The Fox Report
Barry Fox’s technology column
Cinema’s insatiable appetite for ‘versions’
H
ats off to movie industry
trade body SMPTE (the Society of Motion Picture and
Television Engineers). It does a very
good job of educating movie and television engineers. The enterprising
UK branch recently held two firstclass sessions, which I was lucky
enough to attend.
For one of them, SMPTE gained
access to the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, to learn more
about time – more next month.
For the other event, SMPTE took
over the Dolby Screening Room in
Soho Square to show Disney’s Avatar:
The Way of Water in immersive audio,
high frame rate, and high dynamic
range 3D. Carly Brown, Disney’s Director of Motion Picture Operations, and
Rich Welsh, Deluxe’s SVP of Innovation, talked ahead of the screening
about the mind boggling multitude of
sound and picture formats needed for
release to different types and grades
of cinemas worldwide, ranging from
high-end Dolby venues (such as the
Leicester Square Odeon or the new
Battersea Power Station cinema) to
bog-standard flea pits and local multipurpose halls.
Multiple versions
According to Brown and Welsh, runof-the-mill movies are released in
around 100 versions, with ‘bigger’
titles hitting 500. But Avatar: The
Way of Water (AWOW), ideally needed
5000 versions, compromised down to
a final 1065 versions, partly because
it’s in 3D (which involves different
projection systems needing different
brightness and colour gradings) and
partly because movie maker James
Cameron wanted multiple aspect
ratios to stop cinemas with different
screen sizes projecting pictures with
black masked bars and borders. There
are 27 different aspect ratio versions
of AWOW.
The sound options range from simple
stereo and surround to Atmos immersive, with subtitles in 51 languages
and 28 language dubs.
Whereas most cinemas project at 24
frames per second (fps), a few (Dolby)
cinemas can handle 48 fps. The 24
fps versions of AWOW were down
converted from 48 fps.
In fact, AWOW uses a mix of material created at 24fps and 48 fps. This
explains why keen eyes will spot 24
fps motion artefacts (judder) in some
action sequences, even when the movie
is playing at 48 fps.
The subtitles were originated in 3D
and down converted to 2D for the 2D
cinema versions. The 3D titles hover
in unusual areas of the screen, at different depths.
10 quadrillion bytes
The post-production engineers handling
all this work were split between New
Zealand and California, with a database
of 10PB (one petabyte (PB) equals one
million gigabytes) of uncompressed
audio and video and metadata, representing 381 million picture frames. This
was moved across the world by Amazon’s Web Cloud service, which needed
radical tweaking by AWOW engineers
to make it fast enough. The data was
physically moved by undersea cables,
using ‘dual wet routes’; a matched pair
of 10GB fibre ‘pipes’. In this way, if a
trawler drags up a cable and breaks it,
the data keeps on streaming.
In all, 3500 hours of movie material
was cut to the final release length of 3
hours 12 minutes. To achieve all this,
movie engineering companies that
normally compete ended up working
together to get the job done. The credits
at the end of the movie are as long as
a short film. Even James Cameron was
moved to admit: ‘I’ve never worked like
this before, and I never want to again’.
The Dolby screening room in London
is classed as a ‘grading theatre’ and is
thus permitted to screen movies in pitch
black, without any of the emergency
lighting or Exit signs which public cinemas must provide. It’s a unique way to
watch a movie and reminds how much
ambient light pollutes all other cinemas.
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Practical Electronics | May | 2023
charging the battery, removing and
owners of Amazon Ring cameras can
replacing the battery and pressing the rest easier in their beds, knowing that
reset button for short and long periods. they are not being silently surveilled.
A quick Google-check showed that
other Ring camera users had experienced
exactly the same problem; a forced
update that bricked the device.
Just for the heck of it I called the Ring
Help line, which is run by Amazon who
bought the Ring company. As I feared,
I was compelled to repeat all the same
fault-fixing steps while the helper (in
South Africa) religiously followed her
script and made side-calls for more help
from more senior helpers.
After an hour of laboriously achieving
absolutely nothing Amazon insisted
that I try one last fix. I had to sit by the
dead and disconnected device while
All 60 issues from Jan 2017
Amazon tried to force an update over
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the Internet. I tried politely to question
the logic behind this powerful magic. If
PDF files ready for
a stone dead device isn’t connected to
immediate download
anything, how can it receive anything?
But the helpers insisted on trying.
See page 6 for further
I then began to doubt my sanity and
wonder whether the clever boffins at
details and other great
Amazon might perhaps be selling suback-issue offers.
per-clever cameras that can play dead
but actually respond remotely, much as
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pany NSO lets security services access
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But sadly, or
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failed too. Amazon-Ring’s Helpers finally had to
acknowledge that
the dead device
wasn’t responding
to the firmware that
Amazon was optimistically pushing
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Amazon’s Ring camera has an annoying habit of
auto-updating itself to death.
Likewise, the Dolby screening room
can use the Dolby 3D system, which
was developed by German company
Infitec, and is less fatiguing than other
systems, but not commercially viable.
The spectacles (which filter slightly
different red, green and blue spectra for
the left and right eye views) cost at least
£25 a pair and are thus too expensive to
risk losing to light-fingered customers.
Was all Cameron’s work worthwhile?
Everyone will have their own opinion,
but AWOW is a remarkable technical
achievement on all counts. As a movie,
I find it far too long and too loud,
with endless bang, whoosh, boom and
ratatat audio effects for interminable
battle scenes. There are also some
very distressing sea creature harpoon
hunting sequences that remind of the
infamous 1956 Moby Dick movie with
Gregory Peck.
But for those who enjoy MarvelComic-style blockbusters, which play
like a computer game with no pause
control, AWOW will hugely appeal.
Reportedly, it has earned more than
$2.2bn worldwide. It was nominated for
four Oscars, including best picture and
won the Best Visual Effects category.
Helplines Coda
Amazon is a clever company with
mould-breaking ideas, but perhaps not
always as clever as it thinks.
I recently started to use a Ring CCTV
camera that had being lying in my drawer for a while. It worked for around half
an hour and then decided to download
itself a firmware update. The update
‘bricked’ the camera. It was stone dead,
showing no lights or other signs of life.
I followed all Ring’s recommended fault-fixing steps, including fully
Practical Electronics | May | 2023
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