[x264-devel] x246 and the Cinema Industry.

[James Gardiner]

Hi x264 team,

My name is James Gardiner and I work in the cinema industry here in
Australia.  Specifically Digital Cinema.

 

Currently I see a big opportunity for the x264 team to make a big impact
on the cinema industry. I am writing this letter to encourage you to
move forward in the areas that will achieve this sooner rather then
later.

 

Firstly let me mention DCI (Digital Cinema Initiative).  This is a
recommendation on how to achieve a digital cinema standard for the
cinema industry.  It was developed by big players in the "tradition"
film industry, and in some ways is a little over engineered.

 

I would simply like to address current image standards like that of
H.264 and its roll in this area.

 

DCI recommends JPEG2000 compression.  An i-frame based JPEG2000 stream
utilizing XYZ colour space.  Sounds great and will obviously achieve
very good image quality.  But also very expensive to do and implement.

 

The major distribution companies have settled on this as a standard as
you would expect, however, a gaping hole exists in the market.

 

With the changing media industry, the business models on making films is
evolving.  Art house or niche films are becoming more popular.  The
ability to distribute these films digitally has made these films far
more viable.  I am extremely excited about this and how more content of
this type is making it to the screen.  However..

 

The costs of following DCI recommendations can be a barrier to digital
feature distribution.  This need not be the case in my opinion.

 

To make an example, the initial Digital features released before March
2007 where 80mbit MPEG2 1920x1080 24p.  As JPEG2000 hardware became
available late 2006, this has driven the need to drop MPEG2 all together
(For feature release).

 

And really I tend to agree with this as, MPEG2, as proven as it is, has
a very limited colour depth. (Ie banding is especially annoying to me.)

 

Pushing the resolution issues aside, (2K, 4K, HD about 6% diff to 2K).

 

The adoption of the new H.264 Higher profile specifications could be a
huge benefit to the cinema industry. Starting at 4:2:2 10bit or going to
4:4:4 12bit we then have an effective range of codec levels that can
carry the required quality to the cinemas cost effectively.

 

This not only effects feature but also advertising practices.

 

I have been scanning the web for news on implementations of these
features of H.264, however, none are currently available.  And as such
proprietary version like Apple ProRes are popping up.  I thing it would
be better for all if more open codecs are used for these type of
implementations.  I would encourage the x246 team to look into these
issues.

 

I describe this as an opportunity to the x264 team as, this technology
could have a major effect on the future of cinemas and the world we
know.  It is a rare opportunity to be able to participate in such world
altering developments.

 

Thanks you for reading,

James Gardiner

 

 

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