HD in the long term: Sony's view on video creation

At the Studio Visionaries panel at CES on Friday, a cast of entertainment industry experts gathered to chat about the challenges that the high-definition era brings to the art of video and movie production, as well as re-production.

"A lot of the displays they're showing at CES this year, OLEDs and others, are in the 1,000,000:1 and some manufacturers are even advertising the 10,000,000:1 contrast ratios. The color reproduction on these screens is higher than anything we've seen in the past," said Chris Cookson, the President of Sony Pictures Technologies and former CTO of Warner Brothers.

"If you look at HD material that was mastered ten years ago, the monitors at that time were not good enough to match what's available in consumer displays today. So we not only have to deal with the spatial resolution, but also deal with advances in color imagery we're likely to see in consumer displays over the next few years that don't even exist yet, and it's difficult to prepare material from a production standpoint if you can't preview it the way consumers will see it a few years down the line."

This raises a question many Blu-ray users have about back catalog titles coming to a high-definition release. With a theatrical release window averaging 4 months and 15 days, we know approximately when a new movie will be coming to Blu-ray. When classic films will be released on high-definition format, however, is not so clear.

"High-definition transfers were done for many years, and looked quite good," Cookson said, "That was because there were no HDTV sets until about three years ago. The 1920 x 1080 full resolution HD set that is now so common is still relatively new. In our professional monitors in the mastering suites that we used back then, we couldn't see as good an image. The result is that all of us made HD masters to put in the vault that by today's standards don't stack up."

"We have to go back to the film and mine it again to make new masters that are suitable for release on Blu-ray because the quality is so much greater, the sets on which it is shown are so much greater than what we thought was top-of-the-line just five years ago."

So if the only print left "in the vault" of a particular film is a 35mm Technicolor camera print, for example, there is a finite amount of cleanup that can be done. The same thing, Cookson says, is happening with images produced in 2K resolution.

"Today, most films are post-produced electronically at 2K, 2K being essentially HDTV. What we're doing is loading our vaults with productions that are as good as today's way of looking at the picture, but not necessarily as good as we will be able to see it in the future."