Labcine - Laboratory of Cinematic Arts

SoftCult Review Journal | ISSN 2236-3181
Issue no. 03, vol. 1, 2013

Labcine - Laboratory of Cinematic Arts
Jane de Almeida
Mackenzie University, Brazil

The high definition digital cinema is still a challenge to be produced, not only because of the amount of data involved in the whole process - from capture to display - but also because the narrative and imagistic effort that the new digital movies require.

The 8K films, also called Ultra High Definition movies with over 33 million pixels per frame, have been hailed as movies with a resolution that will replace the 4K, or even immediately replace the full-HD. In April this year, during the NAB (National Association of Broadcasters), the company Astro Design announced an 8K camera called AH-4800, to be officially sold - giving continuity to the commercial race started pixels with digital cinema, the so-called "marketing pixel ". The 7680 × 4320 resolution is four times larger than 4K resolution and has been developed since the early 2003 by NHK (Japanese Telecommunication Company) through a series of gatherings as 16 recorders Full-drives and cameras with two CCDs (Charge-Coupled Device) doubling the resolution 3840 × 2048 this is considered as referring to the 70 mm film, especially for large screens image.

The movie picture 4k, in turn, has more than 8 million pixels per frame and has been disseminated widely. In 2008, the 4K resolution was established as the standard image of the recommended digital cinema by DCI (Digital Cinema Initiatives), an association of the seven major Hollywood studios. 4K refers to the number of horizontal 4096 pixels (vertical pixels multiplied by 2,160, leading 8,847,360 pixels). This is a more accurate picture than HD and 24 times more accurate than traditional television and was considered sufficiently defined to replace the 35 mm film, film four times. There, in the movies, some possibilities considered 4k resolution (digital standard): Standard Full Aperture 4K is 4096 × 3112 pixels and represents 12,746,752, the "Academy" 4K standard is 3656 × 2664 and has 9,739,584 pixels per frame and the standard that DCI is 4096 × 1714 pixels and shows 7,020,544 per frame or 3996 × 2160 with 8,631,360 pixels per frame.

Even 4K cinema, already popularized finds challenges for editing, post-production and exhibition. In Brazil, few companies are able to finalize a 4k movie until the end. Especially without compression. And there are few cinemas that can display it. If there are still difficulties in the production of content, the greater the challenge for transmission. The Laboratory of Cinematic Arts has maintained research partnerships with institutions of advanced technology as LAVID (Laboratory of Digital Video UFPB) with LARC (Laboratory of Architecture of Computer Networks USP), LRV (Laboratory of Virtual Reality UFRN / PETROBRAS) to search for the digital cinema super-high definition from its production to its view, considering your storage and distribution by means of photonic networks, with speeds from 1 to 50 gigabits per second. 

These experiments use the Brazilian academic networks such as RNP (National Research and Education Network), Giga network, Network Ipe, ANSP network, among others, connected with the GLIF (Global Lambda Integrated Facility), an international consortium of academic networks involved in research. The background to the research of the Laboratory of Cinematic Arts point to the uniqueness and equivalence with international research institutes of excellence. Matters of the Journal of FAPESP, important media science communication, published in March 2012 "Images Vanguard" (http://revistapesquisa.fapesp.br/2012/03/29/imagens-of-vanguarda/) and in August 2009 "Tracking the Light: transcontinental photonic 4K film between Brazil, Japan and US" (http://pt.scribd.com/doc/29926958/Tracking-the-Light-transcontinental-photonic-4K-cinema-between-Brazil-Japan-and-US) demonstrate the importance, the originality of the research and demonstrations. 

Were also published articles in collaboration with international partners involved in the experiments and research 4K image lying in the bibliography of this project. In addition to international media and scientific articles, experiments received wide dissemination of conventional media, recognizing the innovation of our research. These data are listed after the bibliography.

There is no known mapping production 8K, which is still scarce, and even less is known films such as films were made ​​- which tend to be just a "sample" sample image for consideration of so-called experts of the picture. This hypothesis stems from the verification of what happened with the 4K at the first showing of films 4k in Brazil, held in 2008 in FILE (International Festival of Electronic Language), which happens in FIESP (Industry Federation of the State of São Paulo) since 2001, whose repertoire consisted only small films, virtually uncut and many examples of fully computer-generated movies. "4K: four carats images / Eight Million Pixels in 4K images" (Almeida, 2008) and "Effects of Scale: 4K" (Manovich, 2008) on this issue, two articles were published. This show was performed by our research group in Languages ​​and Technologies Mackenzie Presbyterian University in partnership with Calit2 (California Institute for Telecommunications and Informational Technology) at the University of California San Diego (UCSD), where I had the opportunity to be a guest professor twice.

One of the projects LABCINE (Laboratory of Cinematic Arts) at Mackenzie the University aims to make a mapping of these early films 8K, researching its properties as file formats, compressions and equipment. There will also be a concern to relate the controversies, as is quite common in the world of technological innovation of film that questions arise about the quality of sensors, the number of pixels, the lens of cameras (with respect to the optical) luminosity and the definition of the projectors. Given this kind of concern is that a discussion at FILE 2008 on the actual uptake capacity of 4K cameras of the time, they were considered not genuinely 4k cameras by artifice interpolation of their processing was organized. This digital chaos highlights the lack of consensus even on the relations between the analog film, films made ​​with 16, 35 and 70 mm and digital resolutions.

It is believed that the lifting of the state of the art of film 8k can not only assist researchers regarding a still new and experimental film production in the technological field, but also about the themes and languages ​​resulting from this production. This research, interdisciplinary nature, is justified by mapping the technological aspects of a recent and controversial production to help with the latest production with current data in the complex task of understanding the integration of different chains systems: capturing, editing, post-production, exhibition and distribution networks. But we also want to search the historical and cultural aspects of the film and the 8K race pixels arising from this field. One of our theoretical framework is called the "cultural analytics", a term coined by Lev Manovich in 2009 to deal with the phenomenon of Big Data and data visualization in the fields of arts and culture. Still perceive a volume of very shy research on the subject in the fields of Social Sciences and Humanities, when, on the other hand, it is a subject widely reported in the world of technology. In the specific case of digital cinema, the visualization of data is converted into images without the dash between this image and data collection. However, it is pertinent concern about what would be the limit of these data and what would be the contemporary ability to "see" so many pixels - more than display. One of the issues that governs the Cultural Analytics is, since its inception in 2005, how would a science of culture driven by a massive amount of data and what are its limitations.

This remembering that the logic of the resolution, at least with respect to its marketing, part of the idea of ​​"higher reality." This strand of reasoning leads us to the studies on the origins of modern visuality developed by Jonathan Crary in his works as Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the 19th Century (Crary, 1992) and Suspensions of Perception (Crary, 2001 ). His concern was with these works the shift in perception occurred in the middle and late nineteenth century promoted by new optical devices and forging the historical construction of "observer". Were, at this time, developed theories and models of "subjective vision" that gave the observer a new sense of autonomy and control. 

The author is dedicated to studying previous optical devices such as theaters and Stereoscopy or the Zootrope, showing the interaction between technologies arising at that time and modern man. For Crary, the masses, traditionally considered adept at "realism", the readability of the images were formatted differently over the models vision and abstract representations than mimetic models and pre-Modernist painting of the 1880s and 1890s period Such books are works of recognized fields of arts and culture by understanding that the crises of attention in contemporary society is related to the technological avalanche of audiovisual devices since the early nineteenth century and to accelerate the metamorphosis of our visual culture of contemporary techno-. 

The viewer - regarded by him as observer - is re-articulated in his visual field for close observation of images by means of new devices that pose a particular body position, training the look inside prosthetic devices which are positioned face to position the eyes , leaving behind the Renaissance model of the vanishing point. However, Crary raises the current images, computer-generated, they may be generating even greater resolution in our scopic field. New ways of viewing coexist with the old, but increasingly become dominant in our culture and society. Some other authors like Arlindo Machado, Tom Gunning, Miriam Hansen, Alexander Kluge are important references for this theoretical research.

The LABCINE got their start in May 2013 with support from the National Network for Teaching and Research, with panel for viewing movies and pictures 4K - OptiPortal and 11 researchers.

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