IP-RACINE Integrated Project Research Area Cinema

Background and Rationale

Film or cinema is the driving force for the entertainment industry, setting the highest standards of quality, providing the most compelling experience, and feeding the distribution chains of other media (broadcast TV, cable and satellite channels, DVD, video, games, interactive media et cetera). Cinema is at the top of the chain in terms of quality requirements, cost, data quantity and complexity. We expect this will still be true in the digital future of ambient entertainment systems, and the highest quality of digital ‘movies’ will continue to drive the technology and content development for a wide range of future media types and channels – whether in large-scale public venues, at home, or on the move. With good reason: digital content created for the big screen, with the highest possible resolution, colour depth and sound quality can always be down-converted or output at quality levels suitable for home or mobile platforms. To enhance low-quality originals for high-quality display is quite another matter.

The Movie Chain

The movie chain is now beginning to go digital, from origination through distribution to display, in the process known as ‘Digital Film’,‘E-Cinema’ or ‘D-Cinema.’ In this document, we use the term ‘Digital Cinema’ to refer to the entire process.

The chain currently consists of at least three separate businesses: (1) digital cinematography and content creation; (2) digital postproduction of the movie; and (3) digital distribution and display. While different parts are developing at different speeds, and the transition from analogue to digital is expected to continue for at least a decade, the introduction of digital cameras and projectors has begun and there is a rapidly growing reliance on digital data processing. Nevertheless, the Digital Cinema process is still fragmented, rudimentary and highly skills-based, operating at or beyond the limits of technology. Industry and public acceptance still depends on digital offering a better experience at an affordable price. RTD into Digital Cinema technologies is essential to provide enhanced ‘cinematic’ entertainment and make it transferable cross-platform.

Whilst the US ‘majors’ dominate film production, specialist European companies (mainly SMEs) lead in digital cinema technology and services. European manufacturers, studios and postproduction companies have a reputation for quality, technical sophistication, creativity and cost-effectiveness. Only by continuing to research and develop world-leading technology can Europe maintain its position in the global market for digital film equipment and services.

The future

Over the next ten years, we expect to see Digital Cinema evolving toward a position where:

	Almost all movies are digitally originated. Moving images will be captured and stored on portable, integrated camcorders, operating at resolutions better than today’s film.
	Metadata will be captured automatically and will be pervasively available. This metadata will include all relevant data, including time, date, place, weather, temperature, and possibly capture the whole scene, in a full 360 degrees, in varying resolutions.
	It will be routinely possible to capture 3-D objects and scenes in real time, in great detail and some movies will be realised fully in 3-D, from data capture to display.
	Virtual Studios will be capable of creating and combining 2-D or 3-D optical and computer-generated imagery seamlessly, in real time.
	Postproduction will operate on data on higher semantic levels of information than pixels or frames. Moviemakers will be able to manipulate ‘data objects,’ which may be characters in a story, or the plot of the story itself.
	Cross media or cross platform transformations will be as simple as dragging and dropping an illustration between word processor documents is today.
	3-D digital audio will be generated to compliment the scene so that an aircraft hangar will automatically sound metallic and echo, or a virtual living room with soft furnishings will sound acoustically dead.
	New forms of ‘cinematic’ entertainment will integrate live and recorded action, with real-time rendering and playout. Moviemakers will find new ways of manipulating experiences of in space and time.
	Digital projectors will offer better quality and brightness at costs comparable to or lower than film projectors, and 3-D digital projection will be readily available.

In the 10-year period some of these points will come into existence earlier than others, while it is likely that the formulation of some of them will change, and new objectives will be added. The fulfilment of a key part of these objectives poses significant research challenges, and this is the goal of the IP-RACINE project.

Project Aims

IP-RACINE aims to create a technology chain and workflow that allows the European digital cinema industry to deliver a complete digital experience ‘from scene to screen’ in a way that gives a more exciting experience to the Cinema audience and facilitates the use of Digital Cinema assets in other media. IP-RACINE will realise its aim through contributions to standards, the development of procedural rulebooks and the creation of hardware and software products.

The Research and Technological Development to be undertaken by IP-RACINE includes both long-term research and medium-term work that is designed to result in next generation products and services by the end of the project. The RTD clusters into the following areas, which will give rise to specific Activities:

1.	Research and Development of the overall workflow and data handling, storage, and processing through each of the creative stages in the movie making process.
2.	Research and Development of optimal methods of capturing, storing and pre-processing data from 2-D and 3-D digital cameras with the quality, resolution and formats required for cinematic display.
3.	Research and Development of 3-D Imaging for virtual film studios.
4.	Research into high-level data descriptions necessary to define and repurpose aspects of the data (characters/objects/plots) in the same, or different media, with improved processing efficiency and scalable resolution playout for real-time operation.
5.	Research into the playout and projection technologies, resulting in much more cost effective and efficient systems, which are also capable of providing novel and compelling forms of entertainment.

These five areas do not cover every detail of the Digital Cinema chain but they address interrelated key areas where we expect effort will result in the maximum impact on the introduction of the whole chain and where we feel Europe has a competitive advantage.

Project Objectives

This approach underpins a series of step-by-step innovations through the chain, which are designed to transform the professional environment for producing compelling and novel digital entertainment. This gives rise to series of Objectives to be achieved by the end of the forty-two months of the IP-RACINE Project:

O1.             To create an integrated Workflow for the Digital Cinema process that supports the coherent creation or access to essence and metadata at all stages from capture / creation, through postproduction and repurposing, to localised playout. The Workflow needs to support industrial scale production and metadata/essence access on first a frame-by-frame basis and then object-by-object with the preservation of colour and sound fidelity across platforms, processes and stages.

O2.             To provide improved digital cameras, offering variable frame rates and linear light representations, with compact on-camera data storage systems to allow real-time recording of unprocessed raw data streams of cinematic quality in a way that is consistent with the Digital Cinema workflow.

O3.             To develop film resolution real-time multi-camera 3-D virtual studio technologies offering ray tracing, many degrees of freedom and real-time interaction with real and synthetic actors, incorporating previsualisation techniques that permit the real-time preview of complex visual effects at the shooting stage.

O4.             To research new means of representing, manipulating, annotating and retrieving moving images (in 2D or 3D) and sound (including the automated synthesis of 3-D audio effects with acoustic quadraphony) using approaches designed ultimately to operate on complex media assets defined as high-level film objects that can be rendered at any resolution.

O5.             To develop and demonstrate real-time hardware solutions, integrated with the Digital Cinema workflow, capable of supporting the intensive computational requirements of spatio-temporal moving digital image analysis techniques and processing film objects in real time. To be achieved by Activity 6.1.5 ‘Research into Representation and Manipulation of Moving Imagery and Sound’ realised in WP6.

O6.             To develop file structures and systems for the distribution/playout of multi-resolution and multi-version data offering device- and audience-adaptive contextualisation, including the representations of ambient acoustics, a sense of analogue quality, loss-free format interchange and graceful degradation when necessary.

O7.             To develop digital projector and playout technology offering either 2K or 4K in width (as suggested by the Digital Cinema standards bodies), as well as compatibility with standard resolution sources via advanced format conversion techniques, supporting not only for normal 2-D images but also 3-D at significantly lower cost than is currently possible.

O8.             To promote the understanding and acceptance of European Digital Cinema and its technologies within the international professional community (including the relevant standardisation bodies).

O9.             To reinforce the European skills base for digital cinema technologies, by developing training structures for professionals and researchers.

O10.          To prepare the market launch of digital cinema technologies created by IP-RACINE through a series of Demonstration Testbeds for leading industry professionals.

Vocabulary Notes

	The terms E-Cinema and D-Cinema are sometimes used interchangeably and sometimes to differentiate between any electronic delivery of film (E-Cinema) and a process resulting in high-resolution digital projection of the result in a movie theatre (D-Cinema). In this web site we use "D-Cinema" or "Digital Cinema" to refer to the digital equivalent of film, aiming at the highest quality throughout from origination to theatre projection while "E-Cinema" refers to other, lower quality content delivery.
		Security and transmission are not addressed specifically within IP-RACINE, since they are being pursued by other groups in other RTD proposals; IP-RACINE expects to liaise with them at a later stage.

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