Theatrical quality DCPs and Uncompressed Video

[Night457]

I don't think tubi videos are compressed

Every video is compressed with a video codec. (unless you want a filesize of around 300.000 GB.)

But yeah, tubi's picture quality is better than most videos on yt.

YES! It is about time to toss the BluRays in the bin and have home distribution of complete DCPs on solid state drives. I am sick of the media companies selling the same movies over and over on each format upgrade. It is time to have the final format.

Of course once I have my favorite movies on DCP they will decide an 8K version is necessary...

[ghost]

YES! It is about time to toss the BluRays in the bin and have home distribution of complete DCPs on solid state drives. I am sick of the media companies selling the same movies over and over on each format upgrade. It is time to have the final format.

Of course once I have my favorite movies on DCP they will decide an 8K version is necessary...

I guess you must be joking.

I don't know the size of a DCP, but just try to save a video in VirtualDub as an uncompressed avi and see what file size you will get.

[Night457]

I guess you must be joking.

For once, I actually mean it -- at least in principle.

Spoiler: The best possible quality right now is a Digital Cinema Package, digital files on a hard drive, generally 100-500 GB. Of course a long movie in full 4K could exceed that. All the movies I get now are digital files and I store them on a hard drive. It is the obvious next step for home media after spinning plastic disks, and some people would actually be willing to use 300 GB for one film if that is the TOP video quality. A 30 TB solid-state drive for $5800 could easily hold 100 movies, and I see limited edition BluRays/4kUHD over $60 each easily selling out. They are crap compared to the uncompressed versions. A cheaper option would be a 36 TB HDD for only $780. (SOME people have the money for it, just not me. Realistically *I* do not have the necessary internet speeds, playback equipment, eyesight, and hearing to get and appreciate the best movie presentation. Younger and richer movie fans do.)

I did not even know there was such a thing as an uncompressed AVI...

[deadman]

The best possible quality right now is a Digital Cinema Package, digital files on a hard drive, generally 100-500 GB. Of course a long movie in full 4K could exceed that.

I think the upper range of that generally is 4K. Even with large external drives, which I do have, I couldn't keep more than a handful of DCPs if I wanted room for all the rest of my stuff. You would only keep them long term if you really, really loved a particular movie. The more rational approach would be to get software that can encode .m2ts files at 4K bluray quality and do so. I might post the complete DCP to Usenet so that for the next 15 years if I ever wanted to re-download it, it would be there. If there were certain scenes I wanted to clip in the original uncompressed form, I could do that too. The clips would be big but manageable.

DCP was never intended as a home video format. A significant leap in storage capacity could always change that. If external drives in the exabyte range hit the consumer market that gargantuan size wouldn't seem all that big anymore. Be a while though. Don't expect to see 4 EB drives on Amazon anytime soon.

8K bluray will never exist in physical form - but it could still be done as a purely digital format, an .iso that plays like any other disc and has 8K video files on it. Maybe they'll be called m3ts. Most likely an 8K bluray image file would average in the 150-250 GB range.

[Night457]

Thank you for your input, you are always reliable for informed film tech commentary. I remember the first computer that I bought for myself had a massive 40 MB hard drive. You read that right. Storage capacity gets larger all the time. But those who create and sell the product have absolutely no motivation to immediately create the largest possible storage and make it available. It MUST be farmed out a bit at a time to keep people buying, until they get used to the largest available storage capacity. THEN they can increase it to get buyers for a new, improved product. It is exactly the same as the gradually improving home video formats VHS laserdisc DVD BluRay 4k UHD (deliberately omitting some less successful formats here). I understand that time must be allowed for figuring out how to improve the technology, but I am absolutely convinced that the industry resists change so they can continue getting every last dollar from the older technology first. Don't give people something better too early!

OF COURSE what the studios send to theatres is not intended for home use. Yet some wealthy film fans have their own 35 mm projectors and literal home theaters. It can be done! I think that most modern digital films are projected in the theater at a mere 2K but I am not sure because I honestly do not keep up with theatrical showings. I am sure you are correct about 8K. I don't expect I will be around to afford 8K and I suspect that the vast majority of eyeballs would not be able to see an improvement. Maybe it is really only appropriate as a format for storage of a yet-uncreated hyper-realistic 3D kind of movie?

[deadman]

I don't expect I will be around to afford 8K and I suspect that the vast majority of eyeballs would not be able to see an improvement. Maybe it is really only appropriate as a format for storage of a yet-uncreated hyper-realistic 3D kind of movie?

Even 4K exceeds the resolution of the human eyeball. I've watched 8K videos and I'm honestly wondering if they look any better, slight improvements you may perceive are probably placebo effect. You expect it so you kinda almost see it. The main purpose of resolutions above 4K imo is that you can zoom in without noticeable quality loss. That's why they have things like 12 or 16 K security cameras - you can zoom in on a suspect from far away and get a really sharp, clear view of their face.

Of course they do planned obsolescence and staggered introduction of new technologies. The right time to introduce a new model is usually when sales of the previous one reach a peak, then decline to a certain level. You miss out on sales when you undercut your own products with newer gear too quickly.

[Night457]

"planned obsolescence" yeah, that's the term I could not think of. Thanks.

[David32441]

I don't expect I will be around to afford 8K and I suspect that the vast majority of eyeballs would not be able to see an improvement. Maybe it is really only appropriate as a format for storage of a yet-uncreated hyper-realistic 3D kind of movie?

Even 4K exceeds the resolution of the human eyeball. I've watched 8K videos and I'm honestly wondering if they look any better, slight improvements you may perceive are probably placebo effect. You expect it so you kinda almost see it. The main purpose of resolutions above 4K imo is that you can zoom in without noticeable quality loss. That's why they have things like 12 or 16 K security cameras - you can zoom in on a suspect from far away and get a really sharp, clear view of their face.

Of course they do planned obsolescence and staggered introduction of new technologies. The right time to introduce a new model is usually when sales of the previous one reach a peak, then decline to a certain level. You miss out on sales when you undercut your own products with newer gear too quickly.

8k and higher is only needed if you're doing stuff like the sphere in Vegas. Where the screen is as big as your entire vision.
And anyone who's worked in VirtualDub knows what uncompressed AVI is - as that's the default output - and even at DVD resolution it'll eat HDD at about 20mb a second.

[Night457]

That makes sense for 8k. I've heard of VirtualDub but don't think I ever attempted it. "For example, a standard uncompressed video can require about 112 GB per hour at 1080p resolution" is what I get from my quick search. Yeah, that's exactly what I want!

[deadman]

That makes sense for 8k. I've heard of VirtualDub but don't think I ever attempted it. "For example, a standard uncompressed video can require about 112 GB per hour at 1080p resolution" is what I get from my quick search. Yeah, that's exactly what I want!

Oh it takes up a lot more memory than that. The uncompressed .avi for a 1080p movie or TV episode would be well over 1 TB. The whole point of it is to process the video in a lossless way, sharpening, de-noising, increasing brightness and contrast for video that's too dark, or whatever else you want to do with it. Then you re-encode the result into a more reasonably sized file (only one re-encode rather than two). Afterward you get rid of the .avi file. Of course you need the storage capacity to hold it in the meantime.

A better approach is to use AVISynth - with the right plugins you can do all the same manipulations as with VirtualDub, and you don't need to go through the intermediate step of recording a massive uncompressed file onto your hard drive. I often set up in VirtualDub because it lets you see what the result of your adjustments is going to look like. Then use an AVISynth script to do the actual encoding.