VFX Oscar Protests

From Hollywood Reporter: Globalization is wreaking havoc on Hollywood's visual effects community.

Cheap labor in China and India and seductive tax incentives like British Columbia's 33 percent credit on local labor have allowed foreign firms to trigger competitive bidding so intense that the biggest VFX houses are surviving on slim profit margins, often less than 5 percent annually, in a hot-and-cold business. Rhythm & Hues, Oscar-nominated for Life of Pi, filed for bankruptcy Feb. 13, laid off 250 employees and is relying on $17 million in court-approved loans from studios.

R&H tried to adapt by opening facilities in Mumbai, Vancouver, Malaysia and Taiwan -- but didn't move fast enough. "Infrastructure and head count in these territories is only adding cost" for California-based companies opening branches abroad, says Ed Ulbrich, CEO of VFX rival Digital Domain, which went through bankruptcy in 2012 and was acquired by India's Reliance MediaWorks.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/neonmarg/sets/72157632848557341/with/8505477615/

http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/02/26/172910128/among-oscars-fanfare-visual-effects-industry-faces-difficult-times

http://vfxsoldier.wordpress.com/

http://www.hitfix.com/motion-captured/the-visual-effects-community-sees-red-in-the-wake-of-oscar-protest-and-on-air-snub/1

Oli HTML5 Test

Sample code:

<video controls height="360" width="480">
  <source src="http://www.pixelgoat.net/encoding/markus_output/html5/olitest.mp4" type='video/mp4' />
  <source src="http://www.pixelgoat.net/encoding/markus_output/html5/olitest.webm" type='video/webm' />
</video>

Suggested HTML5 Video targets:

mp4 - videos play in Safari, Internet Explorer, Android, and iPhone
webm - videos play in FireFox, Chrome, and Android
flv - Flash fallback, requires Adobe Flash plugin
ogg - older format, lower quality, for old versions of FireFox

NOTE: For Android devices, I'd still recommend Webm VP8 for 100% compatibility. With Android there is spotty support for Flash, HLS, and MP4 depending on manufacturer, OS version, and preinstalled players.

4K and HEVC UltraHD formats

Emerging 4K cameras are the next generation of video. In the future, we may see H.265/HEVC codecs for Ultra HD formats, but for now, please use H.264 high profile at level 5.1 for 4K support. 4K Ultra HD consumer displays have a 16:9 resolution of 3840 × 2160 (8.3 megapixels)

Reasons:

1. There are no hardware H.265/HEVC chips yet for consumer devices
2. Even when those chips do come out in 3-5 years, they will still support H.264
3. H.265/HEVC transcoding math is extremely slow (64x64 DCT & 12-tap interpolation)
4. 4K is great for mastering and digital cinema (10 GB per minute edit codec)
5. 4K is costly bandwidth for digital cable to the home (Bitrate 2x higher vs Blu-ray)
6. About 90% of consumers can't tell the difference between 1080p and 4K
7. There is no 4K disc standard to replace Blu-ray (only 25 GB single layer)

All that said, when H.265/HEVC is ready, you can be sure we will have something amazing. For now, just encode in H.264 high profile at level 5.1 for 4K support. That is what you were watching at CES. We can support these ultra large files over 100+ GB using Aspera transport to our private cloud.

H.264 level details
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC#Levels

4K format details
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4K_resolution

4K sample from Gizmodo
http://gizmodo.com/5914426/the-first-cinema-resolution-movie-download-available-to-consumers-is-160gb-and-absolutely-breathtaking

UPDATE April 20, 2013 Las Vegas: Just saw about a dozen 4K displays at NAB from various manufacturers and encoding providers. Some were playing back on custom H265 quad-SLI hardware, etc... Unfortunately, all were heavily noise reduced with lots of blurring on medium detail areas. Completely defeats the whole point of a higher resolution. Most engineers I spoke with said they expect to see real consumer H265 sometime in 2016. Sony unveiled 55" and 65" sets in its XBR series; at $5,000 and $7,000, respectively, they're significantly more affordable than their 84" predecessor ($25,000) shown at CES.

UPDATE March 30, 2014 Las Vegas: Most HEVC 4K samples still showing very heavy blurring and noise-reduction. Only a few prototype chips being shown. Samsung pricing 55" UHDTV at $2,500 and 65" UHDTV at $3,500.

AVS Forum discussion:
http://www.avsforum.com/t/1515895/hevc-x265-is-here-any-media-players-capable

Latest OpenHEVC commits:
https://github.com/OpenHEVC/FFmpeg/commits/hevc_optimized

Doom9 HEVC discussion:
http://forum.doom9.org/archive/index.php/t-170051.html

It will be a while before HEVC is fully supported in browsers and mobiles, most estimates are 2016.