Hi everyone,
It was time for the annual IBC Conference in Amsterdam. It’s the largest Broadcasting/TV show outside of NAB Las Vegas. Always very cool to walk around and see some new development. I’ve been staring at an 8K tv showing Olympics footage… amazing.
Another fun thing to do at IBC is to spot our movies! This is a great example that illustrates the need for free and open content. It’s just a sample, in the 3 hours I was at the (only parts of the) tradeshow I saw many more. (The pics at QT and Fraunhofer show Sintel too, but not well visible).
I’d add that this is not just because the BF is making is open content, but because it’s *cutting edge* open content.
There’s plenty of open video around. There’s plenty of 4k footage around… but almost nothing that fits *both* categories, that companies can use to demo high end stuff.
Expect to see Tear of Steel everywhere next IBC. :)
For me, it’s strange, that none of these companies have participated as a sponsors. Like, “Common, guys, next year you’ll show your new technologies with a fresh stuff from BF/BI with your own logo in the credits!” It’s a good advertisement. Weird. Ton, did you try to motivate them?
We had sponsoring from happy users of content, like from DivX, HP, and CoreEL… to name some.
So Ton is an 8k tv worth it? I mean after that there is 16 k I guess. Does it add anything to the quality of the program or does it just burden the hardware with unnecessary pixels? Who is going to have the time and resource torender a feature movie at 16k? And no that’s not a challenge for the Blender Foundation…
Just an opinion:
I doubt that you can see the difference between 4k and 8k from a normal viewing distance. So for TV or even cinema, with a normal (not 180 degree or similar) field of view, nobody will render 16 times the resolution of 4k(!) (=16k) for no visible difference. Same applies for live action: no cinema lens can produce the sharpness necessary for 16k, probably not even for 8k, so that’s not only about high resolution sensors, the limitations come in everywhere.
Standing really close to a display or having a dome cinema might be a different story, though.
So after or during the change to 4k, the more important development will probably be higher framerates and higher dynamic range in displays, things like that. Far more noticeable for the viewer.
True, I think Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit is to be 48 frames per second. I would rather have that as a refinement than ever increasing resolution.
A while back on the British TV program “The Gadget Show”, they were testing various budget tablets and to test the HD video playback they used Elephants Dream and Big Buck Bunny.
In and around Amsterdam and Hoofddorp (and I’m sure many more places both here and around world) you often see Big Buck Bunny played at stores like Media Markt and Saturn – always a proud moment to see a Blender open movie on a hundred TV screens :D
Big Buck Bunny has tons of charisma !
I’ve been using BBB and blender as well with kids to show them what research in computer graphics is about. You should see them laughing while moving a rabbit in random but mostly unpleasant positions. The only problem is that I do meshing, and the most frequent question was « how do you make the hair » . Anyway thanks a lot for all these great tools.