Real 4k disks - what do you think the rollout timeline will be?

[Penton-Man]

Originally Posted by ZoetMB

The difference in a movie theatre is that with 2K and a large screen, you get the "screen-door" effect, especially with brightly lit scenes. You don't get that with 4K (or certainly not as much) no matter how crappy the bit rate is...

True, at least depending upon how close you sit to the screen but, keep in mind you’re trading one *evil* (screen-door effect, stairstep jaggies, etc.) for another *evil* (softening due to bit starvation), if frugal bit rates were to be employed in the later situation.

Originally Posted by ZoetMB

...And why would they encode a 4K DCP with a frugally encoded bit rate in the first place? As long as it fits on the hard disk, the only issue is the amount of time it takes to upload the DCP, right?

That’s not a small issue, where time = money in any field/profession. For more, see the last paragraph here - https://forum.blu-ray.com/showthread...er#post7684634

Plus, the smaller the total GB of the movie, the less costly it is to store it long term, and, for instance, replicate it (time factored in again), for something such as a repertory showing several years after the first run exhibition.

If all of the above factors were considered irrelevant then in order to automatically ensure maximal picture quality of all the imagery on the largest of theatrical screens one would be seeing near maximum constant encoding bit rate for 4K DCP (and a resultant file size of roughly 230 GBytes (image only) for just a 2hr. long feature), which we’re not seeing in practice with the deliverables. On the contrary, it seems DCP file sizes of the features themselves have been getting smaller over time.

However, if saving money any which way you can is of some priority, then when you carefully consider the pieces of the entire process, there are subtle incentives to make DCPs as small as possible. Question is how small before astute audiences can notice a decrease in quality? That’s a tough call because you would have to have seen how sharp the original material (the DCDM’s .tiff files) was. Hopefully, the JPEG2000 encoding rates are high enough to remain visually lossless to the original content on the biggest of D-Cinema screens and audiences are getting close to what the filmmakers saw in the D.I. suites….as intended.