Category Archives: Wednesday’s Glenn’sdays

So I was at the library today and came across a children’s book called A Slave Family.  It is an educational book designed to teach children about a very awkward portion of American history.  The book is actually written by a Canadian of Hungarian descent.  Presumably it has an American slant to it since the American educational market is bigger than Canada’s.  Canada doesn’t really exist in this book.

The book is the life story of a fictional child named Quasheba.  I’m guessing that children as supposed to identify with the hero of the story as she is in their same age range.  Children’s literature is usually written with the key characters slightly older than the reader.  Children tend to imitate and idolize others who are slightly older than them (remember when you were a kid?).

The problem with this structure is that you have to point out that slavery sucks.  So you are supposed to empathize with a character who is enduring the degrading practice of slavery.  On the other hand, you’re not supposed to traumatize children.  Everybody looks happy in the illustrations.  The ending of the story is up to the reader.  The book instructs the reader to give Quasheba an ending.  Maybe she will run away (and not get caught and be horribly punished for it).  So the reader is encouraged to give the book an unrealistic fairy tale ending.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that the reasoning behind this book was to provide “historical accuracy”.  If you simply omit slavery as a part of history, then you would arguably be rewriting history.  On the other hand, a children’s book about slavery is pretty problematic.  The book unfortunately sends a mixed message.  Hey kids… slavery is BAD!… but slavery is not that bad because we don’t want to traumatize you.  So ultimately it still falls into the trap of rewriting history.

The real problem

(I’m going to be serious here.)

The real problem is that Americans and Canadians tend to be overprotective of kids and tend to whitewash the world as an amazing place.  We lie to kids about the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus.  You can’t lie to kids about how amazing the world is while trying to explain slavery to them.  We shouldn’t lie to kids.  On the other hand, I think that slavery is too dark of a subject for children’s literature.  I don’t think it’s a good idea to have children’s books about internment camps during World War 2, how the Allies firebombed civilians, how the Allies used nuclear weapons, genocide, how the US tried to hide the genocide in Rwanda, living conditions on First Nations reservations, present-day racism, etc.  These topics are a little much and I think that these topics may be too difficult for really young children to understand.

Of course, I think that it’s important to have discussions about these topics.  Human beings are not perfect.  Overall, I think that our world is actually pretty awesome when human beings work together.  Most of the time, human beings do work together.  It’s just that some of the time human beings will do terrible things to one another.  It’s good if we can talk about it and try to improve the world so that we won’t do terrible things to one another.  But children are too young to understand that type of discussion.  Children’s books could deal with negative emotions or behaviours that they are familiar with- jealousy, envy, etc.  And there are a lot of children’s media out there that do deal with negative aspects of human behaviour.  We could use those structures to teach kids how to deal with these issues in a positive, healthy, and socially acceptable manner.  For example, the movie Toy Story (ok, it’s not a book) has a hero character who deals with his jealousy and envy.

The formula is this: you have a hero character who is relatable and has some very human character flaws.  He undergoes various conflicts and at the end of the day learns the errors of his ways.  In the case of Toy Story, Woody learns to set aside his jealousy so that he can work together with Buzz Lightyear to save the day.  It doesn’t present the hero character as this perfect being.  And because it is fun and engaging, this format is commercially viable.  The good thing about Toy Story is that it doesn’t try to be safe.  The problem with political correctness is that being too safe comes off as patronizing and turns people off from the message.  When you tell somebody not to do something, sometimes it makes them want to do it.  Toy Story on the other hand is more aspirational.  If you stop being a jealous dick like Woody, good things will happen to you.  So I guess what I’m trying to say is this: if we’re going to feed moralizing propaganda to kids, then we should give them uplifting aspirational crack like Toy Story.

The film industry is always trying to give you a reason to see films in the theatre instead of your own home.  The TV industry always tries to give you a theatre quality experience in your home.  I’m going to break down the differences in technology for you.

(Did you know?  I won an award from the Society of Motion Pictures and Television Engineers for my paper on chroma subsampling.)

Aspect ratios

Traditionally, films have always been various flavours of widescreen while TV is generally 4:3.  If you want to watch a film on a TV, you either had to crop out part of the picture or you had to have black bars on the top and the bottom. Some people dislike cropped “pan and scan” movies as they feel that the modified framing is not true to the original.

Now that the TV industry has moved to high definition, it has switched to a widescreen 16:9 aspect ratio.  While this solves problems with films being shown on TVs, there will be some annoyances in the TV world.  The TV world has to deal with and accommodate old technology.  It has to make its content translate to 4:3 well.  Old (or standard definition) content on a 16:9 widescreen TV will have columns on the side.  Some people dislike the columns so much that they prefer the image to be stretched out to fill the entire frame, resulting in wide faces and fat circles.

Resolution: digital cinema has an extra 128 pixels

The digital cinema standards allow for an image that is 2048 pixels by 1080 pixels.
TV standards allow for an image that is 1920 by 1080 pixels.  The ~7% difference between 2048 and 1920 doesn’t really matter to the viewer.  No one is really going to care about the extra pixels on the side.

From a technology point of view however, the extra pixels do make a difference.  A lot of professional equipment used for production is based on consumer technology.  Building off of consumer technology saves a lot of money.  Similarly, a lot of equipment used for film production is the same as TV (some of the cameras, professional video monitors, etc.).  Dealing with those extra pixels means that you have to use equipment specifically designed for 2048×1080.  Your camera (or film scanner) needs to record those extra pixels and your projector needs to show those extra pixels.  Because film is a smaller market than TV+film, this equipment will always be more expensive.  Costs go up for no real benefit.

So why did the people who came up with the digital cinema standards choose 2048 instead of 1920?  Because they wanted cinema to be different than TV.  At the end of the day, it’s still just a dumb decision motivated by politics.

Resolution: 4K versus 2K

First, a discussion of terminology.

“1080″ refers to 1920x1080.  A “1080p” TV has a resolution of 1920×1080.
“2K” refers to 2048x1080.  You might think that this is roughly twice of 1080 (e.g. two thousand is roughly double what 1080 is).  But you would be wrong.  2K and 1080 are practically the same to the viewer.  The digital cinema industry may have wanted to go with 2K because it seems like double what high definition TV is.  It is not.

4K generally refers to 4096x2160, though sometimes it is used to refer to 3840x2160.  Some consumer TV manufacturers use “4K” to refer to their 3840×2160 TVs for marketing purposes (because higher numbers are better right…?).

Here’s the thing about 4K versus 2K: most theatre goers don’t notice it or care.  Sony Pictures has been releasing 4K movies for a long time.  They have a list of 4K movies on their website.  Sony’s digital cinema projector can show 4K while competing 2K Christie projectors cannot.  So, Sony used to be a huge fan of 4K movies since 4K differentiates its projector from Christie’s.  Unfortunately for Sony, nobody cared.

Imax’s digital projector system uses 2 Christie projectors.  For 2-D movies, the effective resolution is better than 2K but not quite as good as 4K.  Fortunately for Imax, nobody cares that their resolution isn’t as good as Sony’s.  (Eventually I think that Imax will use 4-K projectors.  I don’t think that their marketing department will make a big deal out of it though.)

Color gamut / wide gamut

TVs and digital cinema projectors can’t show all the colors that exist naturally.  The rainbow reflections that you see on a CD can’t be reproduced by a TV or projector.  These colors are too saturated / vibrate for TVs and projectors to reproduce.

Digital cinema has an advantage over TV in this regard.  Digital cinema projectors are capable of a wider “color gamut” than your standard TV.

The digital cinema standards actually put in work to future-proof the system.  If we someday developed cameras and projectors to handle an extremely wide color gamut, a digital cinema system could conceivably display any color including those rainbow reflections that you see on a CD.  In practice, nobody really notices differences in color gamuts.

HFR and higher frame rates

More is better right…?  Digital cinema could potentially move towards showing films at 48 (or more) frames per second instead of 24.  This would make it a lot closer to TV, which shows around 59.97 images per second in most North American countries and 50 images per second in most European countries.

But in case you’ve never heard about The Hobbit, some people don’t like the higher frame rates.  It makes films look like soap operas, news, or reality television.  It’s very jarring to some people (myself included).  I’m not sure if this innovation will stick.  It was tried in the past with Showscan film projection system, which projected film at 60 frames per second.

3-D versus 2-D

Here are the main reasons why the movie industry is trying to push 3-D:

1. To fight TV and home theatre.
2. To fight piracy.
3. To make more money.

In cinemas, there are actually different 3-D technologies in use.  As a result, the post production teams have to make a different version of the film for each 3-D technology out there.  RealD’s technology is the most popular.  Its main drawback is “ghosting”, where you can faintly see the right eye’s image in the left eye (and vice versa).  The image is altered (“ghostbusting”) to reduce the effect of ghosting.  In the past, ghostbusting was applied directly to the digital file.  RealD is moving towards applying ghostbusting in real-time so that RealD systems don’t need a version of the film to be specifically made for RealD 3-D.

Dolby’s 3-D system uses the wavelength of light rather than polarization to separate the left/right eye images.  Special processing is needed to get the colours looking correct because the left and right eyes see different wavelengths of light.

Other 3-D systems separate the left/right eye images using shutters.

In the home, all these technologies can be used.  Some manufacturers are also playing around with 3-D TVs that don’t require glasses (similar in concept to the Nintendo 3DS).  However, the 3-D effect only works if your head is in a very specific place and doesn’t move much.

The future

I think that we will see 3-D improve though I’m not sure that we will solve all of 3-D’s problems.  Eventually I see filmmakers learning to use 3-D tastefully and stop jabbing people in the eyes.  Here’s my analogy.  When people started building their webpages on Geocities, there used to be all sorts of animated GIFs and MIDI music playing in the background.  Or beautiful-looking Flash sites that were frustrating to navigate because they used symbols instead of words for links.  We will learn the errors of our ways.  Probably the biggest advances will come from stereographers, editors, and directors of photography learning how to do 3-D better.  We will probably get better at avoiding the things that make 3-D painful such as fast cuts, fast motion, stuff too close to your face, etc.  3-D requires some changes to how movies are made.  However, I don’t know if this will solve the problems that some people have with 3-D being uncomfortable.  And I can’t say if this is good for movie making in general.  Films right now are limited by the 24fps frame rate.  If the camera pans too fast, there will be “motion judder” as the motion will look jerky.  3-D means that films have to work around both the limitations of the low 24fps frame rate and the limitations of 3-D.

On the 2-D theatrical front, probably the biggest technology on the horizon is brighter projectors (e.g. replacing the xenon bulb with laser light).  This will allow for bigger screens.

In the home, it is extremely likely that TVs will get better and cheaper.

Conclusion

The wonderful thing is that people are always innovating and coming up with new ideas and technologies.  Many of them are bad or don’t pan out as hoped (e.g. 4K, wide gamut).  But eventually the cream will rise to the top.  Film and TV technology keeps getting better and better over the years and I think that the trend will continue.