| Author | Message | ||
     Christoph Bungert (Admin) Rating: N/A |
Digital Cinema Initiatives (DCI) founded by Studios Disney, Fox, MGM, Paramount, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal, Warner Bros. Studios and others has just released their final system requirements for digital cinema. http://www.dcimovies.com/DCI_Digital_Cinema_System_Spec_v1.pdf The document says: "DCI was created with recognition that these benefits could not be fully realized without industry-wide specifications. All parties involved in the practice of Digital Cinema must be confident that their products and services are interoperable and compatible with the products and services of all industry participants." In other words this document is a guideline for the hardware industry, especially for movie-server and projector manufacturers. And what do you know? No word on 3D/stereoscopy! Required frame rate: 24 Hz. 48 Hz are optional. Required refresh rate: none, nada, not specified I guess this means the projector manufacturers and cinema owners now are officially allowed and endorsed to invest in expensive equipment which isn't active-3D-compatible. Now imagine a theatre-owner who buys a projector for 150 k$. This thing will be there for the next 10-20 years. Christoph | ||
| M.H. Rating: N/A |
The stereo will be non-offcialy supporte in 2 forms: 1) by the help of scaling the 48 Hz to 96 Hz 2) By using 2 standard 2D servers and adding a sync and multiplex box The Christie CP2000 already supports stereo in this way in combiantion with CyViz video servers ... | ||
| Peter Wimmer Rating: N/A |
Obviously it is possible to encode stereoscopic content within a Digital Cinema Package. It was possible to show 3D content with proprietary solutions in the past and it will be in the future. But the point is: The spec does not require silver screens, IR emitters and appropriate projectors. Consequently, 3D will not work in any ordinary cinema. Special equiqment will be needed, so it will be as costly to show digital 3D as it was with analog 3D and 3D cinema will remain a niche market. Btw. the spec is very interesting to read. The digital cinema will use JPEG 2000 compression at the following resolutions: 2048 x 1080 pixels at 24 fps 2048 x 1080 pixels at 48 fps 4096 x 2160 pixels at 24 fps Maximum datarate is 250 Mbps in any case. Audio will be stored with 24 bit at 48 or 96 kHz unompressed. There's a maximum of 16 audio channels but only 8 are actually used. It was big surprise for me that only uncompressed audio is part of the spec, because this means Dolby is out of cinema business. | ||
| clyde Rating: N/A |
Hi, I was under the impression that Dolby was more a sound modulation technology than a compression one. I think dolby "logic" can still be encoded in uncompressed audio right? after all dolby is about modulating different left/right /rear channels onto a carrier signal. Maybe the discrete 16 channels above will be used for languages only? (I may be wrong tho.. anyone care to explain?) Regards Clyde | ||
| clyde Rating: N/A |
sometimes i post without thinking  it can only be used for languages if every one in the cinema were given tunable headphones !doh regards' Clyde | ||
| M.H. Rating: N/A |
Peter: The digital cinema will never show 3D in the passive way - the price for the 2 projectors neccesary is to high. The eventual Z-screen based aproach in combination with one projector is to problematic (light lose, color distortion) ... So silver screen is not a problem .. Christie supports 3D in the CP2000 as a standard future (the projectro work at 96 Hz anyway) so this is not a big problem ... What IS the problem is the super complex exncryption technology making the movie preparation possible only in special certified studios probably + the very proprietary format of the movie storage. In addition there is no chance to run the movies (even non-protected) on PC. JPEG2000 will require special cooprocesors for decompression ... So this is not a solution for middle-sized flexible stereoscopic projections .... | ||
| M.H. Rating: N/A |
P.S. If anybody need a PC based system able to play 3D stereo at identical resolutions as the digital cinema specification let me know. The only one drawback will be only 8-bit color output (in comparion to 12-bit in the digital cineam spec) ... PC graphic card do not have 12-bit outputs now ... | ||
| Peter Wimmer Rating: N/A |
Dolby Stereo is identical to Dolby Surround in home cinemas: a matrix coding of additional speakers in the stereo signal. Dolby Digital, used both in cinemas and at home is a digital compression format, similar to MP3, DTS, AAC, WMA, ... Dolby Digital is optically coded on the film between the perforation holes. Storing uncompressed audio optically on the film would have been impossible, but with digital cinema, there is no need for compression any more. The 8 audio channels are left, right, low frequency effects, left surround, right surround, left center and right center. | ||
| Peter Wimmer Rating: N/A |
> Christie supports 3D in the CP2000 as a standard future But there will be other (cheaper) projectors in the future, and I guess 3D will be just an option for an additional charge. As long as 3D is not part of the spec, there is no guarantee that all projectors support 3D. And there is still the problem with the glasses and IR emitters. The spec doesn't require these, so why should cinemas buy them? They'll wait until a large number of 3D movies is available and studios will wait until many cinema are able to play 3D content. In my opinion, it is absolutely necessary that DCI issues version 2 of the spec including 3D support. | ||
| Peter Wimmer Rating: N/A |
By the way, there is no specification for stereoscopic content on HD-DVD and BluRay as well, so how will 3D home cinema work? In addition, the old interlaced format can't be used anymore, because it is not compatible with LCD and Plasma TVs. There's the option to encode stereoscopic content at full 2 x 1920 x 1080 pixels as multi-angle content on these discs. The max. datarate is high enough to allow multi-angle at good quality, at least when using H.264 or VC-1 instead of MPEG-2. But how to play such a disk? On computers, it will be extremely difficult (because you have to develop a custom navigator which outputs both left and right stream instead of just the default one) and extremely expensive (because you have to pay licence fees). Maybe it will be even forbidden to decrypt and decode the content in software. An alternative would be coding the video in over/under or side-by-side format and store it as file on a HD-DVD-ROM and BluRay-ROM. WMV-HD discs currently work this way (but DVDs don't have the capacity to store a 2+ hours movie at 2 x 1920 x 1080 at a reasonable quality, even when using H.264 or VC-1). Advantage of this solution: Playback is very simple, at least on a computer, in fact existing playback applications already support over/under and side-by-side format. DRM would be possible as an option, e.g. using Microsoft's DRM system (but Microsoft's WMV decoder is limited to 2000 x 2000 pixels, which is really problematic). |
