craigbowman
Veteran
I often go from absurd musings to just doing it somehow. That's how I wound up in this business in the first place. Is it just me or has anyone else started to contemplate the ludicrous possibilities?
Who wants to get a 4K projection system?
- Thread starter craigbowman
- Start date
firstcinemapictures
Member
I'd like to have a 4k projector.
Only problem is I would have to buy a really big house in order to have enough room for such a thing.
Darrell
FIRST CINEMA PICTURES
Only problem is I would have to buy a really big house in order to have enough room for such a thing.
Darrell
FIRST CINEMA PICTURES
Drew599
Veteran
4K projection is a total waste of data. 2K projection is plenty of rez to have. Now what they need to do is make it 4:4:4 2K projection because that looks amazing. If seen the tests for 4K against 2K and the difference is so slight that the whole 4K thing, for projection should be scrapped. 4K production footage is another story because you should always start with a high rez master that you can play with.
The SXRD projectors, if you were at NAB, IBC (I wasn't), or have seen them anywhere else, are pretty substantial systems. They are my favorite projectors on the market, at least from what I have seen. They are also very large-- about 200 pounds. Lenses range from about $2.5 to $20K. Normally a projector of this magnitude goes into a projection room, but there are some nifty solutions that can be customized as an enclosure for the projector, which minimizes the noise to a computer-humming decibel level, and cools the projector as well.
You're right for the most part about 2K vs. 4K, at least I do think they look alike. The film output, though, normally is the essential ingredient to a 4K-preferrable master in a DI, and a studio will choose this if they feel it is essential to maintaining elements in a release print. When I saw Da Vinci Code in theatres, though, I did not sense a "4K" prsence. It all goes back to the storyline, and what the overall composition of the film calls for. I think that's one of the main determining factors for choosing 2K vs. 4K these days.
Still, though, I prefer the Sony to all other projectors at this stage.
You're right for the most part about 2K vs. 4K, at least I do think they look alike. The film output, though, normally is the essential ingredient to a 4K-preferrable master in a DI, and a studio will choose this if they feel it is essential to maintaining elements in a release print. When I saw Da Vinci Code in theatres, though, I did not sense a "4K" prsence. It all goes back to the storyline, and what the overall composition of the film calls for. I think that's one of the main determining factors for choosing 2K vs. 4K these days.
Still, though, I prefer the Sony to all other projectors at this stage.
Drew599 said:
Sorry, but that is simply not true. If you have ever seen 4K originated material screened *properly* at 4K, then seen the same material downrezzed and screened at 2K, the differences are immediate and obvious.
There are a lot of ways to do this wrong, and a lot of situations where you can see 4K vs. 2K and think "what's the big deal?" That sounds like what you have seen.
But in an environment that is setup correctly, the advantages are very clear.
Storage costs are almost completely uninteresting to me. Yeah, 4K is a lot of data. Whoopee. Two years ago, HD was a lot of data. In the storage world, the realm of the high end becomes the realm of the consumer in about 5 minutes.
Lucas
Mr. Blonde
RED Advocate
The advantage to a 4k projector/image is that you can have a gigantic image that will remain clean and crisp in comparison to a 2k image.
Think of it in photography terms. If you were to blow up a two megapixel photo to say, bus-stop billboard size, it would be garbage. Now a 12mp image would not only look great in this situation but could be blown up to true freeway billboard size and retain cleanliness.
I love me some 4k.
Think of it in photography terms. If you were to blow up a two megapixel photo to say, bus-stop billboard size, it would be garbage. Now a 12mp image would not only look great in this situation but could be blown up to true freeway billboard size and retain cleanliness.
I love me some 4k.
Graeme_Nattress
Red Team
Umm.... 4k v 2k. All things being equal, the 4k does look better and more detailed. We did the comparison ourselves at the IBC digital theatre.
Graeme
Graeme
Mr. Blonde
RED Advocate
**** 4k might be able to re-vamp the drive-in theater as far as I'm concerned. :smile:
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craigbowman
Veteran
Anyone else besides QuVis make the 4K players which send data to the projector?
By Sony, Graeme, I did mean 4K as a preferrable viz output-- quite considerably as well. But I do think it depends on a 'situation by situation' basis when to choose 2K (economics) and to choose 4K (quality hold-up), at least for now (until Red 
). In theatres today, though, most cannot tell the difference between them. I guess it just depends on the output available, and sufficient testing of course.....
). In theatres today, though, most cannot tell the difference between them. I guess it just depends on the output available, and sufficient testing of course.....craigbowman said:
There was (or is) a company that had some prototypes earlier this year that were designed to do everything for DI acquisition and playback-- record, store, output, and even playback. And the designs I remember were really nice! They kind of looked like a supercharged game cube-- very, very stylish. I wonder what their name is..... anyone know what I am referring to? Sorry for not remembering the name.
Chris Kenny
Well-known member
Supposedly NVIDIA's Quadro Plex VCS (which is basically a big external box full of GPUs) can drive an SXRD projector at 4K, and probably has the processing power for real-time color grading. I don't know what the pricing for this thing is going to be, but it's all based off of off-the-shelf hardware, so it could end up being pretty cheap. $15-20K, or even less, maybe.
DVS has a line of 4K solutions, very slick stuff feeding Sony SXRD at NAB. My market application is large corporate presentations. I plan to crop my Red 4K footage into a widescreen 3840 x 1080 and then playback through a dual channel Chyron XClyps system into two blended DPI 3500HD projectors.
So far quotes for Quadro Plex are around 30K... might come down before shipping.
Link to 4K DDR's DVS.de
I expect several lower cost systems (50K or under) to hit the market April '07.
So far quotes for Quadro Plex are around 30K... might come down before shipping.
Link to 4K DDR's DVS.de
I expect several lower cost systems (50K or under) to hit the market April '07.
craigbowman said:
Craig - Keisoku Giken make a 4K DDR that is pretty slick. It operates like a normal deck - front panel transport controls that look like a Digibeta. Loading material into the Keisoku is easy - Java applet that runs on XP or OS-X and allows drag-and-drop from a wide variety of stillfile formats.
We can debate the merits of compressed vs. uncompressed until the cows come home, but QuVis is compressed, and Keisoku is uncompressed. I've never seen a direct comparison of the two with 4K originated material... would be interesting. I suspect that nobody (and I mean nobody) would be able to tell the difference.
But where compression is a PITA is that it takes time to compress and uncompress. Anything requiring realtime manipulation that has to deal with a compression engine in the middle is like sticking a catalytic converter on a John Judd engine - just slows things down...
Lucas
Chris Kenny said:
Quadro Plex can drive SXRD... but...
You gotta look at how QuadroPlex is used and what it is designed for. If you are loading models and massive amounts of geometry and want to take a look at that stuff at high resolution in realtime - then QuadroPlex is for you. I was at the SIGGRAPH launch event for QuadroPlex, and there were VizSim guys with tears in their eyes... CAD engineers weeping and rending their garments... (and you think I'm kidding...)
But for realtime throughput of massive textures - QuadroPlex doesn't help. a 4K texture is a 4K texture... and there is nothing in QuadroPlex that allows for "ganging" textures in realtime.
Will be interesting to see what happens whenever NVidia's next-gen stuff comes along.
Lucas
KG does make a incredible box as lucas has demonstrated.. And I think Scratch should soon be able to play back 4k soon as well. (Lucas correct me if im wrong).
Chris Kenny
Well-known member
luki said:
I'm not an expert on this stuff, but... what's the specific issue with 4K textures? A 4096 x 2160 36-bit RGB video stream runs about a gigabyte per second at 24 fps. The Plex's interface with the host computer is 16x PCIe, which has four times that much bandwidth. And the fill rates of modern high-end GPUs are already over 10 gigapxiels per second, so that doesn't seem like a major problem either.
The quadro plex is a revolution for the CGI world, where the system is rendering synthetic material at high resolutions and high frame rates. Systems from Vizrt, Brainstorm and Chyron will get a huge performance boost later in the year. I'm sure it will also be utilized for realtime rendering of transitions, DI and compositing applications. When you are working with shot or rendered footage, playback of 24 frame 2K or 4K is more disk intensive than graphics card intensive. My Quadro 4500SDI systems need Huge 4210 dual channel 4gb fiber channel systems to playback large files.
Drew599
Veteran
Luki, the environment that I saw the 2K vs. 4K was at the Steven J Ross theater at Warner Bros. In my opinion it doesn't get much better than that. The stuff they were looking at was "Corpse Bride", which was captured on a 16.7 MP camera and "Batman Begins". I see plenty of 2K stuff every day at work and it looks amazing. But what looks even better is 4:4:4 2K. I just think as far as a projector goes it should be left at 2K. There's no reason to go to 4K. I guess you can make the same argument about 35mm vs. 70mm. If you really need to see all that detail then by all means shoot in 4K and project it in 4K. But if filmmakers realize that people that go to see the movies they make won't care either way if its 2K or 4K. Then why spend the extra money. I think a 4K is a great idea but not 4K projection.