First off, I've looked over the list of forums, and this seems to be the best space for this thread/review. If it isn't, my apologies.
Last week, I was at the NAB 2006 conference/trade show (National Association of Broadcasters), where NHK and their partners had an Ultra High Definition Theater set up for demonstration purposes. Some of the details that follow are approximate; others are personal opinions. Your milage may vary. That said:
The theater was a "small" theater, with perhaps 175 chairs on a flat floor, in about 8 rows. There was, perhaps, 15 feet all around the chairs to the pipe-and-drape that made up the walls and ceiling (remember, this is installed within the Convention Center's main exhibition space.) The east wall butted up against the actual concrete of the convention center; the other three walls were just drapery. The screen was, I recall, a Stewert screen, approximately 16 feet high, giving it a width of about 30 feet. The base of the screen was about five or six feet above the floor.
The sound system was the customized 22.2 surround sound system, consisting mostly of speakers around the middle of the height, but with some ringing the top and bottom of the theater. Two subwoofers were placed below the screen, spaced about equally apart. All of the speakers were Bose - the "mains" looked like Bose 402-Series II speakers from their pro line. I don't see an obvious match on the website for the Bose Subwoofer cabinet that was on the floor. They were largish, and cubish, at about a cubic yard, each.
The image is 7680x4320 pixels. In theory. They do a lot of tricks to try and make it work, more on that later. I'm not sure what the frame rate was, I suspect it was either 24 or 30 progressive frames per second.
To make the picture work, they have to do a number of things. First is aquisition. They use 4 Micron Devices 8 megapixel sensors, rather than the conventional 3 for a profesisonal camera. (Side note: consumer video equipment and digital cameras tend to use a single sensor chip, filtered with a Bayer pattern yielding a 4:1:1 or 4:2:2 color space, where there is considerably less red and blue information than there is green. A typical professional camera uses a prism block and three monochrome sensor chips, giving red, blue, and green information at every pixel.) In this camera, the prism block drives four images: red, blue, and two green panels.
Now, those of you who are math inclined will note that they have an actual 24 megapixel camera here, that they are using to create a 33 megapixel image. And, if one subtracts out the "color" channels, they've only got 16 megapixels. There's some serious interpolation going on here to make this work, but realize also that there's a fundamental 4:2:2 chromatic resolution going on here.
Moving right along, the signal out of the camera is carried on 16 parallel HD-SDI lines. There is a tremendous bank of hardware to do any additional processing - such as recording and playback. (As yet, there are only two of the cameras in existance; both were in Nevada last week.)
The projector is similarly... unusual. The system actually uses two highly modified JVC digital cinema D-ILA projectors. Projector 1, mounted on the top, has two imaging chips, both filtered green. Projector 2, mounted on the bottom, also has two imaging chips, one filtered red, the other blue. Oddly enough, this kind of matches the camera. Except that I believe that they are using the prototype 4k D-ILA chips. This yields the required 33mega pixels - once one realizes that they're using a 4:2:2 projection system - very unusual, that.
So, accepting that there is a boat-load of smoke and mirrors going on, here, how'd it look and sound?
D---ed impressive. Not flawless, but impressive, none-the-less. Water, for example, looked a little odd. (Water included shots of the New York City harbor spaces, as well as a Sea-World type park with orcas in Japan.) The camera they shot some NBA stuff with had some issues: a few stuck pixels, and something that was really funny. Imagine that the MPEG macro-blocks were fine - except that the blocks themselves were outlined? It was something like that. I wonder if that was something that was fixed with a firm-ware update after shooting had started.
The up-close-and-personal shots in the sumo-wrestling arena were much too close and detailed. A serious case of "too much information"!
Blacks were pretty good. CG elements (titles, for instance) were pin-sharp. Gray-scales looked pretty good, but a little crushed at the black end.
Some bits had some noise, but again, firmware updates, and, in some cases, merely the amount of gain that they may have needed for the amount of light they had - it happens.
I don't know how much the presence of 22 channels of full-range sound mattered. I liked the fact that there were speakers above the audience; I didn't really notice anything from those at floor level. The subwoofers, well.. transients were very bad, but they rumbled nicely.
I saw the demonstration twice; once from the middle of the front row, and once from about the middle of the house. Front row for me was not unlike where I like to sit in an Imax hall - at least for width. Stuck camera pixels were visible, but apart from that, it was everything one expected from an insanely high resolution D-ILA projector. JVC should be proud of those units. Actually, most of the companies involved in this aught to be proud of their acomplishments.
One of the interesting side demonstrations was they had the second camera on the roof of the convention center, pointed out over the parking lot at the street and Las Vegas monorail tracks in front of the LVCC. They had a PlayStation sized controller hooked up in the demo area, and a 1920x1080 LCD monitor. One of the joysticks controlled the 16x digital zoom; the other one was a "pan and tilt" control. You could zoom all the way in to "native" resolution for the 1920x1080, or pull back to the full image area. Panning and tilting was smooth and fast. I'd hate to think how much processing power was running that little display!
All in all, most impressive. Not ready for prime time yet, of course, but impressive.
Leo Kerr
Last week, I was at the NAB 2006 conference/trade show (National Association of Broadcasters), where NHK and their partners had an Ultra High Definition Theater set up for demonstration purposes. Some of the details that follow are approximate; others are personal opinions. Your milage may vary. That said:
The theater was a "small" theater, with perhaps 175 chairs on a flat floor, in about 8 rows. There was, perhaps, 15 feet all around the chairs to the pipe-and-drape that made up the walls and ceiling (remember, this is installed within the Convention Center's main exhibition space.) The east wall butted up against the actual concrete of the convention center; the other three walls were just drapery. The screen was, I recall, a Stewert screen, approximately 16 feet high, giving it a width of about 30 feet. The base of the screen was about five or six feet above the floor.
The sound system was the customized 22.2 surround sound system, consisting mostly of speakers around the middle of the height, but with some ringing the top and bottom of the theater. Two subwoofers were placed below the screen, spaced about equally apart. All of the speakers were Bose - the "mains" looked like Bose 402-Series II speakers from their pro line. I don't see an obvious match on the website for the Bose Subwoofer cabinet that was on the floor. They were largish, and cubish, at about a cubic yard, each.
The image is 7680x4320 pixels. In theory. They do a lot of tricks to try and make it work, more on that later. I'm not sure what the frame rate was, I suspect it was either 24 or 30 progressive frames per second.
To make the picture work, they have to do a number of things. First is aquisition. They use 4 Micron Devices 8 megapixel sensors, rather than the conventional 3 for a profesisonal camera. (Side note: consumer video equipment and digital cameras tend to use a single sensor chip, filtered with a Bayer pattern yielding a 4:1:1 or 4:2:2 color space, where there is considerably less red and blue information than there is green. A typical professional camera uses a prism block and three monochrome sensor chips, giving red, blue, and green information at every pixel.) In this camera, the prism block drives four images: red, blue, and two green panels.
Now, those of you who are math inclined will note that they have an actual 24 megapixel camera here, that they are using to create a 33 megapixel image. And, if one subtracts out the "color" channels, they've only got 16 megapixels. There's some serious interpolation going on here to make this work, but realize also that there's a fundamental 4:2:2 chromatic resolution going on here.
Moving right along, the signal out of the camera is carried on 16 parallel HD-SDI lines. There is a tremendous bank of hardware to do any additional processing - such as recording and playback. (As yet, there are only two of the cameras in existance; both were in Nevada last week.)
The projector is similarly... unusual. The system actually uses two highly modified JVC digital cinema D-ILA projectors. Projector 1, mounted on the top, has two imaging chips, both filtered green. Projector 2, mounted on the bottom, also has two imaging chips, one filtered red, the other blue. Oddly enough, this kind of matches the camera. Except that I believe that they are using the prototype 4k D-ILA chips. This yields the required 33mega pixels - once one realizes that they're using a 4:2:2 projection system - very unusual, that.
So, accepting that there is a boat-load of smoke and mirrors going on, here, how'd it look and sound?
D---ed impressive. Not flawless, but impressive, none-the-less. Water, for example, looked a little odd. (Water included shots of the New York City harbor spaces, as well as a Sea-World type park with orcas in Japan.) The camera they shot some NBA stuff with had some issues: a few stuck pixels, and something that was really funny. Imagine that the MPEG macro-blocks were fine - except that the blocks themselves were outlined? It was something like that. I wonder if that was something that was fixed with a firm-ware update after shooting had started.
The up-close-and-personal shots in the sumo-wrestling arena were much too close and detailed. A serious case of "too much information"!
Blacks were pretty good. CG elements (titles, for instance) were pin-sharp. Gray-scales looked pretty good, but a little crushed at the black end.
Some bits had some noise, but again, firmware updates, and, in some cases, merely the amount of gain that they may have needed for the amount of light they had - it happens.
I don't know how much the presence of 22 channels of full-range sound mattered. I liked the fact that there were speakers above the audience; I didn't really notice anything from those at floor level. The subwoofers, well.. transients were very bad, but they rumbled nicely.
I saw the demonstration twice; once from the middle of the front row, and once from about the middle of the house. Front row for me was not unlike where I like to sit in an Imax hall - at least for width. Stuck camera pixels were visible, but apart from that, it was everything one expected from an insanely high resolution D-ILA projector. JVC should be proud of those units. Actually, most of the companies involved in this aught to be proud of their acomplishments.
One of the interesting side demonstrations was they had the second camera on the roof of the convention center, pointed out over the parking lot at the street and Las Vegas monorail tracks in front of the LVCC. They had a PlayStation sized controller hooked up in the demo area, and a 1920x1080 LCD monitor. One of the joysticks controlled the 16x digital zoom; the other one was a "pan and tilt" control. You could zoom all the way in to "native" resolution for the 1920x1080, or pull back to the full image area. Panning and tilting was smooth and fast. I'd hate to think how much processing power was running that little display!
All in all, most impressive. Not ready for prime time yet, of course, but impressive.
Leo Kerr
