Did you notice anything there?<\/p>\n
Deliverables are 1080 lines or less. (Always.)<\/h3>\n
Yep: none of those containers have more than 1080 lines of resolution. As far as DCI, SMPTE, your SDI cables, and Digital Cinema projectors are all concerned, “2k” still means 1080 lines of resolution or less<\/em>. This turns out to be pretty important.<\/p>\n If you are finishing in a 16×9 aspect ratio, and you’re finishing in “2k”, you’re actually going to deliver … 1920×1080. Which is HD.<\/p>\n Likewise, if you’re finishing in 1.85 and “2k”, your actual deliverable is 1998×1080. Again, 1080 lines. Not 1152.<\/p>\n But wait, it gets worse. Putting that extra 14% of spatial resolution into your DI can actually damage the picture that your audience sees<\/strong>. Why? Because your fancy, non-standard 1152 lines of resolution will have to be scaled down to 1080 lines of resolution. But that’s not a big deal, right? You just press the magic resize button, and there’s no penalty, right?<\/p>\n It’s become conventional wisdom that oversampling is a good thing. Shoot 4k or 5k, finish in 2k or HD. No problem. I happen to agree with that, and Charles Poynton made an eloquent, 5-hour long argument<\/a> to that effect at a recent talk at the HPA retreat.<\/p>\n But in this case we’re oversampling not by 200% or 300%. We’re oversampling by a lousy 14%. To quote one guy<\/a> on the topic:<\/p>\n “Resampling an image works well for large factors. A small factor like 2048\/1920 is difficult to achieve as you basically need a very very large filter kernel to effectively remove just the frequencies you don’t want. In other words, the reject band (1920>2048) is very narrow as compared to the size of the image. That doesn’t give much room for any filtering to work in.”<\/em><\/p>\n In plain English: a small resize factor will only serve to soften your image. You’re stepping on your image. You’re making it worse.<\/p>\n You (or your client) may have thought that you were finishing in “better resolution” by “going 2k”. But since you have to down-res all deliverables\u2014you know, the thing that your audience will actually see\u2014that higher resolution is not only thrown away, but contributes to an inferior final picture.<\/p>\n [UPDATE: Graeme Nattress writes, “what will happen is necessarily softening, but aliasing because the downsampling filter, if inadequate, will let through aliasing artifacts.” Thanks Graeme.]<\/p>\n This is true for finishing in 1.78 (16×9) or 1.85. It’s not true for finishing in 2.39. If you’re finishing 2.39, stick with 2k, since you’re only at 858 lines of res anyway.<\/p>\n Scrolling credits turn out to be the canary in the coal mine here, because they can look really, really bad when you resize them by a small factor. They are very unforgiving. Our slate tries to point this out as politely as possible:<\/p>\n2048>1920 is not enough Oversampling<\/h3>\n
Canary In the Coal Mine<\/h3>\n
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