Batman

Is Batman Begins Better in 4K?

As keynoter at the pre-NAB Digital Cinema Summit, Warner Bros. Entertainment’s CTO Christopher J. Cookson took the opportunity to give attendees a lecture on the advantages of 4K post-production pipelines. He trotted out some of the numbers we’ve all heard before about screen heights and the limits of human vision that seem to suggest movie-theater viewers who typically sit at least three screen heights away from the front of the theater can’t see resolution beyond 2K. But, he noted, today’s stadium-theater designs often have a depth of only about three screen heights. And he argued that viewers with 20/20 vision sitting halfway back in one of those theaters would be able to resolve detail roughly equivalent to 4096×2160 4K delivery.

Acknowledging a general perception that 4K is overkill, at least today, Cookson said the problem is that film prints are not good enough to resolve the extra detail from a 4K master. He said digital screenings of films from the Warner library – and he named Batman Begins and Cool Hand Luke among them – had indicated that you see more picture information from the camera negative in 4K than on a film print. In short, Cookson claimed that 4K post and projection are making movies look better than they have in the history of movies – and of course that may represent another opportunity for the post industry, which has already made the leap to HD and 2K resolutions. “There’s life in the [35mm] standard to do it again,” he said, invoking 4K-enhanced WB titles like The Wizard of Oz, Gone With the Wind and The Adventures of Robin Hood.

And then he threw down the gauntlet: “A 2K archive that mechanically replicates a DI at 2K locks the negative to an image not much better than what a 100-year-old technology can project. It’s as if the industry has entered a dark age of production where what’s put in the vault is less than what could have been created five years ago …. We need to push the post industry to deploy 4K tools and infrastructure. We need to be aware of what we throw away, and the implications of the decisions we make.”

Warner Bros. has long been beating the drum for 4K pipelines, and some audience members remain more than a little skeptical. Cookson urged the creation of 4K pipelines from scratch, rather than trying to “graft it onto an HDTV pipeline.” (So much for 4K shortcuts.) And he argued that, if a studio amortizes the technology costs over many films, moving to 4K is “not hugely more expensive on a per-picture basis.” Matt Tomlinson of Tippet Studio noted that 4K increases VFX rendering times “exponentially,” and Cookson agreed the rules are different for certain films. “But people aren’t understanding the trade-off,” he said. “They’re saying, ‘You’ll never see the difference, so don’t worry about it.’”

A few months ago, I saw a screening of Tears of the Black Tiger, a postmodern Thai western (yes!) from 2000 that featured some very aggressive color manipulation. I’m told the film looks stunning on DVD, but the 35mm release print was a little dingy, with a lot of artifacting and even aliasing visible during the white-on-black end credits. Turns out the movie was finished on DigiBeta tape before being filmed out for theatrical release – and the result is that Tears of the Black Tiger will forever be limited, in theatrical screenings as well as on high-definition displays, by its DigiBeta origins. Obviously today’s DI features look a lot better than that — but is there a time coming when 2K will be the new DigiBeta?