Big Buck Bunny In 4K, 60 Fps and 3D-stereo 102
An anonymous reader writes "Blender Foundation open movie projects like Sintel and Tears of Steel have been mentioned on Slashdot in the recent years. Now an old-timer, their open movie Big Buck Bunny from 2008, has been getting a make-over in a new release: The entire movie has been recreated in 3D stereo with a resolution of 4K (3840x2160) at 60fps. It took years to rework the movie because the original Big Buck Bunny was created for 2D. Most of the scenes had to be modified to work well in 3D stereo. Furthermore, the original movie was made for cinemas and was 24fps; a lot of changes to the animations had to be made to get the correct results. The creator of the reworked version explains about it on BlenderNation where he also talks about the fact that the entire movie was rendered via an online collaborative renderfarm, BURP, where volunteers provided spare CPU cycles to make it happen. If you want to see how your computer measures up to playing 4K content in 60 fps you can download the reworked movie from the official homepage — lower resolutions are also available."
What are they displaying this on? (Score:5, Interesting)
AFAIK to get 60fps at 4k using existing display connectors you need to use two DP or HDMI1.4 connections and MST, but with two connectors you just have enough bandwidth for 60fps so how are they doing 3D which would require another doubling of bandwidth and thus require 4 connectors? Are there 4k monitors with 4 inputs I'm not aware of?
Re:Should have made a decent film first... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Why? (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, for a start, 24 doesn't go nicely into 60 so if you do have a particular keyframe position that you want to keep precisely, you'll need to work carefully around it.
It may also be that you've specially keyed an object's position (perhaps camera position for a cut to another angle) in two neighbouring frames for a particular effect, but interpolating between those positions for the extra frames just doesn't work. Or you might end up with an intersection of objects which didn't happen on the original frames.
Then you've also got the problem of extending the number of frames at either end of a scene. Suppose you have (for simplicity's sake) three frames in a scene:
ADG
and you want to triple the framerate. No problem, just stick two extra frames in for each existing frame:
AbcDefG...
Ah. Where do you get the two extra frames you need at the end? There's nowhere for the animation to go because (quite possibly) you only keyed right up to frame G originally, and that was the frame you wanted to end the shot on (as a hobbyist editor, one can get pretty picky about that). You could insert frames at the beginning of the scene, but that's the same problem. You could stretch the whole scene out more - here by inserting three frames between AD and DG - but then you'll be altering different scenes by slightly different amounts.
They'll also be less motion blur with a higher framerate, so errors that may have been covered up might become more noticeable.