Project description
Cross-media content for leisure and entertainment
Keeping European cinema at the cutting edge
A novel video-production system developed by European researchers enables the production of high-quality digital cinema, called 4k movie production.
The system will usher in better quality cinematography with lower processing overheads, allowing Europe’s industry to remain competitive in the global market place.
After 100 years of celluloid, cinema is moving to digital film production. In the very near future, movies will be shot in 4K format, a very high-quality cinematography standard. The transition will mean the end of the cinema reel and the introduction of other digital distribution channels like DVD, hard disks or even satellite transmission.
But digital cinema means more than a shift from analogue technology on film to digital 1s and 0s. It also calls for completely new workflows within most parts of the digital cinema chain.
Each link in the chain requires special handling, a difficult task given the size of the files involved. Shooting a single scene in 4K resolution can generate between 200 and 500 gigabytes of data, so a 90-minute film can take up terabytes of space.
It takes a lot of time, effort and money to process, edit, distribute and archive all of that data, which must then be converted for TV, DVD and other media.
Simpler, cheaper, more efficient
Now, thanks to the work of the Worldscreen project, a European initiative to develop a new way to make and distribute digital movies, those difficult tasks will become easier, cheaper and more efficient.
First, Worldscreen evaluated various data-coding standards, finally selecting JPEG2000, a new standard for digital cinema, because it offers adjustable compression rates, from lossless to lossy, with maximum quality. JPEG2000 also encodes images frame-by-frame, which means more precise editing.
Even better, JPEG2000 has a multi-layer-quality structure. It is possible within post-production to work with different resolutions or qualities in the same file.
For example, you can choose the most suitable post-production settings without downscaling or resizing the file. And at the end, you can apply all adjustments and processing steps to the master file.
This structure allows the extraction of different resolution sizes to produce content quickly for distribution to other media.
Setting standards
Within Worldscreen, metadata models were developed for the post-production. Metadata is information about the content of a file. These metadata are stored separately in the system and provide information such as colour grading and editing adjustments.
The team became involved in the creation of the JPEG2000 standard, too, and contributed significantly to its development.
The researchers also developed a portable media-storage device for capturing the source material from digital cameras on the movie set. It can encode the footage in JPEG2000. Meanwhile, the Worldscreen partners developed post-production and transcoding methods for distribution and decoding systems.
Commercial opportunities
Next they created a quality-assessment methodology for digital cinema and supported research and standardisation of a layered scheme data-compression system. The workflow and metadata models for using JPEG2000 across the entire production chain.
Worldscreen presented its results at the Berlinale 2007, an international film festival, and at the National Association of Broadcasters 2007 conference in Las Vegas, USA. Movie producers, studios and even commercial broadcasters showed enormous interest in the technology, so there is a strong potential for commercialisation.
Technical hurdles hamper the creation of content in D- and E-Cinema applications, as well as in the conversion of film to other media; especially as high demands on quality lead to a huge amount of source material data and previous data-flow concepts cannot handle this in an adequate manner. These bottlenecks during acquisition, editing, archiving and conversion of digital movies are responsible for large delays between film shoot and presentation to the market. The goal of the WorldScreen project is to address these problems by using layered scheme compression algorithms and preservation of the highest quality possible at the same time. -For acquisition, portable storage for digital cinema cameras with lossless or near lossless layered data compression will be investigated. On the set previews can be extracted without transcoding of data. -For archiving and transcoding, layered scheme compression offers the possibility of access to different resolutions and qualities without the need to hold different copies of the same image. -During postproduction, previews, editing lists or color correction can be done without access to the original full image. -For distribution, the project will solve the problem of how to deliver different qualities in terms of resolution, color subsampling etc. to cinema theatres. Digital film copies could be created in different resolutions on the fly from a single distribution format. A combination with the use of MXF as universal file format is planned.The main objective of the project is to evaluate viable compression systems in a series of field tests for the applications mentioned above. This process will evaluate the usability of the technology and further technical and economical output specifications will be formulated and reviewed. The viability of the adoption of different compression schemes in relation to the specific demands of the cinema workflow will be evaluated.
Fields of science
Call for proposal
FP6-2003-IST-2
See other projects for this call
Funding Scheme
STREP - Specific Targeted Research ProjectCoordinator
80686 Munchen
Germany