Creating seamless, realistic digital effects for director Chris Nolan is always a tall order, but doing so in IMAX resolution was an extra added attraction for the post-production studios who worked on Warner Bros.’ box office hit The Dark Knight. “Chris [Nolan] has a very astute eye,” says Nick Davis, the film's visual effects supervisor. “It was important for the visual effects to look as though they were shot on set. He didn’t want the film to take on a gimmicky visual-effects look.” In keeping with that philosophy, Nolan shot footage for the major visual-effects sequences with IMAX cameras, making The Dark Knight the first feature film shown in IMAX that wasn't originally shot in 35mm.
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Comments (16) for "Delivering 8K VFX Shots for The Dark Knight"
1.
My calculations for the 8k scans came to 187 megs & 5.6k @ 88megs. I wonder how they are getting 200meg to 160 meg for the downrezzes.
Posted by celboy on Thursday, July 24, 2008 @ 09:23 AM
2.
Just when we thought we had blisteringly fast machines to do 2k, some jumped up director comes along and denotes that '4k was too small' oh please! Just give it up. From about 3k onwards the difference in sharpness between the resolutions starts to level off considerably. There is little perceptible difference between a 4,5,6 or even 7k scan in terms of sharpness and resolution, hence why the Digital Cinema Initiative denotes that 4k digital projectors will be sufficient to display correctly all the nuances that film has to offer.
Really at this
Posted by majik on Thursday, July 24, 2008 @ 07:02 PM
3.
Give me a break... there's a huge "perceptible difference" between 4K and 7K scan in res. Buy some new glasses nerd!
Posted by Dan Bailey on Friday, July 25, 2008 @ 10:03 AM
4.
Thanks for the comments.
Celboy, good question. Barbara went back to Paul Franklin at Double Negative and asked him to run us through the exact numbers. Turns out the 5.6K files took up a little less space than he had remembered. Here are his notes:
###
5.6K: 5616x4096;
A full 5.6K was actually about 100 meg for the exr and 122 meg for the
cineon/dpx;
8K: 8192x6144;
approximately 150 meg for the exr and 200 for the cineon/dpx;
exr files are run length encoded whereas cineon/dpx is not, so as well as
being more efficient they also vary in size depending on how much detail
(difference between pixels) there is on a frame to frame basis;
My mistake on the downrez figure for the 8K to 5.6
Posted by Bryant Frazer on Friday, July 25, 2008 @ 10:57 AM
5.
Thank you for explanation about 5.6 and 8k, is fantastic get this quality.
Posted by Oswaldo on Friday, July 25, 2008 @ 11:31 AM
6.
I'd love to see a full resolution lossless 8K frame from the film. It makes me curious to see how much practical detail is actually there.
Posted by atomisok on Friday, July 25, 2008 @ 05:01 PM
7.
Clerk: "What should we do with all these Gates 4000s?"
Manager: "Throw those pieces of crap in the trash!"
Posted by Dan on Friday, July 25, 2008 @ 05:38 PM
8.
Was there any rotoscoping in the picture? It isn't mentioned even though it's a big part of post, isn't it?
Posted by George H on Friday, July 25, 2008 @ 06:07 PM
9.
To Mr Bailey - have you actually done a comparison between 4K and 7K? Perhaps you should. And you would discover that the previous poster is correct - you get diminishing returns the higher the resolution - due to several factors. The only people who claim outrageous benefits of big resolutions sell film scanners.
Posted by Ian on Saturday, July 26, 2008 @ 02:25 AM
10.
I wonder what is the purpose of all these extreme resolutions when, for example, Fuji gives a maximun (decent) resolving power of 60 cycles for its new Eterna-RDI.
(In case nobody knows 60 cycles could be thought as 120 pixels per millimeter, which gives us for a 20 mm area on a 35mm negative around 2400 pixels horizontally.)
Not to mention that Contact printers, on their manuals, specify a maximum resolution of 50 line pairs, which can be thought as 100 pixels per millimeter por a projection copy.
One can also take into account that a color film dye cloud is around 10-25 microns diameter, and you get an idea of the resolution limitations.
Posted by J. M. M. Fiebelkorn on Saturday, July 26, 2008 @ 02:32 AM
11.
Thats odd with all the 8K processing and stuff the movie should have looked really sharp but it was no better than any other 35mm film - in fact i think the camera was so out of focus they probably could have done it in 2K and it would have looked the same !
Posted by stephen on Saturday, July 26, 2008 @ 04:42 AM
12.
I'm just a normal movie-goer, but I can tell you that the IMAX portions of the movie were enormously effective. The audience I was in gave a collective "whoa!" when the opening IMAX shot appeared. It was like I've been looking at the world through a slit in a box, and suddenly someone took the box off my head and I could see EVERYTHING. A profoundly moving experience.
Posted by Dave on Saturday, July 26, 2008 @ 09:56 AM
13.
Fiebelkorn:
Using your number of 100pixels per mm.
IMAX uses 70mm film (turned sideways)
so 7k pixels in height and at 2.4 aspect ratio =16800
So the IMAX film has a theoretical pixel limit of 16k x 7k image size.
They did release this in IMAX so they did need to keep the image quality up to similar standards. The "enhancement" to the 35mm print? See the linked article for comments on the tests they did in deciding if it was worth it.
Posted by Dale on Saturday, July 26, 2008 @ 02:31 PM
14.
stephen, clearly the projectionist at your theater had the focus off.
Posted by ben on Tuesday, July 29, 2008 @ 03:34 PM
wiki and others indicate a 1.43 aspect ratio, or 70mm x 49mm.
Posted by mo_joe on Friday, August 1, 2008 @ 12:22 AM
16.
What's the MTF of the film recorder the print stock and the neg as a concatenated tranfer function?
Is there a film recorder out there that can even shoot 8K?
Sorry, I'm with the guys who are saying "WTF" on this one. The screen value of the quadrupled file size is not justified.
It's not the size that matters, it's how you use it.
Posted by Huh What? on Tuesday, January 20, 2009 @ 06:23 PM
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