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Oceans 13 was mastered with HP Media Storage and 4K Digital
HP sets up Warner with massive storage for 4K Digital movie-making

HP is lending a hand to Warner Bros. Entertainment in helping it store the data needed while in the post production of new films, as well as the restoration of older titles.

HP Media Storage is helping Warner Bros. move to an environment that uses 4K Digital, the industry’s highest resolution format for digital video, which provides four times the resolution of today’s HDTV.

Using HP Media Storage, creative teams can store and retrieve the massive 4K files in real time while working on the task of transforming a director’s raw footage into a finished movie that will be ready for distribution into many different formats, such as 35 mm and digital cinema screens, high-definition discs, Internet TV and mobile devices.

At its Motion Picture Imaging (MPI) facility, Warner Bros. uses HP Media Storage to support high-resolution post-production tasks such as dailies, 4K digital intermediates, color correction, mastering for cinema and high/standard definition video, digital clean-up, and laser film recording.

One concern of film purists is that digital formats are unable to retain all the information captured by celluloid, though HP and Warner believe that their 4K digital masters preserve enough information to guarantee the value of the film for future generations and presentation technologies.

“HP studied our post-production processes and worked with us to deliver a flexible storage solution that supports our directors’ creative needs – and allows us to work at the quality we consider essential,” said Chris Cookson, president of Technical Operations and chief technology officer, Warner Bros. Entertainment. “Working in 4K generates enormous amounts of data and HP has made storing and retrieving that data effortless, while helping to streamline the post-production process. The bottom line is we can now meet the creative needs of filmmakers as well as the image quality demands we have as a studio. HP has helped us make that possible.”

Warner Bros. relied on HP Media Storage to produce its recent titleOceans 13. To see a video of the Warner facilities and 4K process, click here.

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Well, now they're future proof...
By Das Capitolin on 6/27/2007 11:29:31 AM , Rating: 2
Well, now they're future proof... at least until the future become the present, and we have HDTV's diplaying these movies at the 4K rate they offer. 1080P is great, but it won't be very long before that's old news.




RE: Well, now they're future proof...
By smilingcrow on 6/27/2007 11:38:42 AM , Rating: 1
1080P = 1920 x 1080 = roughly 2 mega pixels.
So does 4K = 4 mega pixels?
Hardly a quantum jump!


RE: Well, now they're future proof...
By ForumMaster on 6/27/2007 11:41:21 AM , Rating: 2
if you read the article, is says four times the resolution of today's HDTV's. so i'm assuming 8 mega pixels?


RE: Well, now they're future proof...
By colonelclaw on 6/27/2007 12:07:58 PM , Rating: 2
4k res is 4096x2160 = 8847360 pixels

i assume 1 megapixel = 1000000 pixels unless for some weird reason it follows the binary system in the same way bytes do


By glenn8 on 6/27/2007 12:15:01 PM , Rating: 3
From wikipedia it's confusing as there are several "4K" resolutions ranging from 7 to 9.7 megapixels:

Sony 4K
4096×2160 1.85:1 8,847,360

Academy 4K
3656 × 2664 1.37:1 9,739,584

Digital cinema 4K
4096 × 1714 2.39:1 7,020,544
3996 × 2160 1.85:1 8,631,360

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_resolution#Te...


RE: Well, now they're future proof...
By TomZ on 6/27/2007 12:10:20 PM , Rating: 2
It depends on the aspect ratio. If you assume 2:1, then the resolution is 4096H x 2048V ~= 8MP, but if you have an aspect ratio of 1.33, then it would be 4096H x 3072V ~= 12MP.


RE: Well, now they're future proof...
By Oregonian2 on 6/27/2007 2:13:25 PM , Rating: 2
Keep in mind that "2 megapixels" calculated that way is equivalent to about 6~8 megapixels counted the way digital cameras do (they count the red, green, and blue (etc) dots separately as pixels while the screen resolution count has each RGB triplet as a single pixel).


By dubldwn on 6/27/2007 2:39:48 PM , Rating: 2
Really? I didn't know that. So, a single frame of 1920x1080 video is what would be considered a ~6.2MP photo? Thanks for the post - that's interesting.


RE: Well, now they're future proof...
By masher2 (blog) on 6/27/2007 4:44:09 PM , Rating: 2
> "Keep in mind that "2 megapixels" calculated that way is equivalent to about 6~8 megapixels counted the way digital cameras do (they count the red, green, and blue (etc) dots separately"

Incorrect. My 5MP camera has a maximum resolution of 2592x1944. That's 5.03 million pixels...or 15 million, if you attempted to count RGB subpixels.


RE: Well, now they're future proof...
By Oregonian2 on 6/27/2007 6:04:11 PM , Rating: 4
Sorry, you've been "had" by the digital camera industry. It outputs that many pixels in the files that it produces, but it's being faked in software. If it's a 5MP digital camera, the optical CCD or CMOS sensor has 5 Million sensors TOTAL, typically half of which are sensitive only to green, a quarter only to red, and a quarter only to blue (Kodak now has a new pattern for the split). Software then fakes it into 5MP the "regular" way with 5 million of RGB triplets. Some cheap cameras fake the output file resolution to an even higher ratio. Foveon sensors actually pick up all three main colors at each sensor spot -- but they multiply that number several fold in advertising in order to give "equivalent" performance as not to be beaten by the marketing fluff numbers everybody else uses. Note that scanners don't do that, they actually have an R, G, and B sensor for each pixel in their normal output files.


RE: Well, now they're future proof...
By Oregonian2 on 6/27/2007 6:13:11 PM , Rating: 2
P.S. - To be fair, the Bayer-pattern and processing yields better than having the number of sensors divided by three and doing direct mapping to output file pixels. At least typically (there are special cases like a room that's lit by pure red light where ONLY one fourth of the sensors have any luminance output at all and the rest all having nil-output). So when I say 'software faked', it's not totally faked, but only partially faked. I suspect Kodak's new replacement for the Bayer pattern is a great deal better (although still faking things, it fakes less for the luminance which is more important that the color resolution -- and fakes the color resolution more as the tradeoff).


By masher2 (blog) on 6/27/2007 11:19:02 PM , Rating: 2
My apologies; you are correct.


RE: Well, now they're future proof...
By CCRATA on 6/27/2007 12:05:17 PM , Rating: 2
not really. If you do the research you can see that on most TV sets from average viewing difference a person cannot physically see the difference between 1080p and 720p. Going above 1080P would be useless for tv sets <100" in size, unless of course you want to sit 2 feet from you 60".

http://www.hdtvsolutions.com/HDTV_Viewing_Distance...


RE: Well, now they're future proof...
By paulpod on 6/27/2007 12:37:44 PM , Rating: 2
This is a misleading argument because if everyone had a 1080p TV, the average viewing distance would come down.

I watch on a 1920x1200 LCD monitor driven in 1:1 pixel mode from and ATI graphics card. (There is a small letterbox effect going from 16:10 to 16:9) Source is a Fusion HDTV tuner.

With 1080i material, I am compelled to pull in close because of the awesome clarity. Wide shots on golf broadcasts are stunning.

720p, however, never looks sharp at close range, in spite of ATI's scaling which works without introducing artifacts but can not make up for the missing pixels. I have to pull back from the monitor on a 720p broadcast until the lack of sharpness matches my perception how sharp things should look from a given distance.

Fox and ABC should be embarassed and had better be planning an upgrade to 1080i to coincide with wider 1080p TV adoption.


RE: Well, now they're future proof...
By TomZ on 6/27/2007 12:57:49 PM , Rating: 2
Many sources I've read say that 1080i give no noticable improvement over 720p. Can I assume you would disagree with that statement?


By Oregonian2 on 6/27/2007 2:25:29 PM , Rating: 2
Speaking about current implementations or what the format could do if the infrastructure was made for it?

If higher res were standard, the source and delivery system would move up in quality to match what can be shown. For instance, if the source is an upconverted SD DVD , going to 720 will help a lot because a normal SD set doesn't show all that a DVD can do. But going to 1080 from such as source directly (or one that was converted at the TV station previously) won't show improvement because the source isn't that good. So in the short term it makes no difference, but in the long term (if 1080 were the normal receiver) then the improvement would be visible later on.

And as has bene mentioned, once higher res is the norm, TV sets will be bought larger (or people sit closer) to take advantage of it and to be more theater like.

P.S. - And again, my mother once showed me some REALLY HORRIBLE fuzzy pictures of my sisters (that reel sort of film format, I forget its name) and asked me if I didn't think those photos were really wonderful! Some won't see improvement even if it were tremendous. Depends what one cares about. :-)


RE: Well, now they're future proof...
By Whedonic on 6/27/2007 2:31:53 PM , Rating: 3
I for one do notice the difference between 720p and properly deinterlaced 1080i.


By Clenathan on 6/27/2007 4:38:35 PM , Rating: 2
Depending on your TV (I have a 46" Sony RP), I also agree that's it's very easy to tell the difference between 720p and 1080i. Live sports games look noticeably different - 1080i has more vibrant colors but gets fuzzy/static when the camera pans from left to right while 720p is always smooth and without fuzziness/static but is not as sharp/vibrant. Personally, I do not have a preference as each resolution has it's own advantages.


RE: Well, now they're future proof...
By Brockway on 6/27/2007 1:31:07 PM , Rating: 2
Of course viewing content at non-native resolutions will look blurry. My laptop has the same 1920x1200 res, and running games at anything below 1600x1200 looks god awful. I've never tried tried this, but watching 720p content on an actual 720p display probably looks much better than upscaling to fill a 1080p screen.


By kextyn on 6/27/2007 1:40:10 PM , Rating: 2
Exactly. If you are watching 720p on a 1920x1200 screen the video is either stretched or you