Are we ready for HD animations?

[Brian Smith]

I came across this interesting article about the high-def format battle. I have been watching the developments very closely over the past year and am particularly interested in this subject. In my backyard, the building industry has taken a nosedive in the last year and my clients are looking for a competitive edge over their competition in this over-flooded market. To the benefit of our industry, their need for marketing has never been greater and after talking to most of them about the upcoming potential to create high-def animations, most are bitting at the chops waiting for the day to come. Many of our clients have elaborate sales centers with fancy high-def displays but no content to play on them.

 

My personal belief is that the potential benefit for our industry is huge. If you consider the possibility that you can reasonable justify a hefty increase in cost to create a high-def animation versus a standard animation, the profit margin for a project can drastically increase because other than being a little more careful with the details you put into your scene, you are charging more for a product for which your computers will bear most of the burden of its improvement. When the HD-DVD recorders come out (hopefully really soon), I firmly believe it will be the beginning of a whole new phase in our industry, just like the advent of radiosity.

 

Any other thoughts?

 

http://news.digitaltrends.com/talkback158.html

[mahorela]

Very interesting Brian. You are lucky to work in an environment where your clients realise the importance of new technology in terms of gaining a competitive advantage over their opposition. I haven't been paying as much attention as I should to this.........how will this effect our work. Is it as simple as rendering a larger size? a higher frame rate? got any details for us on the technical side?

[Brian Smith]

Well the obvious thing that comes to mind is memory consumption, but with the Max 9 and 64bit processors, this should be a minimal problem. I'm sure others that are more hardware savvy could expound better than me on this particular issue.

 

What I think it means is that there will be a wider range in perceived talent. I mean that if your work has problems and a low level of detail, those problems and lack of detail will become more apparent when rendered in high def...if you're work has few problems and a high level of detail, your skill will be more apparent. Right now, so many people can achieve such high quality and realism at standard resolution but with this new advancement, achieving the same level of realism might be more difficult...especially if one has to sacrifice quality settings to compensate for an inability to minimize render times from proper scene structure and render settings. Another way to explain is that if you looked at an image (say 640x480) and it didnt look very good, you could simply reduce it in size (say 240x180) and it would look less worse...and at some point it would start to look as good as another image that shined at the higher resolution.

 

It's only a matter of time before it's the norm...hopefully sooner than later.

[Jeff Mottle]

I've not followed this battle for the new format for quite some time, but from a pure marketing standpoint Blu-Ray is probably doomed. If you asked the general public I would be willing to bet 9.5 out of 10 likely don't even know what it is. At least HD-DVD suggests what it is and uses terminology that is pretty common these days even in general consumer markets.

 

As far as it affecting our industry I don't see HD being a huge help to most clients. I think it's going to take more than a few more pixels on a screen to convince someone to buy one property over another. That having been said, I think it's probably a better marketing tool for viz firms to both edge out their competition in tight markets and to upsell their clients into something that they (with proper education and brainwashing) will perceive as something that will give them an edge in the market. In reality, I don't see it helping much. It will become mainstream in due time and some will jump on the bandwagon in the interim, but I don't see it sweeping the arch viz market. My 2 cents.

[Jeff Mottle]

I wonder too though, even those companies that do try to offer up an HD service, will the time they need to spend making sure the modeling and post work is up to par and the extra horsepower to render the extra pixels, be cost effective for the clients. At some point no amount of marketing is going to offset a significant increase in fee.

[Brian Smith]

That having been said, I think it's probably a better marketing tool for viz firms to both edge out their competition in tight markets and to upsell their clients into something that they (with proper education and brainwashing) will perceive as something that will give them an edge in the market.

 

I completely agree which is why i started the 'brainwashing' process long ago and have been hyping it every chance i get. Most of my clients don't know much about technology but from what i've told them they see it as a way to look better than their competition. It has become quite cutthroat around SW Florida as it has in numerous other markets, and marketing is more important than it's ever been. Will it help sell a property? I don't know...but i do know that my clients are all about show.

[Brian Smith]

I wonder too though, even those companies that do try to offer up an HD service, will the time they need to spend making sure the modeling and post work is up to par and the extra horsepower to render the extra pixels, be cost effective for the clients. At some point no amount of marketing is going to offset a significant increase in fee.

 

Well to that i have to say what i said before...the perceived talent spectrum will widen. If your work is good enough already, you shouldn't have much additional work to do at all...it's your computer that will carry the load. So i think it is a HUGE benefit to an already talented artist and a hindrance to a less talented artist. I'm already doing some hard thinking about what to charge for the high-def versions...don't know what it will end up being but i know it will be substantial, the additional hours i have to put into it will be negligible, and many clients will eat it up.

[mahorela]

http://forum.ecoustics.com/bbs/messages/34579/118003.html

 

this is an interesting read which suggest that its all about pixel resolution and from my understanding of it we will simply have to render higher res frames at a different pixel aspect ratio.

 

1280 x 720 pixels 16:9 aspect ratio

or

1920 x 1080 16:9 aspect ratio

is all we can expect from this a sharper picture?

I think that this will sort out the men from the boys as the higher res will show up some nasty details but it also may prove to make things harder for the freelancer or the one man band who just may be forced in to lowering standards to render out this size. Will this increase the gap between the haves and have nots as well as the talented to the less talented?

[Brian Smith]

It will be more than just a sharper image. One thing that will definitely change is improved antialiasing and a reduction in the common side effects (flickering, swimming, etc). Right now, I sometimes have to overcompensate in the modeling process to make certain features stand out...such as making a wall reveal 1 inch deep instead of half an inch deep (so that it stands out better). I'm sure there are many others.

[Nic H]

Yay! all my hi res texturing and over the top chamferring will be seen.

alas the render times.

[AJLynn]

Don't worry about the render times, you'll have 80 cores. (Will the 80 core Intel chip have a Xeon option so you can have 160 cores? )

 

I've not followed this battle for the new format for quite some time, but from a pure marketing standpoint Blu-Ray is probably doomed. If you asked the general public I would be willing to bet 9.5 out of 10 likely don't even know what it is. At least HD-DVD suggests what it is and uses terminology that is pretty common these days even in general consumer markets.

 

I think you're wrong, for one reason - the PS3. Early indicators are that the porn industry is going to Blu Ray because of the PS3. HD-DVD won't last any longer than the original DivX. (Anybody remember that?)

[Brian Smith]

I have to agree with jeff...i think blu-ray doesn't have a chance to survive beyond PS3. There is going to be a winner...there has to. Even if it takes 10 years, everyone will be high def someday just a sure as everyone has gone from vhs to dvd. Blu-ray has so many things going against it..as pointed out in the article.

[AJLynn]

The article may have a point, but this is numbers vs porn, so reasonable analysis doesn't necessarily apply.

[ihabkal]

one major plus is that you will get rid of shimmering, dancing lines, and other display related artifacts with the HD LCD screens and high res animations. THat by itself is worth the extra cost IMHO because I have seen nasty dancing lines from animations done by major studios.

[John Dollus]

The article may have a point, but this is numbers vs porn, so reasonable analysis doesn't necessarily apply.

 

Well, the success of VHS over Beta was long been attributed to the porn industry. When they adopted it, sales of the larger, bulkier VHS players and tapes took off.

 

From my experience, those marketing types in the sales centers think the increased contrast of an LCD TV is HD. They often connect the equipment with either S or composite connections anyway to completely defeat any HD source material.

I am surprised nobody has brought up the fact that all of those low poly entourage items would not be acceptable for a high detailed presentation. No more Axyz people, no more low poly cars with no drivers. No more planar trees either....

 

Of course, if they continue to stock those sales centers with only 42" screens, it won't be that much more noticeable anyway. Only when you get up to around 60" or so would it be noticeable to the average schmoe and only after switching back and forth.

[Nils Norgren]

Here at Neoscape we have been building everything in 720p for about 2 years now. Most of the time we bump down to SD at the end of the process for the clients who only need a DVD but we keep all the content at HD. The resulting DVDs are better and we use the HD versions when marketing. Rendering at HD can be more time consuming (obviously) but at 1280 x 720 it is not as bad, we also render to 23.976 fps, so there are less frames to render.

 

When compressing to an HD stream there are only so many megs per second to use per frame, so the less frames and the slightly lower resolution allows the inter-frame compression to be lessened. The main problem is delivery, we have been using a special video server. They are a bear to prepare media for as they require a Transport Stream mpeg which is not something created out of most compression suites.

 

Things sure look good in HD tho. We have also been doing all our shoots on the Varicam (Panasonic's HD camera 720p), except Hele footage which is usually shot on the Sony Cine-Alta which is 1080i, it makes for better tracking when you have the higher res source.

 

Back in the early days we use to say "gbogh" or "go big or go home"

 

-Nils

 

ps. I am pulling for Blu-ray, although I don't believe that it will be a repeat of VHS Beta, with one dominating and one dying off.

[MandelbrotJr]

Well, lets not forget that we're not talking about HUGE increase in resolution. In the computer world we've been using resolutions equal or greater than 1024x768 for years, 720p is not that much of a leap from that. I often forget that in the TV world you still have a LOT of people looking at 486 lines of vertical resolution.

Yes it will mean an increase in rendering times, but lets also remember that in the past year or so dual-core procs have reached a mainstream price, and that trend is going to continue for the foreseeable future with more cores on the way.

I think HD is going to be a really big thing for us in the future, and although we will need to keep on eye on the detail, we're much more suited to producing content in HD than other industries because our data source is intrinsically scalable.

[Ernest Burden III]

I was going to post saying that Neoscape already works in so-called HD, but Nils beat me to it. Well, they do. I've only done standard 720x480 so far. My friends at Animation + Images are starting to work in high-res, though getting clients to pay for the extra costs seems to be an issue, no so much for the rendering but for the live plate shots.

 

The real benefit to our work that I'm looking forward to is the move towards progressive scan over interlaced. Talk about dancing lines--with my NPR animation work there have been some issues with playback on interlaced. I changed how I make them, but the more our work is viewed on progressive scan the better. So getting clients to buy nice new DVD players and monitors for a sales office provides the perfect time to nudge them to progressive.

 

Nils, the 24fps doesn't cause problems? Is that only for clients who have purchased 3:2 pulldown players, or will it be as good as 30fps for anyone? The VHS scheme for 24>30 is to run 5 frames then repeat one (if my memory is working correctly). I'm wondering how a generic DVD players does that?

 

Also--hi-def means more than just visual detail. Is anyone thinking about all that nasty 5.1 channel audio? I say nasty because I'm an audio snob--two channels is stereo and more than that is phony silliness. But if you turn off the sound and watch an amazing special effects shot it won't look so special anymore. Sound is critical, and don't just mean playing the Four Seasons. I sometimes add wind noise, birds, distant closing doors, ambient conversation noises to animation. Environmental sounds make a HUGE difference. You will notice that in films when you get the required song break (featuring some warm moment in the story and with a song that was popular when you were younger) you usually still have sounds coming through--footsteps, traffic, smoochy-kissies, wind-in-the-trees. Adding in all those ambient sounds is called 'sweetening'. It probably should be a standard in arch-vis films, too.

 

There's an interesting way to do that, I haven't tried it yet, in Cinema (and probably in Maya and Max, too). You can put a soundfile onto an object like a texture (via a 'speaker' object--cute) and then place vaious microphones in the scene (attached to cameras for example) and have an automatic audio track of the environment as your camera navigates it, mixed to one channel, two, or various 5.1 types. You can also have audio drive effects, so a sound of wind blowing through trees can drive the modifier that makes the trees move, so the sound matches the movement and is varied by camera position and direction. More things to soak up our production time.

 

We can address two senses in hi-def and should be providing detail in both. I'm sure that if you could add more senses the porn industry would be an early-adopter.

 

One caution on rendering high definition is that you have to have enough visual detail and interest to fill all of those extra pixels. More detail may reveal just how empty your scene really is. People still like some things left to their imaginations, that way they are a part of the presentation, not just watching something passively. Show too much and risk shutting out your audience.

 

And hi-def doesn't do anything for a lack of story.

[AJLynn]

How is the change to HD affecting the NTSC/PAL thing? Do Europeans have the same HD spec, but with a PAL spec in place of our 480i? (Can American HDTVs handle PAL source and vice versa?)

 

BTW I recently got HDTV and an HD cable box, and, wow. Then I plugged in my PS2, and, not at all wow. Then I got a $15 set of component cables for it and the difference is amazing, even though it's still just 480i. Now I'm waiting on my new DVD+surround sound system with HDMI upconverting, I'll see how well that works, but I'm not going to invest in an HD-DVD or Blu-Ray deck until those come way down in price.

 

I had an exchange with 2 guys at Best Buy where they were trying to talk me into buying a $125 Monster HDMI cable. I asked if they had anything cheaper, and they had one for $50 but one of them started giving me a spiel on how Monster cables have the kind of shielding they use on nuclear reactors, copper mined in the mountains of Nepal and refined in zero gravity, etc. I replied, but isn't HDMI a digital protocol?... but there was no stopping these guys. Then one of them walked away and the guy who had been doing the talking told me that the other guy was his boss, but now that he was gone it was okay to tell me that the $50 cable is just as good. I got on Amazon.com and ordered $20 Panasonic cables

[AJLynn]

We can address two senses in hi-def and should be providing detail in both. I'm sure that if you could add more senses the porn industry would be an early-adopter.

 

They beat you to it but i hear the technology hasn't matured yet

[Ernest Burden III]

How is the change to HD affecting the NTSC/PAL thing?

 

You still have video getting its timing signal from local power, and the US is 60hz and the PAL countries are 50hz, so I would assume that divide still divides.

 

And don't say wire is wire to an audio junkie. Cables and inter-connects (meaning expensive cables) are part of how you shape the sound of a stereo. I'm sure the same is true for carrying a digital signal. I have special digital cables in my stereo.

 

They beat you to it

 

I'm sorry I brought it up.

[AJLynn]

It's not the same with digital and analog - in analog (I agree with you) good cables result in better reproduction because interference is added to the waveform and impedence tends to flatten the waveform, but in digital there is no waveform - it's just 1's and 0's. Or, I should say, the waveform only has 2 points, up and down.

 

So, e.g., if you were designing a digital system and used a 2V signal line, you'd have your transmitting end send 0V for 0 and 2V for 1, and on your receiving end you might set it up so that anything below 0.5V is 0 and above 1.5V is 1. You'd have to have just about the worst cable you could get, and live in my old house 1/4 mile from the KDKA AM tower, to have interference and inefficiencies causing 0.5V errors, and even then it probably wouldn't do anything. With digital, your signal is either received correctly or incorrectly (which would result is big problems you'd notice immediately), not poorly, fairly, well or very well.

[Chad Warner]

They beat you to it but i hear the technology hasn't matured yet

 

I hope you didn't just do a search for that term....although I suppose that's better than knowing it off the top of your head.

[AJLynn]

I did already know what teledildonics was

[mtutaj]

Looks like Blue-Ray may not win as the standard.

 

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