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Topic: The Last Jedi

Michael Cornish
Film Handler

Posts: 26
From: Cincinnati, Ohio, USA
Registered: Sep 2011

posted 09-21-2017 12:48 AM

Has Disney announced any plans yet of doing any 70MM release of The Last Jedi?

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Mike Blakesley
Film God

Posts: 12767
From: Forsyth, Montana
Registered: Jun 99

posted 09-21-2017 01:22 AM

I'm kind of amazed there hasn't been more promo on it. They're being even closer-vested with this than they were with "Force Awakens." I love it, I hope they don't even release any more trailers. Maybe a final onesheet and be done.

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Stephan Shelley
Jedi Master Film Handler

Posts: 854
From: castro valley, CA, usa
Registered: Nov 2014

posted 09-21-2017 01:55 PM

I believe that it is the next one that has been shot on 65mm.

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Lyle Romer
Phenomenal Film Handler

Posts: 1400
From: Davie, FL, USA
Registered: May 2002

posted 09-21-2017 02:02 PM

quote: Stephan Shelley
I believe that it is the next one that has been shot on 65mm

According to IMDB, it was shot on a mix of 35mm film, IMAX 70mm horizontal film and Arri Alexa 65 (5K+) digital.

The DI is supposedly a 4k DI but with a 3D release I'm not sure if 4K DCPs will actually be available. Of course, if they spent the money to do a 4K DI, then why not release a 4K DCP?

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Mike Schulz
Expert Film Handler

Posts: 122
From: Los Angeles, CA
Registered: May 2007

posted 09-21-2017 05:44 PM

quote: Lyle Romer
Of course, if they spent the money to do a 4K DI, then why not release a 4K DCP?

I've heard that the main reason lots of big budget features end up with 2K DCP's is because of the extra time and money involved to complete the visual effects in 4K is doubled. Because of this, a lot of 4K DCP's that we do get are using visual effects that have been upscaled to 4K. Some filmmakers don't like the idea of upscaling anything so they just release everything in 2K. If you add 3D into the mix, that's even more time and money involved to render 4K stereo images.

I'm not really sure what can be done to make rendering less expensive and time consuming other than the eventual evolution of supercomputers that can get the job done faster.

My guess is that unless a 4K release is planned for during pre-production, it will probably not happen.

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Mark J. Marshall
Film God

Posts: 3188
From: New Castle, DE, USA
Registered: Aug 2002

posted 10-03-2017 03:22 PM

quote: "Mike Schulz"
I've heard that the main reason ... is because of ... money

I've heard that too and that just pisses me off. If you know you're going to make a billion dollars on a movie can you not spend an extra million or two to get the 4K visuals right?

quote: "Stephan Shelley"
I believe that it is the next one that has been shot on 65mm.

Do we have confirmation that this is still happening? They did just change the director, didn't they? And I thought it was him that was pushing for 65mm. Hopefully the new guy will keep that going.

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Mike Schulz
Expert Film Handler

Posts: 122
From: Los Angeles, CA
Registered: May 2007

posted 10-03-2017 05:52 PM

Mark, I see that you intentionally left out the "time" part of my quote in your comment. That is also a very crucial factor concerning production. I get your point that a company like Disney,that will no doubt gross another billion dollars with the new Star Wars movie, should have no issue covering the cost of getting everything done in 4K but time is also a very important factor.

If money was of no concern, you would still have to push the release date of the movie to next summer to allow the time to render everything in 4K. The amount of VFX in a movie like Star Wars is astronomical and extremely time consuming already just rendering everything in 2K.

Their options would be to either postpone the release 3-6 months to get the job done, or to just upscale the VFX to 4K which, understandably, a lot of people don't like to do.

Having said that, we still don't know how they will release this feature. It could still be a 4K release but the reason I would guess that it will be 2K is because The Force Awakens was released that way.

I'm trying to remember the last movie that Disney released in 4K and I think it was "The Jungle Book".

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Adam Martin
I'm not even gonna point out the irony.

Posts: 3686
From: Dallas, TX
Registered: Nov 2000

posted 10-03-2017 06:11 PM

I'm still trying to figure out how you guys got down this road of "Last Jedi will be 2K". The 2D trailer is 4K.

Now, to be fair, there were 4K trailers of Born in China, Monkey Kingdom, The Avengers, and War Horse and those all ended up as 2K releases.

Disney's 4K releases have been Rogue One, Bridge of Spies, Tomorrowland, and Lincoln.

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Mike Schulz
Expert Film Handler

Posts: 122
From: Los Angeles, CA
Registered: May 2007

posted 10-03-2017 09:34 PM

quote: Adam Martin
I'm still trying to figure out how you guys got down this road of "Last Jedi will be 2K". The 2D trailer is 4K.

Trailers are almost always farmed out to production houses that are not involved with the studio's production at all so a 4K trailer would not be a good indicator.

I had forgotten about "Rogue One" being released in 4K. I don't think it had a 3D release which, again, involves more post production time, but that release does let us know that Lucasfilm might be willing to push for 4K on their future releases.

By the way, everything I've mentioned in this thread is pure speculation on my part. While I would love for "The Last Jedi" to be released in 4K (especially Dolby Vision), I just wanted to provide people with some reasons why a big movie like that might not be released in 4K. Another person mentioned that it should be a non-issue to do considering the money it will make, but I wanted to point out that money is not the only factor in making it happen. The VFX probably take the most amount of post production time as it is to get completed in time for the release date and having to do everything in 4K literally doubles the rendering time.

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Marcel Birgelen
Film God

Posts: 3357
From: Maastricht, Limburg, Netherlands
Registered: Feb 2012

posted 10-04-2017 12:49 AM

Rogue One was also released in 3D and in Dolby Vision 2D and 3D. It also had a 70mm release in both 5/70 and 15/70. It also had both Dolby Atmos and DTS:X. So, it had all the major checkboxes ticked.

I doubt Disney will be targeting such a major release at 2K, not just for the theatrical release, but also the "aftermarket", where 4K has become the norm and where HDR will be expected. A 4K HDR Blu-Ray will also fetch roughly double of the 2K SDR equivalent in the store.

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Daniel Schulz
Master Film Handler

Posts: 387
From: Los Angeles, CA USA
Registered: Sep 2003

posted 10-04-2017 01:20 AM

quote: Marcel Birgelen
Rogue One was also released in 3D and in Dolby Vision 2D and 3D. It also had a 70mm release in both 5/70 and 15/70. It also had both Dolby Atmos and DTS:X. So, it had all the major checkboxes ticked.

Are you sure about the 5/70 release of Rogue One? I don't think any DTS/Datasat discs were made for that title, and to the bet of my knowledge there are no facilities left that can do mag striping.

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Marcel Birgelen
Film God

Posts: 3357
From: Maastricht, Limburg, Netherlands
Registered: Feb 2012

posted 10-04-2017 02:05 AM

You're right, there was no 5/70 release, but there was an IMAX 15/70 "DMR" release.

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Mark J. Marshall
Film God

Posts: 3188
From: New Castle, DE, USA
Registered: Aug 2002

posted 10-04-2017 08:29 AM

quote: Mike Schulz
Mark, I see that you intentionally left out the "time" part of my quote in your comment. That is also a very crucial factor concerning production. I get your point that a company like Disney,that will no doubt gross another billion dollars with the new Star Wars movie, should have no issue covering the cost of getting everything done in 4K but time is also a very important factor.

Not intentional. Dedicate more processors at a higher cost and the time should be close to a wash.

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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."

Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001

posted 10-04-2017 01:05 PM

quote: Mike Schulz
If money was of no concern, you would still have to push the release date of the movie to next summer to allow the time to render everything in 4K. The amount of VFX in a movie like Star Wars is astronomical and extremely time consuming already just rendering everything in 2K.

If that's Hollywood's excuse I am certainly not buying it. Not at all.

The only way that excuse could possibly work is if computing technology was stuck in early 2000's standards -back when the first feature-length 4K digital intermediates were first being rendered. Actually, Snow White was the first movie to be scanned and digitally processed in 4K back in freaking 1993. In that movie's case the 4K data wasn't saved; the final result was down-rezzed to something more manageable for early 90's technology.

Current computing technology is now many times more powerful than what it was only 10 years ago. Yet 2K digital intermediates, CGI and digital backlot techniques have all been in common use longer than that. So if a 4K render would push a release date for a new Star Wars movie back until summer of next year then all those 2K (and 4K) renders from over a decade ago would have been impossible. Today many TV shows with much lower budgets than Hollywood studio features are using CGI and digital backlot techniques like crazy. Some of these shows, such as House of Cards, are being produced in 4K.

The real problem is that the Hollywood studio production infrastructure grew way too accustomed to 2K. 4K is very feasible for modern movie productions. Even 8K is very do-able with modern workstation technology. What the movie studios did was take all the performance gains and sink it into doing 2K ever faster and cheaper rather than raising the quality bar.

There's a lot of projects that were shot on film or shot digitally in 4K, even post-produced in 4K yet down-rezzed to 2K to save space for archival purposes. They're still doing that shit out of habit. It's one of the reasons that explains why so few movies released on the Ultra-HD Blu-ray format contain any native 4K content.

Only now, with 4K UHDTV sets becoming very common and affordable and 4K infiltrating many other aspects of consumer electronics, Hollywood studios are finally starting to wake up and realize they need to start leaving behind the old 1080p HDTV quality 2K shit.

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Tyler Purcell
Expert Film Handler

Posts: 180
From: Van Nuys, CA
Registered: Dec 2015

posted 10-12-2017 04:24 PM

What pisses me off is that making 35mm prints is a piece of cake and not that costly. There are ZERO reasons why movies shot on 35mm, aren't doing a hand-full of laser-out prints, even if they come from 2k masters, so us "film buffs" can see the movie on the format it was shot on. It's just pathetic and shows how studio's are still stuck to the whole 3D thing, which I think is stupid and worthless.

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