Disney ‘Very Content’ With HDR Images in 1080p, Pixar Executive Says

Slavens broke months of Disney silence about industry chatter that the studio wants to release animated HDR content on Ultra HD Blu-ray at resolutions lower than 3840 x 2160, as the format allows it to do (see 1601260048). Disney is a founding member of the UHD Alliance (see 1501050023), but releasing HDR content with less than 3840 x 2160 resolution wouldn't qualify Disney product to bear the alliance’s UHD Premium compliance logo under the specs the alliance announced at CES (see 1601030003).

Though Slavens didn’t rule out Pixar releases of consumer HDR animated content in 3840 x 2160, she steadfastly insisted the studio has no imminent plans to jump into consumer HDR delivery of its Pixar content in any form, physical or digital. She also told the conference audience similarly in Q&A as moderator of a panel on “First Forays: High Dynamic Range in Animation.” On there being no imminent plans to release consumer HDR content, "we don’t have a deal in place,” she said. “We don’t have a distribution outlet in place. But we’re definitely doing the R&D.”

Disney and Pixar have “done a lot of testing over the years to get to that place,” Slavens said of the stance pairing animated HDR content and 1080p resolution. “So it really is a question that needs to be answered for us. I think the live-action world is a little easier to slice and dice.”

Cost is “part of it,” Slavens said of the reluctance to jump into animated HDR content at resolutions higher than 1080p. But it’s also a “creative” discussion, she said. “It’s about the fact that we created those 4K images and very rarely is there tangible creative benefit” to releasing animated HDR content at resolutions higher than 1080p, she said.

As moderator at the conference Saturday, Slavens herself broached with her panelists the questions whether there is “an upside or a downside” in pairing HDR with higher resolutions or stereoscopic 3D, and “the choices that we make” as a result. She conceded the answers to those questions “might be a little controversial, but I think these are important things to say out loud.”

Animation in HDR “has perhaps a different cost impact” than live-action content “when you consider an increase in resolution and the pixel count,” said Dominic Glynn, Pixar senior scientist. “So when someone says, ‘I’d like an 8K version in 3D of your movie,’ that’s a lot of pixels, as it turns out.” There needs to be “a corresponding creative pull for that to make sense” financially, he said. “We’ve got this bucket of cash, and we have to spend it on story and fidelity and all these components.”

Of all those variables, higher resolution “is one of the ones where the cost benefit is perhaps not as high as some of the others,” Glynn said. “That said, it’s not the driving decision” on whether the studio should spend the dollars “it costs if we’re going to do a 10K movie,” he said. “We are creatively driven at Pixar.” It’s “very much the directors who pull and ask for capabilities and attributes and characteristics in this platform,” he said of HDR.

Likewise, with stereoscopic 3D, there are “multiple camps” debating how critical it is that the theatrical “stereoscopic exhibition” winds up living up “to the original intent” of the film, Glynn said. “Some of the directors are big, big, big, big fans of 3D, and others aren’t willing to accept that this is a necessary part of having to exhibit your film.”

However, everyone agrees HDR “is universally adopted as an awesome way to add value to the audience experience,” Glynn said. “That’s what, I think, makes it super-hyper-focused interesting for all the technology folks. It’s great. How do we do this at scale? How do we give it to everybody in the production process? How do we make this thing a first-class citizen without compromising the other things that are very important in our features?”

Slavens said during Q&A that Disney has no “definitive plans around releasing high-dynamic-range content to the home as yet” when an audience questioner asked what “consumer deliverables” in HDR were in Pixar’s offing. “We’re definitely digging in,” she said of HDR delivery to the home, emphasizing that her remarks were coming from “a corporate responsibility perspective.” On Disney’s R&D efforts in consumer HDR, “we’re up to our elbows in it,” she said.

Creatively speaking, consumer HDR is “very different from the theatrical HDR experience,” said Glynn, on why it’s not easy adapting animated HDR movies for the TV screen. It involves “totally different opportunities, different challenges,” he said. Another panelist, Mark Dinicola, colorist on the 2015 Pixar HDR release, Inside Out, let slip that he's working on a consumer HDR version of the film, but “it’s challenging,” he said. “There’s a big increase in impact” in viewing consumer HDR clips of Inside Out, compared with the theatrical version, Dinicola said.

At Pixar, “critically, we want the audience experience to be really positive,” Glynn said of consumer HDR. “It’s going to take a lot of work from a lot of people to guarantee that outcome. There’s a lot of different display devices, a lot of compromises being made today -- things that will really challenge our capability to make this a very compelling, robust, long-term, positive audience experience. But we’re deep in it right now, and really vested.”

NAB Show Notebook

Last week's joint petition for a rulemaking that NAB filed with CTA, America's Public Television Stations and the Advanced Warning and Response Network (AWARN) Alliance asking the FCC to authorize ATSC 3.0's physical layer (see 1604130065) was "a great step toward the adoption of ATSC 3.0, the next generation of television," said NAB Chief Technology Officer Sam Matheny Sunday in his Broadcast Engineering Conference opening keynote. At ATSC, "so many people worked very hard to get us this far," Matheny said. "The committee meetings, the debates. The plug fests, the debates. The conference calls, the debates. The field tests, the debates. The candidate standards, and yes, the debates." The give-and-take within ATSC has been "very constructive, and all those debates are for good reason," because they "help bring consensus on the best possible next-generation standards," he said. As broadcasters, “we have some big challenges ahead, like the channel repacking that will follow the spectrum auction," Matheny said. "The FCC has models that will require as many as 1,300 stations to change channels. And while no one can accurately predict exactly how long the auction will take, or how much spectrum will be impacted, we have done some serious work on looking at the resources required to implement channel repacking, and we continue to do our best to educate the FCC on what we believe will be required to execute properly on an endeavor of this scale. With challenge comes opportunity, and post-auction, we will have to do more with less."

“The means” exist to do consumer device updates in ATSC 3.0, Rich Chernock, chief science officer at Triveni Digital, told the Broadcast Engineering Conference Saturday. But receiver-device updates likely won’t come from “the broadcast itself, as most devices are going to be Internet-connected,” said Chernock, who chairs ATSC’s Technology Group 3, which is supervising the framing of ATSC 3.0. “It’s up to the device manufacturers to figure out how they want to deal with software updates of their devices. There’s a lot of things involved there that are maybe not so obvious, including security. The ATSC broadcast provides a data pipe, and DTV systems have been used to send the data for updates to the devices.” The current ATSC system “even has provision for that” in certain parts of the world, Chernock said. “Whether that path is the one chosen by the consumer electronics manufacturers,” that’s their decision, he said. In ATSC 3.0, as with the current DTV system, “it’s available,” he said.

Don’t buy into the skeptics who say Ultra HD “will just become another 3D,” advised Stan Moote, chief technology officer of the International Association of Broadcasting Manufacturers, a trade group representing broadcast and media technology products and services. The 3D TV sector was “an interesting false start a few years ago,” said Moote at a Broadcast Engineering Conference workshop Saturday. Moote thinks “everybody knows 3D really works well when it comes to film, but when it comes to basic television, it’s a real challenge,” he said. “I think part of that reason was because the set manufacturers pushed them out too soon before people knew how to make product in 3D for television.” That active-shutter 3D glasses didn’t work right “so everybody ended up with headaches” was another factor in 3D TV’s demise, Moote said. “When you’re going over to UHD, you don’t have that anymore, you’re not messing with your mind anymore. It’s just plain good picture, and that’s the important thing.”

Korean broadcasters KBS and SBS are teaming with LG Electronics to use this week’s NAB Show to showcase how over-the-air ATSC 3.0 will deliver “pristine” Ultra HD pictures to LG 65-inch 4K TVs equipped with the world's first ATSC 3.0 demodulator/tuner chips, LG said in a Sunday announcement. The announcement quoted SBS as saying the NAB Show demos will “set the stage” for the start of ATSC 3.0 broadcasting in South Korea next year in advance of the February 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang. "With Korea preparing to launch terrestrial UHD TV commercial services in early 2017, we hope our alliance with LG at the NAB Show inspires other broadcasters around the world to have the confidence to also move ahead with next-gen broadcasting,” SBS said. LG previously teamed with Korean broadcasters and others to beam the world’s first end-to-end 4K broadcast in Korea using the ATSC 3.0 standard (see 1602230044).

LG is demonstrating a new wireless network antenna designed to receive and process ATSC 3.0 broadcast signals and redistribute them via Wi-Fi throughout the home to connected devices such as smart TVs, tablets, laptop computers and smartphones, the company said in a separate announcement Monday. The showcasing of the antenna at the NAB Show caps a two-year development project, LG said. The antenna is based on an LG-developed unidirectional antenna array with unique electronic steering logic designed to optimize indoor reception, it said. LG is integrating a chip-based ATSC 3.0 tuner-demodulator with the antenna, which can be placed virtually anywhere in the home wherever indoor reception is best, it said. The steerable network antenna is coupled with a network interface to communicate with a home Wi-Fi router “to allow connected devices to blend ATSC 3.0 signals and services with over-the-top Internet-delivered content,” it said. LG also announced Monday it’s teaming with Sinclair at the NAB Show to do the first over-the-air broadcast of AWARN, the ATSC 3.0-based advanced emergency alerting system. The ATSC 3.0 signal carrying AWARN data is being received with a simple antenna at the Las Vegas Convention Center and LG’s new ATSC 3.0 chip tuner/demodulator, LG said.