Resolution and the big screen

adkimery said:
"28 Days Later" is probably the best SD on the big screen I remember seeing.
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Viewing distance makes a tremendous amount of difference. When I saw "28 Days Later" in the theater, I sat between two DP's about 1/3 of the way back, and it looked like doggie doo doo. Any wide shot looked horrible. Massive edge enhancement, low res, it was awful.

I then took a film-style commercial I'd shot on the DVX100 with the anamorphic adapter and had it transferred to film. I was expecting it to be marvelously tremendously better than the "28 Days Later" experience, because we were talking about a net efficient use of basically twice as much resolution. Sat in the first 1/3, and ... meh. It looked better, sure -- sharper, etc., but -- it wasn't film.

Then, on a lark, I went and sat in the back row and had them play it again and ... heck yeah, it looked pretty much indistinguishable from 35mm film. Looked frickin' fantastic, from that distance.

Of course, that's not really a reasonable requirement to expect of our viewers (hey everybody, only sit in the back row!) but it really does show just what a huge difference your distance to the screen makes in the perceived sharpness and quality of the images you're watching.
 
A 35mm theatrical projection is not typically very high resolution. The B&W test film I used to run setting up small theaters would typically show somewhere between 500-800 lines vertical on a res chart, about like decent 1080p at best if it was accurately focused (meaning with binoculars from the booth). For older used projectors and lenses the low end was more likely than the high end. Sony's 4k digital projectors are considerably better than this. Even a 2k projector will out resolve most 35mm film projection systems with any age on them.
In just two years 4k projectors will be installed on more than 20% of US major chain screens. Try the same comparisons against 4k DCI print then see what you think. :happy:
 
adkimery said:
Chris,
You've had much better luck than I have when viewing SD material blown up for the big screen. To me it's all looked sub-par compared to 35mm or HD sourced images. I don't mean it was necessarily unwatchable or distractingly bad but just not as good compared to HD or film. "28 Days Later" is probably the best SD on the big screen I remember seeing.
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If I had compared the film side by side as SD and HD projection, I'm sure I would have seen a difference, but the main thing was - it looked "good enough" which is to say I didn't feel as though it needed to look "better" from 30 or 40 feet back. I didn't get closer to the screen because I figured most people would be sitting at least 30 feet from the screen. The very first feature I ever shot was shot on DV and screened I believe from DV tape and it looked hideous. Starting with low noise, sharp, and well lit HD material I think can go a long way even projected in SD.
 
Another way to phrase the effect of viewing distance on sharpness/resolution is that: as one moves away from the screen, the resolution (angular resolution) increases. There are more pixels per degree of view angle.

One important fact that is often overlooked is that, as resolution is increased the color depth is boosted. Actually, given a 10-bit-per-color-channel "2k" imaging system, increasing the resolution to "4k" increases the color depth a minimum of 64 times.

Bit depth is not the actual color depth -- bit depth is one factor of color depth. Resolution is another factor of color depth.

So, moving away from the screen not only increases the resolution, but it also increases the color depth,

This page discusses in more detail the relationship between color depth and resolution.

By the way, I am not a resolution freak. I believe that 1920x1080, 10-bit, log is enough for most projects. I am merely stating basic photographic principles.
 
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Chris Santucci said:
Pixel peepers really should take "normal viewing distance" into account before making statements like that. There IS a normal viewing distance for projections and it's almost always a much greater distance than the distance we normally view TV's and monitors from. I shot a short with an HVX200A last year with and without a lens adapter that was projected in a commercial theater from a standard def DVD and it looked as good as it looked on my monitor. If I had stood 10 feet from the screen in the theater, I might have seen "softness" but the film looked as good as any other film I'd ever seen in a commercial theater from the mid point of the seating.
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Well thats frickin great news. I was worried after reading the first couple posts. I just put my movie on a dvd and watched it on a tv and thought it looked great. I'd think it'd have the opposite effect.
 
Barry_Green said:
Viewing distance makes a tremendous amount of difference.
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As does the quality of the projector. If you are hooking up a DVD player via composite to a run-of-the-miller projector and shooting that onto a 40ft wall things probably aren't going to go well. I recently attend a screening of a film I graded and the festival's projection system wasn't much better than that. The image was very soft, colors were too saturated, anything close to black was crushed and anything close to white was blown out. The only I could console myself with was that I had consistently matched all the takes and cameras so at least the movie looked uniform in its crappiness. Ugh.

Obviously this is more a case of poor projection than anything else, but it makes feel better to vent a little and it is close to on topic.:D


-Andrew
 
Yes, clearly projector quality matters very much, our projection at one major festival was mediocre because the projector wasn't calibrated well at all.

In the test I'm referring to, it was a film transfer, so it was the theatrical 35mm projector, which removes a million variables out of the process. With a video projector, yeah, there's a million things that can go wrong...
 
SMPTE and ICIA reference viewing distance relative to screen height regardless of format or screen size. Guidelines are based on content. For cinema theaters the old
SMPTE guideline was 2x screen height to closest seat to 6x screen height to farthest seat with around 4x being the sweet spot. Needless to say many theaters pack seats in much closer than 2x but few exceed 6x.
ICIA uses the 4-6-8 rule. 8x screen height maximum viewing distance for entertainment programming, 6x for general presentation use like power point, and 4x max for viewing fine detail or small text such as medical images or spreadsheets, same 2x recommended minimum. At the 4x sweet spot distance, the difference between 480p, 720p, 1080p, or 2160p vertical resolution is quite visible if the projection system is up to the task.
 
Last one, ZBLOCK-you should have nothing to worry about. I premiered my first feature shot in SD with the dvx 100b at The Anthony Minghella theatre where I live on Saturday night. The screen was fricking gigantic, I was worried, I'm not anymore, it looked unbeleivable and the film is full of wide landscape shots. Go to www.manwhowalked.com and read a few of the e.mails I've received from the public, have a look at the films facebook page and read them. Tell the story and you'll have nothing to worry about.
Jim
 
I just came back from a screening of "Tiny Furniture" and was very impressed, after being very un-impressed by the technical quality of most of the Academy nominated shorts this year.

I wonder how much the film-out process helped in reducing moire and aliasing? There was some present but overall it was jarringly filmic. The grain in the filmout helped tremendously.

Would love to know how they achieved the wide screen aspect ratio, through lenses or cropping.
 
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I think this is really just a function of certain aspects of how film actually works. Resolution is one part but since the average film projection is around 750 lines of resolution (http://www.cst.fr/IMG/pdf/35mm_resolution_english.pdf) I don't think it matters as much as people think.

Personally, I think it's the gamma curves and highlight/lowlight stuff that makes film look like it has more resolution. The common analogy in digital would be the use of an "unsharp mask" filter where it creates more contrast at edges of contrast change. This makes things look much more crisp without actually sharpening anything..
 
Here's my two cents, as everyone knows I'm a big harker about this sort of thing:

Basically, I'm a big theater person, I've always watched films at the modern megaplex (40ft+ screens) and all of those films have been shot with 16mm, 35mm, 2K, or 4K. There may have been a 1080P or two, possibly even a 720P for the local advertisements that show when the lights are on between showings. I've always paid attention to every wall, brick, tree, and area of every scene in a film because I've always wanted to be a film director, that's how I grew up, and since I have perfect vision myself, I want a film's wide shots to reflect the life I see with my own eyes in real life. And my take on it is that the sharpness capabilities of the camera is more important that the resolution size itself; you can have a 720P file shot on a camera with a 720P sensor and it'll look wonderful, or you can have a 4K file shot with Canon's pixel binning and it'll have the quality of that 720p file if you took it and stretched to 75% higher than it's original size. When Canon records a shot that has a perceptional distance of over three feet away, the quality declines rapidly because of the distance to moire ratio (even if you can't see the moire itself), and before you know it, you'll have yourself a file that only looks realistic when down-rez'ed to 360P.

So what does this mean? This means you're sure not going to shoot The King's Speech on a Canon DSLR, I watched parts of that film in theaters and it was simply amazing the detail that film held up on subjects (walls and textures, for instance) that were hundreds of feet away from the lens, perceptionally. (Landscape shots, cathedral shots, wide focus room shots.) No matter where you sat in the theater, it looked absolutely stunning. And it's not all a resolution thing, how the camera at hand records the detail is the most important factor of all, and since Canon has an extremely faulty way of picking up detail in the focus place (reducing it by 50%- 75% in almost all normal filmmaking styles of shot distances.), you will never "regain" that detail back no matter if you even resize or sharpen in post. It's literally lost forever. You could shoot 4K and it still wouldn't be there. That pretty flower wallpaper will look like someone poured jelly all over it (blur, not moire, but moire as well.), no matter if you're watching the video on your computer or on a 40ft screen. That's the downside of pixel binning from an insane 18MP sensor.

Now, if we were talking about shooting with the most intelligent digital cameras on earth, then I would still suggest that 2K is probably what matches human vision in terms of projecting a film onto a 40ft+ screen, plus that already accounts for the screen ratio.The reality is that a native 720P video viewed on a 720P computer is around 2% the size of what it takes to fill up a 40ft screen pixel for pixel (like imagine a 40ft computer screen.). 2K is probably 4%. 4K is probably around 8%. I'd have to know something about projectors to know if those two percentages are drastically different or very much alike, I really just don't know how strong projectors are - I'd have to know how far you can stretch individual pixels using a digital projector before you start to see squares or a strong blur. The one thing that strikes my brain, though, is that if shot with a perfect technology, I would bet that even a 720P or lower would hold up perfectly on the big screen, and that resolution sizes like 4K were probably invented so that the cameras could have bigger sensors for better low light production, that detail itself may have been a lesser reason (and only an added bonus).

I mean, my opinion is that all of my favorite films have been surprisingly shot on 16mm, including Saw, and whatever digital resolution that is truly equal to 16mm (not just resolution, but the detail quality) is what I'd feel amazing shooting with.
 
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redhighway said:
Last one, ZBLOCK-you should have nothing to worry about. I premiered my first feature shot in SD with the dvx 100b at The Anthony Minghella theatre where I live on Saturday night. The screen was fricking gigantic, I was worried, I'm not anymore, it looked unbeleivable and the film is full of wide landscape shots. Go to www.manwhowalked.com and read a few of the e.mails I've received from the public, have a look at the films facebook page and read them. Tell the story and you'll have nothing to worry about.
Jim
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Thanks Redhighway.

Anyone else seen their 720p HVX footage blown up?
 
snapper yore obsessed by this, ive seen disgusting SD footage in theaters with lots of grain but guess what ... people didnt run out of theater.Those things arent that impotant,content is everything and even then if movie is a piece of garbage scriptwise a lot of people sit till the very end.
 
the problem arises BECAUSE it's now almost possible to use DSLR's as "film substitute" in theater screenings for minimum budget films.
so it makes people think: well because it's almost there, we must be extra careful to make it "exactly right". and don't forget that when you watch a dv shot film on a big screen,
the image won't be as sharp as full HD DSLR's, so there's less place for mistakes.
 
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I think DSLRs are great for what they are. Other people in this forum believe that unless you are shooting RED or better, you aren't making anything worth watching. I disagree. I recently worked on a shoot that had originally planned on shooting RED but there was no way we could raise the money for a week's rental AND set building, craft services, etc.

We settled on DSLRs and were able to spend much more on set build/design and craft services. I think the choice helped considerably increase the production value regardless of resolution. It's not worth shooting at "4K"(since no camera actually shoots at 4K anyway) when what you are capturing looks cheap. Will it be good enough to put on a big screen? Who knows, but we made it anyway and we're proud of it.
 
Svart said:
It's not worth shooting at "4K"(since no camera actually shoots at 4K anyway) when what you are capturing looks cheap. Will it be good enough to put on a big screen? Who knows, but we made it anyway and we're proud of it.
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Ya know, if a script was THAT compelling that it made people jump up and down and money fell from the sky because of it, OK, maybe then you should shoot for the sky with respect to camera choice. But, how many Indie efforts ever get close to being projected at even a film festival? I'd guess that greater than 95% of Indie films produced each year are never seen on anything but people's computers and TV's.

You wanna shoot your $50K feature on Red? With no names? At 4K?!?!? Why?

I'd rather see more budget put into production value because it won't matter if you shoot on film or 4K if the production value isn't there.
 
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