the quest for the perfect 4K

Just received some footage from the launch event hosted by Barco Tuesday night at the ShowEast convention where they launched their 4K projector. While I was invited to attend the launch event as part of my quest, due to time pressures I was unfortunately not able to attend in person.

For more info on the brand-new Barco DP4K-32B projector, go to www.barco.com/en/digitalcinema/product/2310.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank all the people who have made this quest possible and have given so generously of their time.

Thank you too for taking the time to read my blog and watch my videos, and to all of you who have taken the time to make comments or point out any mistakes.

This has been a great and unique opportunity for me to go and meet people in the industry that I just never would have met and visit places that I never would have visited. I really have been on this quest to understand the ‘Secrets of 4K’.

Like everything, if there was more time, there are a number of other people I would have liked to talk with, and a number of other areas which I would liked to have explored. Maybe some other time…

Thanks again and best regards,

Peter J. Knight, signing off for the last time.

This morning I got the following video message from Todd Hoddick, Vice-President for Barco Digital Cinema in North America.

He announced details of Barco’s launch event for their brand-new 4K projector at the ShowEast Convention in Orlando. I was invited to the event, but unfortunately was unable to attend, but I will be provided with footage to include in my final blog post tomorrow.

Something to look forward to!

Peter

As I approach the end of my “quest for 4K”, I’m beginning to think about what I have learnt, the questions I still have, and indeed the impact of all of this. In short, what the secrets of 4K really are.

I started this quest not knowing much about 4K, and what I have discovered is that where 4K is concerned, you need to look at much more than just resolution and even the image on the screen. You need to consider the whole cinema going experience; as a concept which could provide additional revenue for cinema owners.

We discovered that cinemas are striving to create the best possible cinema going experience for their audience, as we saw with both Kinepolis in Europe and Cinemark in the US. However, the image resolution is only one element of the overall picture for a cinema. As Bob Claeys from Kinepolis said, you have to invest in order to provide the audience with the experience – customers need to live the dream when they watch a film and 4K can certainly be a part of this.

And of course we’ve heard from Cinemark who are having great success with their XD auditoriums. They have selected Barco as their preferred partner for a host of reasons, even looking beyond light output and image quality to include things such as reliability, modularity and operating cost, which are of course also important from the exhibitor’s perspective. They have seen the brand-new Barco 4K projector, which they are really excited about.

Indeed, there is more to image quality than resolution. There are other things to consider as Michael Karagosian explained, such as colour and contrast, which are probably more important than pure resolution as they are perceived by the human eye first.

Resolution can make a difference, especially on very large screens, where there is a large space to fill with light, and where it’s necessary to have the audience sit very close to the screen, in which case a 4K image helps to reproduce more of the information which is in the original source image. But given the above, also in those cases it’s important to have the right 4K and not lose sight of the other aspects of image quality.

Like I alluded to in one of my posts, in some ways it’s a bit like choosing a digital stills camera. Buying a camera with more megapixels will not necessarily get you a better picture. You need to look at all the other aspects of image quality such as colour, contrast, quality of the sensors, etc. And you need to consider how you are going to use that camera, for example what size prints you are going to use, etc. I think you need to consider similar issues when comparing 4K to 2K and looking at the different imaging technologies in digital cinema, in function of the experience that you are trying to create for cinemagoers.

The headlines seem to be that 4K will suit the big premium screens that need additional brightness on the screen, and provide extra resolution for audiences who sit in the front rows, but that is however not the end all and be all.

What 4K will do is provide exhibitors an extra ingredient in providing their audience with the ultimate cinema going experience, a ‘first-class movie premiere’ at their local cinema…

Peter

Since the start of my quest, a number of people have talked both about the movie experience and about Cinemark and their XD auditoriums. Today, I met James Meredith, Vice President Marketing & Communications, and Phil Hacker, Director Presentation for Cinemark, at the Cinemark venue in West Plano, Dallas.

My visit to Cinemark today (www.cinemark.com/corporate.asp) completes my trip to the US. I specifically went there to see for myself what an XD auditorium was all about, having had several talks about it during my quest.

In the video James explains about the XD concept, which in basic terms is about the best possible sound and the best possible digital picture in the best possible seating on the biggest possible screen -- and believe me, they really are huge! They fit from floor to ceiling, wall to wall.

Even the entrance to the XD auditorium is designed to look and be different to the other theatres to give the sense that you are going to experience something different. James also explained that anything which helps to give them a marketing opportunity to the public is a good thing.

After I had interviewed James and Phil, I was given my own guided tour of an XD auditorium, where Phil had arranged a short example of what a programme would look like on the screens (three trailers: one in flat, one in scope and one in 3D). I was also able to see a ‘before’ screen which wasn’t XD, but the XD screen had a real wow factor.

I really enjoyed my screening in the XD auditorium, and would want to watch all my Hollywood blockbusters in them. While as a customer you pay an average of $3 more than an ordinary seat ($9.50 for peak Friday and Saturday evenings), I would happily pay my $12.50 to get such an experience -- the premiere screening of a film, but at a local level.

And speaking to James there was evidence that the XD screens were paying off, with people actively seeking out these screens to watch a film, and I can see why.

Cinemark are very pleased with Barco, who are a trusted partner for them. Up in the projection box, there are 20 Barco projectors, and Cinemark are really looking forward to 4K arriving, as they believe it will enhance the XD experience even further.

After the last 8 days, I think I can understand why Cinemark are so excited by the introduction of 4K projectors and why they want to put them into their XD auditoriums…

Peter

I think for me, visiting Texas Instruments this morning was the highlight of my quest so far.

In fact one of the biggest challenges I’m going to have is cutting down all the material that I recorded this morning, so that it’s short enough to use. Actually I have decided to post two videos: one which focuses mainly on how DLP technology works and a second talking more specifically about resolution and this quest.

When I arrived at the TI offices in Dallas, I was given a tour of their comprehensive demonstration rooms. This is a treasure trove of rooms which are set up as though they were real. They have for instance a school classroom with a 3D projector, a boardroom, etc.

I also saw pocket projectors and projectors built into mobile phones. Furthermore, they had the very first DLP projector on display. All of these projectors use exactly the same technology as that in a DLP Cinema projector. I was also able to see at close hand what it is that I have spent the last two weeks eating, sleeping and dreaming about: a 2K and a 4K DLP chip!

This was probably the one part of the quest which has allowed me to get the most answers, and this is where I have been able to really get into the finer detail of the technical side of 4K. It will really help me when I come to draw my final conclusions in a couple of days time. Especially as I was allowed to see for myself a 4K projector working. In fact it‘s one of the first 4K DLP Cinema projectors in the world. It was of course under lab conditions, so I’m not going to say what I thought about the image at the moment as it wouldn’t be right. But I was impressed!

One of the things Dave Duncan (Business Manager for DLP Cinema Products) mentioned and I found very interesting, was the reliability factor of the chips. Dave told me that up in the labs, they had chips which they had been testing continuously, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year since 1996, with the tiny mirrors moving 50,000 times a second -- in fact the test team have run out of names for the numbers.

I’m not going to try to explain how DLP works here, Dave does a really good job of that in the first video, and you can also read all about it on their website: http://www.dlp.com/technology/how-dlp-works/default.aspx.

From Texas Instruments’ point of view, digital cinema is really successful at the moment and they are seeing sales from all over the world. While America seems to be leading the way, Europe isn’t far behind, and there are many other territories that are also growing at a steady pace. In fact Dave was showing me a board which was meant to show all the DLP installations across the world, but he said that it was now impossible to keep track of them all these days -- apparently in the early days of digital cinema they used a pin in a map.

One of the major things I was reminded of during my discussions was that the 2K ‘Series 2’ digital projectors are all able to be upgraded to 4K in the future. This means of course that a cinema could buy a DLP today, safe in the knowledge that in a few years time they would be able to upgrade to 4K if they wanted to, without having to buy an entirely new projector.

Dave also explained that the DCI specifications, which Michael has spoken about previously, also allowed for both 2K and 4K resolution projectors and that, as it was an industry standard, it wasn’t a case of removing 2K from the specifications.

As you will have picked up from elsewhere in my blog, my analogy of 2K vs. 4K is that of 35mm vs. 70mm. I asked Dave about this view and his response was that I was on track with that thought and went on to give an example of the early days of digital cinema were there were direct comparisons made between digital and film. And 4K will give theatre owners the option of having the best of the best in their screens.

Tomorrow I’ll be going to the cinema, as I’ll be visiting Cinemark to experience their XD Extreme Digital Cinema projection…

Peter

As part of this quest I have been able to get ‘out of the office’ for a trip to Los Angeles, where I’ve met Michael Karagosian.

I have to be honest that I’d never heard of Michael before, although talking about this quest to various people, there are plenty of people in the industry who know him. Having read Michael’s biography on his website, he is someone I really should know, because he has an amazing involvement in both the cinema industry as a whole an in digital cinema in particular. If you don’t know Michael yourself, then I believe you should have a look at http://mkpe.com/company/.

Michael has been involved with digital cinema since the beginning and has been actively involved with writing the DCI standards. If you want to know more about the DCI standards, then have a look at this Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Cinema_Initiatives

I was lucky enough to spend the entire morning talking to Michael, about my 4K quest, and about other aspects of the cinema industry as a whole. It’s also great that, despite having never met each other before, there were people we both knew.

What I discovered, and is becoming more and more clear, is that resolution isn’t actually the most important aspect of a picture. There are a number of other elements which help to determine the quality of the image. As you will hear when you view the video, Michael has a hierarchy for picture quality, which puts colour and contrast above resolution. The colours and the contrast will provide a better image quality than the resolution just on its own. These are the things which we will notice first. Is the colour right? Is the contrast right? Are the blacks really black, etc.? Michael suggested that a high contrast ratio on a 2K projector would be better than a low contrast ratio on a 4K projector.

So, it’s more than just a numbers game. If you are buying a digital stills camera, buying a camera with more megapixels does not necessarily mean that you are going to get a better picture. It will depend on what’s happening in terms of compression, on the sensors involved, and on the rest of the process involved. The same seems to be true for digital projectors. Resolution seems to matter if you sit in the front few rows of the movie theatre, rather than right at the back of the theatre where resolution will matter less.

I also asked Michael about the movie going experience and whether 4K would help that experience. Michael felt that the premier movie going experience is about immersion and therefore you are likely to be closer to the screen, which in turn means that the resolution becomes important. Although again, brightness will also have an important effect.

Michael also mentioned that, once you have 4K projectors, showing 4K films on them comes with a cost. But then a 4K projector will happily show a 2K film.

Off to Texas Instruments, the makers of DLP…

You can’t spend some time in the digital cinema industry without knowing about Texas Instruments. After all, it’s their chips which are in the majority of digital cinema projectors (including Barco’s) around the world. So there’s really nowhere else I can go but Dave Duncan (Manager, DLP Cinema/DLP HDTV at TI) to talk about 4K and to see if he and Texas Instruments are able to help me with my quest and unlock all the mysteries of 4K.

Check out my next episode tomorrow…

Peter

Today I went to see Patrick von Sychowski, Global Head of Strategy at Reliance Media Works. Patrick is someone I have known the name of for years and I was really thrilled to finally meet him. It was another very interesting discussion, which I suspect may be a theme running through this quest.

Patrick has had a long and varied career in the industry. If you want to know his full history, you can check out his Linkedin profile: http://uk.linkedin.com/in/patrickvons.

Topic of our discussion was India -- a very interesting territory, because it’s still a growing market for cinema chains and it’s still a fairly under-screened country. But according to Patrick, it would be rather difficult to find a cinema in certain parts of India which is still running traditional film.

India is also a very interesting territory as it was the only one which had E-Cinema before it had D-Cinema, i.e. it had digital projectors before it had 2K. Like many other areas, 3D has taken off in India as well, although it’s still not having a big impact on Bollywood productions.

Patrick is a big fan of 4K technology. In fact, he believes 4K may be the future. This is largely because of Patrick’s knowledge and interest in the post-production side of the industry, where films are shot and scanned in 4K but currently being ‘downgraded’ to 2K, thereby throwing away a whole lot of information. Patrick and Reliance Media Works have been playing with 4K for a while and look forward to experimenting more with it.

I asked Patrick whether my initial thoughts that the 2K vs. 4K question is a bit like the 35mm vs. 70mm effect of the past, and he agreed that it was a good assessment. He did however believe that 4K might become the standard, because it contains more information in the picture.

My final question to Patrick was about the fact many small independent cinemas and film societies, who may only have one screen (or use it part-time), will be thinking about converting to digital and only have one chance to get this right. What advice did he have to them, given that what is already a difficult choice, is potentially being made even more complicated with the arrival of 4K. Patrick’s answer was that the real choice is not so much about whether to go for 2K or 4K, but about what you can do with the new technology. If you go with 2K, you will be absolutely fine for the life of the projector, but if you can get 4K, that’s even better, because of all the reasons mentioned before.

So, I am nearly halfway through my quest, and I have to admit that there have been times where I have been feeling a bit skeptical about the value of 4K and whether it was really worth all the fuss. Having spoken to Patrick, I am feeling quite excited about it, and I’m thinking that I am beginning to understand why it may be of benefit to cinemas and the industry as a whole.

The original interview was 17 minutes long, but I had to cut it down, which is a bit of a shame as it was all really interesting.

The next few days of my quest, you will see me travelling to the USA to talk to a number of industry experts about 4K. Stay tuned!

Peter

Yesterday we had the first part of the interview with Bob Claeys from Kinepolis, where there was a direct discussion about 4K projection. Today, the interview is more about the overall movie experience and how 4K may impact this.

If I were going to open a cinema multiplex, I would definitely want to turn to Bob for advice, because apart from being in the business for so long, he understands what the movie experience is all about.

As you will hear from the video, there’s isn’t just one element which makes the cinema experience, it’s many elements combined. It’s the way you buy your tickets, through to the way you are treated by the staff, to the sound (all screens are THX), through to the projection and the images on the screen,…

Kinepolis was one of the early adopters of Digital Cinema right at the beginning with some of the earliest DLP Cinema projectors. It was clear that investment is a key element: give the audience the best experience and they will come back, especially if you have a competitor nearby. One of the other elements was that Kinepolis tried to educate its audience about the equipment and the investments they were making; they even created an in-house trailer to persuade moviegoers to return their 3D glasses after the film.

One of the first things that struck me about the Kinepolis multiplex in Antwerp is that they are really pushing the 3D concept to the public. Before I even got through the cinema doors, I knew that there was 3D installed in the cinemas, as there were stickers on the doors and a big inflatable ’3D’ in the fairly large foyer area.

Kinepolis Antwerp has 24 screens and you can see that it is designed to deal with a vast number of customers at the same time: there are two ticket areas, a large foyer, LCD screens showing trailers along with a brilliant and bright selection of movie posters for what is currently showing.

So just like 3D has added something extra to the cinema experience, so will 4K (maybe?) And along with that comes additional revenue (in theory).

The business-to-business market seems to be very important to Kinepolis and other cinema chains at the moment. One of the most interesting things I heard during my visit was that one of the driving forces for the conversion to digital was actually to make the subtitles better (instead of always being out of focus to the rest of the film and bouncing about all over the place).

One thing has become clear, though. For Kinepolis it’s all about creating an overall movie going experience for its customers. And 4K is just a part of this.

But now I’m off to the US, the home of Hollywood and Texas Instruments amongst others, to see if I can learn more about 4K. But first an interview with Patrick von Sychowski from Reliance Media, who can tell me more about the Indian movie market.

I’ll tell you all about that tomorrow…

Peter

My adventures today have taken me to meet Bob Claeys at Kinepolis in Antwerp. It was a very interesting experience and a good start to my quest. I discovered a lot about a chain I’m not familiar with, as although they are a large chain in Europe we don’t have any of their cinemas in the UK.

In fact, there’s so much material from my visit that it’s going to be split over two days, so stay tuned for the second part tomorrow!

But before I talk too much about that, it’s worth providing some quick background information to Kinepolis Cinemas (taken from there website: http://investors.kinepolis.com/index.cfm?Language_Code=ENG)

“Kinepolis runs 23 multiplex cinemas in Belgium, France, Spain, Poland and Switzerland. Kinepolis employs 1,880 people and welcomed 22 million paying customers in 2009. Revenue in 2009 was € 231.2m.”

Kinepolis Group achieved an €11.6 million profit in the first half of 2010. Right from the beginning of the company’s history, they have been interested and made use of the latest technology in order to provide its audience with the best possible experience.

For those of you who have never met Bob Claeys, he is the R&D expert for Kinepolis and just speaking to him for a few minutes is enough to discover how enthusiastic he is about both cinema and technology.

Earlier today, I talked to Bob about 4K and his view on it. As you will see from the video, while the specifications look good on paper, his personal view was that when you do a comparison between 2K and 4K, it was impossible to see any difference -- the added value wasn’t clear enough to him, but Bob was still open to it, and the possible advantages -- maybe having the ability to have multiple inputs on screen at the same time.

The truth is of course that few people have actually seen 4K projection and 4K content and I guess that’s part of the problem. But so is the brightness of the image when it comes to 3D, as a lot of light is lost via the glasses and the device in front of the projector.

The embedded video is the first part of the interview with Bob Claeys and specifically looks at the straight 2K vs. 4K part of this quest.

Stay tuned for part two of the interview tomorrow…

Peter

Before I leave on my ‘Quest for 4K’, it’s probably worth doing some research into both the cinema exhibition industry market at the moment in terms of number of (digital) screens and what resolution really is all about.

Not surprising I have just done a fairly thorough online search about 4K and Digital Cinema. I don’t know if it was a good sign or not that I found very little information and even less that was actually of any real use, other than perhaps via Wikipedia.

What’s happening?

The speed at which the cinema industry is now converting from film to digital is immense. It’s always very difficult to get the exact figures for the number of screens across the world that are now digital, as this figure is changing on a daily basis. According to a 2010 report by Screen Digest (http://www.screendigest.com), it’s believed that of the 149,068 cinema screens worldwide 16,360 are digital (2K or above). The estimation is that this will have increased to 28,000 (roughly 18.8% of all screens), of which approximately 17,052 are 3D capable.

If I am really going to understand 4K and all of its secrets, I’m going to have to start at the beginning and understand resolution, both in terms of the differences between a 2K and 4K projector, but also in terms of what the human eye can see.

2K vs. 4K: what are the key things you should know?

Probably a lot more than I am ever going to in the next 12 days or so, but it’s worth being clear on some of the basics. 2K means that there are 2,000 pixels across the screen, and 4K of course means that there are 4,000 pixels across the screen. If you want to be correct about it, 2K is 2,048 x 1,080 pixels and 4K is 4,096 x 2,160 wide. This means that the image ends up being four times the resolution of 2K. If you want to see what the values for different formats are complete with the number of pixels involved, then have a look at this Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_resolutions#Films.

However, just getting my head around all this resolution is making my head hurt. Instead of trying to write about it in huge amounts of detail here – especially when it is actually quite a complex topic – it’s probably worth pointing to some more useful resources on the Internet which will help explain it.

In the December 2009 (pages 14-18) edition of Cinema Technology Magazine, there was a very good story about the 4K DLP chip and some of the differences between 2K and 4K. Rather than try to rewrite the article here, it’s worth going to the CT website (http://www.cinematechnologymagazine.com) where you can access the archives for free.

How do our human eyes see?

I’m sure that we all remember sitting in the science lessons at school, where an explanation on how the human eye worked was given by the teacher. And like me, I suspect that you have forgotten most of it. Rather than trying to explain this myself, I have turned to the Internet and found this rather useful video, which helpfully explains how the human eye works in detail, have a look at it yourselves here: http://videos.howstuffworks.com/hsw/11962-light-how-our-eyes-work-video.htm.

What is the resolution of the human eye?

It’s apparently a very common question for people to want to try and work out what the resolution of the human eye is, although in reality it’s very difficult to accurately provide an answer. Of course because of the complexity of the human eye and the way in which it works, there isn’t a straightforward and simple answer. According to the presentation by the Joint Technical Meeting based at the University of Salford in March 2007 (http://opticonsultinguk.com/downloads/Hugh_Barton-Kerry_Byrne_20070330.pdf) it has been estimated that the human vision resolution is the equivalent to 576 megapixels (24,000 x 24,000 pixels) which is about 10 times the resolution of a 2K projected image and 5.85 of a 4K image. (see also http://www.clarkvision.com/imagedetail/eye-resolution.html for a good explanation to it all). And of course the human eye sees more than ten million different colors and shades.

What does this mean for a cinema audience?

Hum, having been looking at this for a few hours now, I’m still not entirely sure that I know the answer to this. If it was just a numbers game, then the logic would be that the higher the resolution of the projector, the better the image that the audience would see on screen. But the eye doesn’t see in that simple way. There are more complexities to it. Or does it just mean that the closer to the screen that you sit, the better the quality of the image is? What about those that like to sit at the back of the theatres? I appear to have as many unanswered questions about resolution as I have answered. My brain hurts too much for this at the moment. I think I may try to come back to these later on, when I’ve met some more of the experts. Of course if you are reading this blog and know the answer, then please feel free to post a comment.

The next step

If I’m going to start anywhere then let’s start with where this all takes place: the cinema. And as I’m in Belgium now, I have been pointed in the direction of Kinepolis, who have been embracing digital cinema since the beginning…

Peter