Theatrical quality DCPs and Uncompressed Video

[Night457]

I have to admit that at this time anyway, over 1 TB is indeed rather large even compared to a DCP. So do employee editors get to see better image quality than paying theater audiences? That doesn't seem fair.

[deadman]

I have to admit that at this time anyway, over 1 TB is indeed rather large even compared to a DCP. So do employee editors get to see better image quality than paying theater audiences? That doesn't seem fair.

No, I don't know the specifics but I'm guessing the DCP format has lossless compression (the name is self-explanatory). An .avi saved from VirtualDub doesn't bother compressing the stream at all. Compression, lossless or lossy, takes processing power - and therefore time, quite a bit of it in the case of a 4K movie. VirtualDub is still not exactly fast but compared to the process used to make a DCP it's lightning quick. You pay for that time savings with massive file size.

[Night457]

OK I get it now!

[Moonee]

I didn't think my post would of turned this thread into almost 2 pages of discussion lol

[deadman]

I didn't think my post would of turned this thread into almost 2 pages of discussion lol

The mods should probably peel this technical discussion off and put it in a separate thread.

[Kingfisher]

but I'm guessing the DCP format has lossless compression

AFAIK, it uses lossy JPEG2000 compression applied on the original mezzanine files that the "employees" work on, so not exactly lossless. But you could consider it practically lossless to the human eye at the size of a cinema screen. But raw video is definitely larger than DCP... there are a handful of DCP-Rips floating around out there, I think it's like 300GB max.

[Night457]

Now that I move the posts to a separate thread, that will surely kill the discussion.

I didn't think my post would of turned this thread into almost 2 pages of discussion lol

The routine is that I post some crazy s*** based on my limited tech knowledge, and then deadman needs to correct me. And then I have to keep pushing him for more information because I might learn something.

Sometimes I move the resulting discussion where it really belongs.

[David32441]

On film resolution, I do recall seeing that Star Wars Episode II was recorded by Lucas on digital cameras that could only do 1440x1080 (in fact he filmed 1 or 2 scenes in episode 1 on the same cameras as a test) - knowing that they would eventually be scanned for film anyway. The special effects then were rendered at full 1080p. That means that even a bluray release is an upscale of what was captured - let alone newer 4k releases - not that Star Wars was great quality cinema
Toy Story 1 at least was rendered at 1536 by 922 pixels (it just had dam good anti-aliasing so you didn't see jagged edges unless you were close to the cinema screen). I think a few years later they went back and re-rendered it at much higher resolution with 4k in mind. I think some other early CGI films (maybe Dreamworks?) they looked to do that but had lost many of the original elements!

[deadman]

On film resolution, I do recall seeing that Star Wars Episode II was recorded by Lucas on digital cameras that could only do 1440x1080 (in fact he filmed 1 or 2 scenes in episode 1 on the same cameras as a test) - knowing that they would eventually be scanned for film anyway. The special effects then were rendered at full 1080p. That means that even a bluray release is an upscale of what was captured - let alone newer 4k releases - not that Star Wars was great quality cinema

George Lucas made plenty of questionable decisions with his franchise - the last being turning it over to Disney, who have managed to ruin Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and the Marvel properties.

It's strange that movies produced in the late 90's-early 2000's are available in lower resolution than movies filmed in the 1930's. Adoption of digital cameras for filmmaking too early didn't exactly pay off.

[Night457]

I do recall low-budget independent filmmakers who were excited at the possibilities opened up with digital cameras, and were among the first to use them. Those movies looked terrible then and still look terrible now. Mind you I was also unimpressed with the CGI effects used by the high-budget Cameron and Spielberg early adopters, so obviously there is no accounting for my tastes.