Posted by Ben on 10/11/05 13:37

Nigel Barker wrote:
> On Tue, 11 Oct 2005 10:39:28 +0000 (UTC), Andy Turner <andyt@nospam.demon.co.uk>
> wrote:
>
>
>>Once HD-DVD (or BR or whatever) and HD screens are popular, it occurs
>>to me that the likes of Pixar might be in the position to create HD
>>versions of their films 'simply' by re-rendering them at a higher
>>resolution. I imagine they might get carried away and redo some of the
>>textures and effects but even so, it's a lot easier than re-shooting!
>
>
> There is no need to create special HD versions of films as they already exist.
> The 35mm film stock shown in movie theatres has much higher resolution than
> current HDTV standards.

The film stock that studios posses certainly has very much higher
resolution than current HDTV standards, but the projected image that you
see in a typical cinema is probably about the same or even poorer than
HDTV resolution. Kodak did a study into this in the early days of
digital projection and found that some cinemas were equivalent to only
900 horizontal pixels (approximately PAL quality) while the average was
iirc in the region 1500 or so. Basically the current generation of 2k
digital cinema projectors (2048 horizontal pixels) should look better
than what most cinemas are currently showing, and the next generation 4k
projectors even better still.

Of course, in the case of pixar, the movies are generated digitally
anyway so the resolution of film stock is irrelevant for HDTV transfers.

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