4 TB original 4k footage available as CC-by

by - 2013/03/15 13 Comments Compositing, Development, Filming, Production

Thanks to our friends at Xiph.org we now can offer everyone access to the original source footage of Tears of Steel.

You’ll find something like 80,000 frames, each in OpenEXR half float files, in 4096 x 2160 pixels. This is 5 times more footage than used in the film, including unused shots, but mainly it’s because of long lead-in and lead-outs, and of course we’ve been cutting shots sharp.

Pictures have been shot using the (4k native sensor) fantastic Sony F65 camera. The raw files were converted with Sony software to OpenEXR, using ACES color. We then converted these with OpenColorIO to Rec709 “scene linear” which we further used for the movie pipeline.

Before we started with this VFX project we already noted a huge lack in available free high quality footage for motion tracking, keying and cleaning testing. With this huge data set this problem now belongs to the past forever!

Browse the full catalog at Xiph.org here.

Note about Creative Commons Attribution: apart from the obvious crediting, you have to be aware that the actors keep their Personal Image (Portrait) and Privacy Rights. That means the footage is OK to use for technical demos, showcases, tutorials etc. But not to use the actor for making a commercial. Read more here.

Have fun!

-Ton-

(BTW: xiph.org is currently syncing files from another server, arrival of all footage finishes in a few days).

  1. Anonymous says:

    Once again: kudos to Xiph :)

  2. Roberto Abella says:

    Nnnnnnice!!!!! Thank you so much!!!!

  3. Avish John says:

    Thank you so much ! Will be really useful for educational purpose.

  4. Enzo says:

    This is wonderful! Thank you!

    Just wondering, is there a specific reason you didn’t compress the EXRs? With my RED footage I always use PIZ, as it reduces the file sizes up to 50%!

    • zaphodbeebs says:

      Compressing footage reduces the available range of color in the image. When pulling keys from greenscreen, you want the most color information you can possibly get. For the same reasons, uncompressed is just better for pretty much anything you want to do in post.

      • Enzo says:

        I understand, but PIZ is supposed to be lossless, developed by ILM specifically for grainy (film-like) images.

  5. Giovanni says:

    Hello,
    I would like to dl some raw 4K footage for vfx practicing. Could you pls help me with some instructions on how to do this as I have never done such a thing before? Do I need Filezilla? How can I dl them?

    Thanks in advance.

    Regards,
    Giovanni

  6. ton says:

    Hi,

    In a terminal, use curl. Here is to get the first 11 files from sintel:

    curl -O “http://media.xiph.org/sintel/sintel-2k-png/[000000001-000000011].png”

    Or get 4 frames from a mango footage directory:

    curl -O “http://media.xiph.org/mango/tearsofsteel-footage-exr/01_1a/linear/01_1a_[00000-00003].exr”

    There are also Firefox browser plugins that handle this, but I have no experience with it.

  7. Georgi says:

    For all the people wondering how to download all of the files at once – there is a free plugin for Firefox called Downthemall. Gets the job done easy and fast.

  8. mfrank says:

    Hi guys, this is amazing contribution to the community!!

    I was wondering if you guys could maybe supply an EDL or maybe a long running video catalog for people to sift through the footage. It might lighten the load on your bandwidth!

    Once guy, awesome and thank you!

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  10. Mark says:

    I work in tv retail and we are have trouble getting any more content to view other than two simple time lapse videos. Also the new Samsung uses 4 files with a main mp4 file and 3 mp4 sub files all aout 3-4Gb. Would you have any suggestions on how we could get some more content to demo for this?

    Thanks

    Mark