sky. This is one of the artists goals, in the same way as the engineers want to make a lighter, flatter, environmentally better television and movie playing system. It isn’t perfect, but picture quality has reached the point that incremental changes will be more subtle than substantive, or better only in larger rooms or specialist applications.

For example, a movie that uses the 2K standard will typically be in the 300 gigabyte size. A movie made in 4K, which technically has 4 times the resolution, will typically be less than 15% larger. This movie will be stored on a computer with many redundant drives, with redundant power supplies and graphics cards that are expressly made to be secure with special “digital cinema only” projectors.

Hopefully you have a feeling for the basic technology. It is not just being pushed onto people because it is the newest thing. The TV and movie businesses are going digital for a number of good reasons. To begin with, it wasn’t really possible to advance quality of the older technology without increasing the cost by a significant amount…and even then it would be incredibly cumbersome and remain an environmental nightmare. There are also advantages of flexibility that the new technology could do that the old couldn’t…or couldn’t at a reasonable price or at the quality of the new.

The technology of presenting a 3D image is one of those flexibility points. 3D was certainly one of the thrills of Avatar. The director worked for a decade learning how to handle the artistic and the technical sides of the art. He developed with closely aligned partners many different pieces of equipment and manners of using existing equipment to do things that haven’t been done before. And finally he spent hours on details that other budgets and people would only spend minutes. In the end James Cameron developed a technique and technology set that won’t be seen as normal for a long time from now…and an outstanding movie.

Could Avatar have been made on film? Well, almost no major motion picture has been made exclusively on film for a long time. They all use a technique named CGI (for the character generated imagery), which covers a grand set of techniques. But if you tried to generate the characters in Avatar exclusively on a computer with CGI, they never would have come out as detailed and inspiring as they did. Likewise, if he tried to create the characters with masks and other techniques with live action, you wouldn’t get the texture and feeling that the actors gave to their parts.

Could Avatar have been displayed with film, in 2D. Yes, it could have and it was.

3D is dealt with in more detail in Part II of this series, but here are some basics:

To begin, 3D is a misnomer. True 3 dimension presumes the ability to walk around a subject and see a full surround view, like the hologram of Princess Leah.

In real life a person who is partly hidden in one view, will be even more hidden or perhaps exposed from another view. On the screen of today’s 3D movie, when a character appears to  b partly hidden by a wall as seen by a person on the left side of the theater, they will also appear the same amount of hidden by someone on the right side of the theater.

In fact, what we see with out eyes and what we see in the new theaters is correctly termed “stereoscopic”. We are taught some of this in school, how to make two lines join somewhere out in space (parallax) and draw all the boxes on those lines to make them appear to recede in the distance…even though they are on one piece of paper. There are several more clues in addition to parallax that we use to discern whether something is closer or farther, and whether something is just a drawing on a sheet of paper or a full rounded person or sharp-edged box…even in a 2D picture.

And we have been doing this for years. We know that Bogie and Bergman are in front of the plane that apparently sits in the distance…our eyes/brain/mind makes up a story for us, 3 dimensions and probably more, even though it is a black and white set of pictures shown at 24 frames per second on a flat screen.

Digital 3D is an imperfect feature as of now. It has improved enough that companies are investing a lot of money to make and show the movies. The technology will be improved as the artists learn the technology and what the audiences appreciate.

Although we are in a phase that seems like “All 3D, All The Time”, 3D isn’t the most important part of the digital cinema transition. At first blush the most important consideration is the savings from all the parts of movie distribution, including lower print costs and transportation costs. But actually, because prints no longer cost over a thousand euros, and because it will be simple to distribute a digital file, lesser known artists will have the opportunity to get their work in front of more people, and more people will find it easier to enjoy entertainment from other cultures and other parts of the world.

This Series now includes:
The State of Digital Cinema – April 2010 – Part 0
The State of Digital Cinema – April 2010 – Part I
The State of Digital Cinema – April 2010 – Part II
Ebert FUDs 3D and Digital Cinema

3Questions – Doremi’s Streamer

Using extended SPL, they can decode the HDTV stream and play it over Cinelink II to the 2K projector. This solution supports 2D and also 3D encoded with Sensio.

Question 2: Is this a standard option? And can current owners upgrade to include this feature?

STREAMER is an option that can be added at any time to a configuration.

Question 3: We imagine that eventually, a cinema complex will need several satellite feeds, and back-ups for those feeds. Can the Streamer take more than one feed? If there is a failure with a feed, can it automatically roll-over to a 2nd source.

In current version, we take only one satellite feed but this TS can have several broadcast channels so the DCP2000 players can select various channels.

Is an editorial appropriate here? OK; as you can tell, our feeling is that the future cinema infrastucture will be very sophisticated. There will be many different inputs that need to be correctly, quickly and securely routed to the different screening rooms…much like a modern post-production facility does. We therefore applaud the foresight that this valuable option that the Doremi Streamer presents.