M+E Daily

By Paul Sweeting

With Ultra-HD TV sets costing $20,000 and up, 4K video is likely to remain out of reach to most consumers for some time yet. And it will still be a very heavy lift for cash-strapped CE companies to go from making a few $20,000 sets to fill a CES booth to anything like mass market production. But that doesn’t mean 4K will have no impact on the business in the near term.

As was evident from the comments at studio technology chiefs at CES, in fact, it’s clear that 4K images and high frame rates (48 – 60 fps) are already being entrenched in Hollywood work flows, from image capture on new movies to scanning the negatives in studio vaults to prepare for the next generations of consumer video formats and digital cinema. And as the use of 4K scanning and high frame rate image capture become more common they’re creating new challenges for the studios and their technology partners, from managing the terabytes of data produced daily by high frame rate, 4K production, to to long-term storage of the petabytes of data produced by 4K scanning of studio libraries.

“There is actually a lot more information on 35mm film negatives than has ever made it to the screen because when you go from a negative to an inter-positive and then to a print you always had generational loss,” Sony Pictures chief technology officer Chris Cookson said. “When we scanned the negative for Laurence of Arabia in 4K we noticed that we got more detail than the inter-positive we got when we did the restoration. So in a sense, no one has ever really seen everything that’s in that movie. So now we’re scanning everything from negatives to prepare for 4K. It has a lot more information than what was used as the reference standard for HDTV.”

How and where to store all that digitized information are becoming urgent questions, however. “The nut we as an industry really still need to crack is long term storage,” Fox CTO Hanno Basse said.

“The long term issue for the industry is how to make sure it will still be accessible 100 years from now,” Cookson added. “Before, with nitrate, you could separate the negatives and if you took care of them and stored them right you know they’re going to be there for another 150 years. You can still get at them and still use them.”

Digital formats, however, generally evolve over time, leaving data stored in an obsolete format of 10 or 20 years ago effectively unreadable today.

The front end of the digital pipeline is also increasingly problematic due to 4K productions, Warner CTO Darcy Antonellis noted. “We worked on this little project with Mr. Jackson,” she said, a reference to Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit, which was shot on video at 48 frames per second in 4K. “With high frame rate, there is a significant issue of data management.,” Antonellis said. “We’re talking about Petabytes of data from a single production. How do you move that around? How do you manage it? How will you even be able to find what you’re looking for in all that data?”

Transitioning to a 4K, high frame rate work flow is a significant challenge for the studios. But it also represents a significant opportunity for technology providers who can help them answer some of those questions.