Filling the GAP

Beer Wars - A Live NCM World Premier

Fri, 17 Apr 2009 11:08:38 -0700

Beer Wars - A Live NCM World Premier

Jerry Pierce April 17, 2009

National Cinemedia (NCM) that runs “Fathom” a “live” to the theater network for single play events. They have Concerts, The Met, Performing Arts, Anime, etc. Cinemedia’s main business is advertising for many theaters. But Fathom seems to be their new baby - below is the list of upcoming shows.

Enjoy one of our upcoming shows
MET – The Audition April 19, 2009
This American Life – LIVE! April 23, 2009
Death Note L: change the World – subtitled April 29, 2009
Death Note L: change the World – overdubbed April 30, 2009
Dr. Laura "In Praise of Mom" LIVE May 5, 2009
Dr. Laura "In Praise of Mom" ENCORE May 6, 2009
This American Life ENCORE May 7, 2009
MET – La Cenerentola LIVE May 9, 2009
DCI 2009: The Countdown May 13, 2009
MET – La Cenerentola ENCORE May 20, 2009
Glenn Beck's Common Sense Tour LIVE June 4, 2009
Glenn Beck's Common Sense Tour ENCORE June 11, 2009

So I decided to attend the “World Premier” of “Beer Wars” held last night. (Never mind that I am getting involved in Beer Making ... that’s a different story.) I attended a CineMark Theater in Northern California at 8 pm. Well, first off it was not LIVE, it was delayed. Not that it would matter much, but if you are attending a live broadcast it should appear to be live. The theater was the same one that housed “Monsters vs Aliens.” Seemed right, the rest of the screens at this location are still film.

So they got a late start - seems the DVR recording of the show didn’t work right and they had technical difficulty - did I mention it was supposed to give the IMPRESSION of being live? Funny seeing the EchoStar’s DVR interface on a 50 foot screen.

They the show finally started. They did not use the big projector! It was the little NCM advertising projector. Not a bad image, but the masking was set for 1.85 and the broadcast was 16:9 (1.77) so the top/bottom was cut off - not even in safe title - many of the titles got lost in the bottom masking. The projector was dim - but not bad. The contrast ratio was muddy to say the least. I mean really, who needs black? I was pleased that the silver screen did not have a noticeable hot spot, then again maybe you can’t have a hot spot with a dim projector (not).

They did show a live question/answer session with the film makers after the show. It was clear the LA premier was sparsely attended and there were about 50 people in my 500 seat theater. Lots of space to spread out. They charged $15 which was a $5 up fee from their normal presentation charge. Did not look like a money maker to me.

Finally, the presentation crashed at the end. Another 50 foot error screen with audio continuing in the background. I didn’t ask for my money back, but if this is their idea of a live, quality event - they had better go back to the drawing board and re-think the experience.

Video Quality Threshold for good enough

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 11:41:19 -0700

What is good enough? Today’s Jon Stewart on HULU is below the threshold.

As new video delivery methods come to market, he must question what quality is good enough. In the world of music the quality is from 64 kbits per second mono to 128 kbits per second stereo to 384 kbits per second 5.1 to 1.5 Mb per second 5.1 to uncompressed 5.1. It is clear that consumers have found it very acceptable at 128 kbits per second stereo- at least on headphones.

Video is more complicated since it involves screen size, program content and viewing conditions compared to the world of audio. I believe we have found where that sweet point is for video at least for non-sports entertainment and information.

I believe there are two environments that need to be supported. The first is the living room display -- 48 inches widescreen. The second are portable devices basically at 240 by 320 pixel display which can be on a portable device or on a laptop computer.

For the living room display I believe HULU is just below acceptable quality and iTunes is just above acceptable quality. That you may see this as a very fine line distinction but at least for me it is the distinction that counts. I find on a 48 inch display that over the air NTSC looks about the same as the iTunes delivery. Whereas the HULU quality is less than over the air -- in terms of resolution (their eyes are blurred) and in terms of frame rate (there are frame drops).

I believe the minimum quality for living room display is 640x480 at 600 kbits per second. I have run experiments with my family having the same program available in high def 25 Mb per second 1920 by 1080, standard def DVD 5 Mb per second 720 by 480, and MP4 3 Mb per second 720 by 480. The family can see the difference between these different qualities and do not care. Their interest is in the content and the quality is secondary.

TV programs that are available in high def digital and standard def analog also do not seem to make a difference except for sporting events (such as “dancing with the stars”). The difference comes for TV programs when we drop to the level of HULU quality compared to iTunes quality and this DOES make a difference at least on the Jon Stewart & Colbert Report programs. I think we have found the MP3 of video.

While I believe the levels are less for portable devices, it makes no sense to have a different standard for living room quality and portable quality given the advances in bandwidth and storage capacity anticipated over the next few years.

Steve takes the stage - what does it mean?

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 07:46:48 -0700

Well it is an interesting move for Apple. Far more fundamental than an iPhone update. Apple continues to follow a path to world domination. They want to own A) music/portable players; B) The Home; C) Business/Office markets for computers and portable devices.

This fairly minor announcement was the move to the Business.

1) Apple is making the move to Enterprise/Business. They want Business to embrace Apple -- they have decided that the path to business is the phone. Currently the Blackberry is the only choice for business - now there is a second and it is far more appealing. From a well accepted iPhone, it will be much easier for business to embrace Mac on the desktop.
2) The new iPhone is a fully developed computer platform - of the category Windows XP, Vista, OSX, and now iPhone. At $199 it is clearly the cheapest 'computer' you can buy. (Granted $30/month for data is steep, most consumers won't care.) Granted I personally don't think a 4" screen is something I want to use to do computing, many users will.
3) Apple has provided an alternative solution to Outlook Exchange. The huge domination of Exchange by Microsoft will be very difficult to unseat, but Apple has decided to use Web2.0 / MobileMe will start as a "home" solution and move to Business. It might just work!

Other parts of the announcement includes features (new GPS and 3G support), pricing ($199/$299), availability (July 11 release) and world wide coverage (70 countries - to appeal to developers to write software for the platform). A demonstration of some applications that work on the iPhone (mainly to confirm that it is a computer platform).

Jerry

How the digital problems facing the movie industry may unveil wider issues

Tue, 1 Apr 2008 15:08:18 -0700

The movie industry is dabbling in an all-digital workflow -- new digital cameras are being used to capture full-length motion pictures -- new digital cinema theaters are replacing film print theaters -- it is now possible to make an Oscar nominated film and never make film. The heads-up: long-term digital storage is a major Achilles heel of all digital processes.

The move to digital has been steadily evolving over the last 20 years. Sound has been all digital for many years. Most special effects have been digital. In the last few years most movies are captured on film and the film negatives are scanned and digitally processed in a technology called “digital intermediate” or DI. For most movies today the final approved picture and sound is fully digital!

That doesn’t mean that film has gone away. Major movies use lots of film -- for both capture and distribution. The movie making industry is testing the removal of all film from all processes. Most “filmmakers” prioritize story, and production and the move to digital makes sense -- just like the home digital still camera makes sense. The fast results, seemingly lower cost, and ease of use are the real advantages. (There is a real artistic question of digital capture, but let me skip that for now.)

The heart of the issue is long-term storage and retrieval of digital data. There are two things to save after a movie is completed. (1) the final movie and (2) all the pieces used to make the movie.

The final movie is fairly easy (especially if you ignore International cuts). Most Studio archives make a film negative from the digital data, which costs about $50,000. This film negative can then be stored in traditional means for a 100 years or more for almost no cost. It will be there in 100 years! For the digital version, the final movie is about 5-10 TB of digital data. Today the digital data is stored on digital tape and if things go well it can be recovered in five years but the methodologies are not in place to guarantee that retrieval. The studios always have the film safely stored in the vault. It would be nice, but not essential, to have the digital version guarantee. So things are not in panic mode for the final movie...

The hard part is all the pieces used to make the movie. These pieces are used in the future for making alternate cuts of the movie, such as the Director’s cut or International versions, they are used to assemble bonus material for the DVD and BluRay. The truth be known studios don’t know what material will become valuable in five or 10 years and so they keep everything. This has been very successful for film based capture because roles of negative can be placed in a vault for very little money and saved for a hundred years. (Along with the film are all the scripts and notes.) A movie can have many hundreds of hours of unused negatives. For the old film capture -- not a problem -- put it in a controlled environment with thousands of other rolls of film’s -- no big deal.

Digital capture is changing all this. For movies captured digitally there can be well over 500 TB of “digital negatives.” The digital capture medium can be hard disks or digital tape. How can this be safely saved for 100 years?

There are a number of approaches to this mess of digital negatives:

0.1. “Not my problem” or let the next guy deal with it.
0.2. Bite the bullet and store it all at full quality in digital.
0.3. Lose some quality, store it all.
0.4. Select the important stuff and store a smaller set.
0.5. Force the industry to stay on film capture.

A bit more details on these five approaches:

1. “Not my problem” is not as silly as it sounds. Digital capture has been done on only a few movies and only for a few years. The problem is just starting -- it is a good time to design a “big picture” solution. The tapes and hard disks that come from a production can be safely stored for a few years. At that time you need to worry about the death of the tape, death of the disk drive, the death of the hardware to read the tape or drive, or the format of the data. In 10 years, all bets are off -- the data is probably gone. (Good thing in 10 years you will have a new job.)
2. & 3. Bite the bullet or Lose some quality is not as easy as it sounds. All of the incoming tapes/discs need to be read, reformatted, stored in a new common format. Just this step can be VERY expensive and it adds nothing to the value of the movie - who pays for this? Then a methodology needs to be established for long-term storage. Generally this involves migration from format to format every five years. The difference between all storage and some storage is the total amount of data to be stored -- one good estimate is that it costs $1,000 per year to store 10 TB. So for a non-reduced movie it may be 500 TB or $50,000 per year per movie. If the data is compressed it may be only $10,000 per year. When you make 25 movies per year the budget for storage gets real big, real fast. A quick comparison: the total cost to maintain the main vault on a studio lot is $10 million per year for 40,000 movies and TV shows. A new digital storage at $50,000 per year for 50 movies is $2.5 million per year… we have a problem unfolding.
3. I briefly mention “only take the good stuff.” Practically this doesn’t work and second -- how do you store and maintain the good stuff? The basic problem still exists.
4. Stay on film. Over the cradle-to-grave life of a movie, film may be the most cost-effective overall solution. However the groups responsible for choosing the format are not the same as the groups responsible for the cradle-to-grave cost analysis. Nice concept, good thing to wish for… but then again there is that difference in creative between digital and film.

The industry needs to seriously consider how best to create a cost-effective solution for long-term digital storage. Economy of scale is key since there is no competitive advantage to each studio going alone. It is not clear that a vendor will approach this in the right way.

Wake up!
The move to digital movie cameras requires the building of new expertise archive methodologies or at the risk of loss of everything but the main movie and/or much more expensive and painful costs in the next decade. GE, Disney and Sony Corp. are you listening? The investment you are making in movies will have a reduced value in a decade if you don’t plan for long-term digital storage -- ultimately maybe the ROI to save nothing but the final movie is a viable decision. Just make the decision and don’t let it be made for you with inaction --

Some issues for 3D

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 19:32:44 -0700

The HPA (Hollywood Post Alliance) held their annual Technology retreat in Palm Springs last month. As usual it was spectacular.

I had the pleasure of being one of the organizers for the 3-D session on Wednesday. I also participated in two of the Topic Table discussions on 3-D in the home on Thursday and Friday.

I came to a new appreciation of the complexities, the challenges, and opportunities for 3-D in the home. There are certainly many challenges to be overcome. It may be one or two generations of hardware before we see 3-D really work in the home. Let me explain one of the challenges:

1: Inter-ocular Spacing - In normal 2-D imagery your eyes converge on the screen itself, slightly tilting to intersect with the screen. In 3-D imagery to images are offset apart to produce behind the screen images (or offset together to produce in-front of the screen images). To achieve an image at infinity the images are separated by normal inter-ocular space for an adult, roughly 2 1/2 inches. The producer of a 3-D image must plan for the size screen in order to achieve this 2 1/2 inch offset. Suppose this is designed for a 20 foot wide theatrical exhibition. Now suppose this same image is used on an 80 foot screen. This is four times wider than the anticipated screen. This means that the offset between the two images will now be 10 inches on the physical 80 foot screen. When presented to an audience this 10 inch offset will cause the viewers to go “wall eyed.” Eyes are very uncomfortable in this position, causing headaches and discomfort.

If you design for an 80 foot screen and it is presented on a 20 foot screen infinity will move closer. This is not uncomfortable but it is not the intent of the content creator.

So what about the home? The same image that was designed for theatrical exhibition in 3-D will be very flat on a 40 inch screen - minimum 3D effects. And a 3-D image designed for a 40 inch screen will have problems presenting it on a 120 inch screen. Most content providers already have significant costs in creating one 3-D image and creating a second one (or more) for the home could be problematic.

Jumping ahead I think the answer is that the home will need a good 2-D image plus a depth map plus an occlusion image. When the home 3-D rendering engines are available they will combine these images and depth map to produce an appropriate 3-D image for the screen size in the home.

This may be many years ahead and at least one generation of hardware to create a 3-D rendering engine.

2: Other 3-D issues - the more obvious 3-D obstacles for the home include standardization of the delivery format, standardization of the interface to display, the display itself, 3D glasses in the home, and standardization of broadcast 3-D. I think current efforts being undertaken for standardization of delivery format to not understand the inner-ocular issues.

Summary: Theatrical 3-D is a sustainable entertainment medium. It will remain appealing for many years to come, but not for all movies. It will be the poor man’s IMAX theater experience. I believe most 3-D experiences will be designed for 45 foot screens will cause some discomfort on the larger screens up to 60 feet and will not be quite the same experience on the 30 foot screen, but acceptable. Personally I will avoid larger screens for watching 3-D.