Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, the Disney/Jerry Bruckheimer sequel starring Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley, received its digital premiere on June 24 at Disneyland, in Aneheim, California. The film was stored and played back on QuVIS’s third-generation QuVIS Cinema System, in JPEG2000.
Why JPEG2000? According to the JPEG Committee, a standards group that monitors JPEG2000 developments in digital cinema and other media applications, the goal of Digital Cinema is to achieve and surpass today's best film quality. The parameters for the digital representation of the movie, therefore, must be much more extensive than in standard videos: These include high dynamic range, different color spaces (sRGB, SRGB-YCC), highest image resolutions (8192 x 8192 pixels, or 4096 x 3112 for 35mm film scans), 4:2:2 – 4:4:4 sampling, and lossless compression. Motion JPEG2000, the consortium suggests, is the best compression standard for Digital Cinema because “it delivers enough headroom in the description of digital movie data. Some features of Motion JPEG2000 are intra-frame coding for a simple editing access, mathematically and visually lossless compression, metadata insertion, scalability in resolution and [picture] quality.”
A revamped Pirates of the Caribbean attraction, featuring 120 animatronic “performers,” an enhanced digital sound system, sets, lighting and special effects, has been timed for re-launch at both Disney’s California and Florida theme parks for the national release of the film on July 7.