NAB: Ang Lee's Pushing the Envelope With New Film Shot at 120 Frame Rate

[DCI forum]

APRIL 14, 2016 2:49pm PT by Carolyn Giardina
NAB: Ang Lee's Pushing the Envelope With New Film Shot at 120 Frame Rate
But how many theaters will be capable of showing 'Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk' is an open question that had exhibitors at CinemaCon buzzing.

But how many theaters will be capable of showing 'Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk' is an open question that had exhibitors at CinemaCon buzzing.
A version of this story first appeared in the April 22 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.

Director Ang Lee will make cinematic history April 16 at the National Association of Broadcasters Show in Las Vegas when he previews footage from his new film Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk in 4K resolution, 3D and a whopping 120 frames-per-second — no studio feature has ever been made for that cutting-edge format. But after Lee showed some footage from the film — presented in the conventional 24fps format — at CinemaCon this week, the question of how many theaters will be capable of presenting the movie in Lee's preferred format when the movie opens in the fall became a major topic of speculation.

First, though, some perspective: In 2012, Peter Jackson's The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey introduced average moviegoers to what a film shot at the high frame rate of 48 frames per second could look like. It was an ambitious experiment that, in the eyes of many audiences, fell short. Critics complained that some scenes appeared as though they had been shot on video.

Frame rates originally referred to the speed at which film passed through a projector, but now that film has given way to digital, they signify the number of still images projected each second. Frame rates can go much higher than the current 24 fps standard or even Hobbit's 48 fps — and, combined with other imaging factors such as 4K resolution, 3D and high-dynamic range (with its blacker blacks and whiter whites), higher frame rates can become a tool to create a wide range of new looks.

Ang Lee to Unveil 'Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk' Footage in 3D, 4K and at 120 Frames Per Second
Lee, the Oscar-winning director of Life of Pi and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, hopes to push cinema innovation with his new film:  He's making his Nov. 11 release Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk in 4K and 120 fps, per eye, for 3D. Sony's TriStar and Britain's Film4 are partnering with Jeff Robinov's Studio 8 on the project, an adaptation of Ben Fountain's novel about a 19-year-old Army private (newcomer Joe Alwyn) who survives a battle in Iraq. He and his company of soldiers return to the States for a promotional tour culminating with a halftime-show appearance at a Thanksgiving football game.

When footage from the movie was shown April 13 at CinemaCon, Sony Pictures motion picture group chairman Tom Rothman emphasized the movie's story, rather than its technological breakthroughs, saying, "technology is always secondary to story and Billy Lynn's story is an American story." Rothman said that Lee would be using what he called "ultra frame rates" for "blending" the intensity of war with the rest of life, suggesting that the frame rates could change during the course of the film to suit the filmmaker's creative intent.

To simply get the movie made, a whole pipeline for postproduction and mastering had to be developed and built specifically for the project.

Before the movie hits the multiplex, though, there will be challenges to overcome. Currently, there is no single digital cinema projector capable of playing back the format in  4K, 3D at 120fps, per eye. At NAB, Lee's presentation will use two 4K "Mirage" laser projectors from manufacturer Christie.

Sony hasn't announced its plans for the Billy Lynn release, and so its unclear how many theaters might be equipped to show the film in Lee's preferred format. It’s expected to be a very small number due to the complexity and experimental nature of the production.

"The challenge is exhibition. Right now there isn’t a system to do it properly," explained Douglas Trumbull, the director and VFX pioneer who created effects for such classics as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Runner, during an interview this week with The Hollywood Reporter. Trumbull himself has developed an inventive system, dubbed MAGI, for displaying high frame rates and said that he showed his system to Lee and Sony before Billy Lynn got the greenlight to go forward.

Ang Lee to Be Honored at the Provincetown Film Festival
Trumbull, whose has long believed in the promise in high frames rates, said that his MAGI system offered a few potential options. For starters, he said that the MAGI digital cinema package (the equivalent of a film print) could accommodate a 2K resolution image at 120fps in 2D; or 2K at 60fps, per eye, (equaling 120fps), for 3D. And he said this could play on any currently installed Series 2 digital cinema projector, which are quite common.

He added that his MAGI projection system — which uses Christie Mirage laser projectors augmented with is own software —could play 4K, and 120fps in 2D, or 60fps, per eye, in 3D, using a single projector. Alternatively, using two projectors, it could get up to Lee's ideal format of  4K, 3D at 120fps per eye, he said.

Dolby is among the companies talking with Sony about Billy Lynn, confirmed Doug Darrow, Dolby's senior vp of cinema. Last year, the company began to roll out its Dolby Vision projection systems — which use two Christie 4K laser projectors and Dolby's proprietary high dynamic range technology —- a combination that Darrow said is capable of playing back 2K and up to 120fps per eye in 3D. "We want our sites to be at the leading edge of what filmmakers want to do; [Billy Lynn] is another movie that's pushing the boundary," said Darrow. "We are working on what we could do to support higher frames rates."

There are currently 22 Dolby Vision projectors installed worldwide (18 of which are in the U.S.) with commitments for more on the way.

There is also a base of projectors from manufacturers including Christie and Barco that were installed for the 48fps release of Peter Jackson's The Hobbit, which could play Billy Lynn at 2D at 60 fps, and there’s some speculation that Lee’s film might have a limited release in that format, where supported.

Chuck Lorre to Be Inducted Into NAB Broadcasting Hall of Fame
Sony also is taking with Sony Electronics, which developed the 4K F65 camera, which two-time Oscar-winner John Toll used to photograph Billy Lynn, and which also manufactures digital cinema projectors. David MacIntosh, vp of Sony digital cinema, said the studio is being "even handed" in talking with suppliers "about what we can show and what can be done."

Technology aside, what does it all mean for moviegoers? "It should be more natural and easy to watch," says Wendy Aylsworth, CEO of entertainment technology consulting company Walden Pond. "There are people who haven't been able to watch 3D well or complained of eye strain; a lot of that is your eyes seeing something that's not normal in real life and the brain working hard to integrate it. The general belief is the more information [in an onscreen image], the easier it is for the brain." She explains that as images become brighter — as laser-light projection and HDR are adopted — viewers sometimes notice a strobing effect, but increasing frame rates should help eliminate that."

The result, Aylsworth predicts, should appear different from what audiences saw with the 2K, 3D, 48 fps format used for Hobbit. "It should look much more realistic," she says. "The higher the frame rate goes, the more it will start to look like you are looking through a window."

The potential of frame rates is not limited to cinema, either: It's expected to be employed by emerging virtual and augmented reality systems. Says Technicolor CEO Frederic Rose: "In VR, we'll go over 100 fps. Gaming is above 100 fps; VR will have to [be also] in order to get continuous movements." If so, then Lee's demonstration could provide a window into the future.

NAB Show
April 16-21
Las Vegas Convention Center

[DCI forum]

APRIL 14, 2016 2:58pm PT by Carolyn Giardina
CinemaCon: 'Avatar' Producer Jon Landau Says Film Industry Needs to Adopt High Frame Rates
There are 35 movies scheduled for release in 3D during 2016, up from 27 domestic releases in 2015.

Hollywood has yet to adopt high frame rates, but Jon Landau, the Academy Award-winning producer of Titanic and Avatar, told exhibitors Thursday at a session on 3D filmmaking at the CinemaCon exhibitors convention in Las Vegas that the motion picture industry "needs to learn how to use high frame rates" in order to "build the best theatrical experience."

As part of the discussion of 3D, Jonathan Penn, director of content programming and analysis at Cinemark Theatres, reported that of the $36.3 billion in worldwide box office in 2015, $7.8 billion came from 3D ticket sales. There are 35 movies scheduled for release in 3D during 2016, up from 27 domestic releases in 2015, including Disney's The Jungle Book, which opens Friday, and Paramount's upcoming Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows and Warner Bros.' Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.

Before the discussion focused on 3D, though, Landau first touted high frame rates. "It's a presentation format," he said. "It's about learning to use the tool so that we create the cinematic experience." Landau said that both production and exhibition need to be involved. 

Frames rates originally referred to the speed at which film passed through a projector, but now that film has given way to digital, they signify the number of still images projected each second. Most movies screen at 24 frames per second, although Peter Jackson adopted 48 fps for his Hobbit movies, and Ang Lee hopes to present his upcoming Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk at 120 fps.

Even though HFR is now a hot topic because of Lynn's choice to employ it for Billy Lynn, it's something that Landau has been advocating for some time. At the 2011 edition of CinemaCon, his partner James Cameron urged Hollywood to learn how to use high frame rates and showed an early test that he directed to illustrate the differences between 24fps, 48fps and 60fps.

At Twentieth Century Fox's CinemaCon slate presentation on Thursday morning, Cameron announced plans to make four Avatar sequels. He has said in past years that he and Landau intend to make the Avatar sequels in 3D with HFRs

During his talk, Landau didn't mention the sequels; instead he focused on urging the creative use of 3D. "We have a responsibility, if we are using 3D, to do it right," he said. "We have to think of 3D as a creative process. The goal is to create an immersive, emotional experience."

As an example of the impact that 3D can have, Landau showed a deleted clip from Avatar — showing Jake training to be a Na’vi — in 2D and then in 3D. Landau said 3D is not just for big action sequences, but it can be most effective "in the moments of intimacy that puts you in the space with the characters — to enhance the characters and emotion in the film."

In addition to their Avatar sequels, Landau and Cameron are also converting Terminator 2: Judgment Day to 3D for a planned fall re-release. T2, the sequel to Cameron's 1984 original, was the highest grossing film of 1991, earning $519.8 million worldwide.

"The future is bright for 3D," said Chris Parks, another member of the panel. Creative director and stereo supervisor at U.K.-based Vision3, Parks is the stereo supervisor on Warner Bros’ upcoming Fantastic Beasts. "Directors are demanding more from 3D, not just spectacle, but to create characters," he said.

Noting that 3D is often considered to be at its best when it is used behind the screen plane, rather than projected images out into the auditorium, Parks said that if used “with a narrative purpose and spectacle, coming out of the screen adds to the scene of involvement, and not in a gimmicky way. I also believe passionately about the use of 3D to support drama. For instance, taking a character in front of the screen when the character is feeling a threat." To Illustrate his point, he showed clips from his recent projects, including Gravity.

Paramount senior vp postproduction Corey Turner described the steps involved for a studio in producing a 3D release. He showed for the first time the 3D version of the new trailer for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows, which opens June 3.

Paul Becker, executive producer at Gener8, walked attendees through the 2D to 3D conversion process, using clips from his recent work on Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice. "Conversion got a bad rap at first, due to errors and cash grabs," he admitted.

Leading the conversation with Landau was Michael Lewis, co-founder and CEO of RealD, which is marking its tenth anniversary since its involvement in the first digital 3D release, Disney’s Chicken Little.

This year, RealD is beginning to roll out its Ultimate Screen technology, which it is promoting for its ability to achieve brightness and uniform distribution of light (meaning without a ‘hot spot” in the center of the screen). It already has a few systems installed in Asia and in the U.S.

Also during the session, Jose Letayf Sr. of Seating Concepts received the International Cinema Technology Association's Distinguished Service Award.

[DCI forum]

Ang Lee On The Bright Future Of Cinema

By: Jon Silberg, Digital Video
At NAB Show’s Future of Cinema session on Saturday, Academy Award-winning director Ang Lee revealed the results of his extensive experimentation with the technology and even the essence of motion picture storytelling. A number of technology demonstrations were presented to overflow crowds of an 11-minute clip from Lee’s upcoming feature “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk.” The film is in a projection format, so new and complex — 4K, 120 fps and 3D — that it is currently inaccessible to most viewers outside this rarified venue.


The dual Christie laser projection and server technology required isn’t just going to show up in even gold-standard cinemas. However, the technical and artistic achievements involved in this movie, shot with a dual Sony F65 camera rig at frame rates up to 120 fps, could well lead to a digital cinema of the future that looks and feels very different from the movie experience audiences have grown accustomed to.

Lee spoke in detail at the conference keynote, tracing his own artistic journey from celluloid die-hard, opposed even to digitally color grading his films long after that was standard procedure, to a filmmaker pushing the outer limits of digital cinema.

Lee shared the stage with collaborators: editor Tim Squyres, ACE, and Ben Gervais, credited as production systems supervisor but referred to by Lee, reverentially, as “my workflow guy.” Variety Senior Features Editor David Cohn joined the three to moderate the more technical segments, which also included Scot Barbour, VP of production technology, Sony Pictures, and stereographer Demetri Portelli.

Lee said his evolution began while attempting to figure out how he could adapt facets of the book “The Life of Pi” into a cinematic realm. This led him to think about stereoscopic filmmaking and the extra “dimension” that could add. “Pi’s” success increased his appetite for pushing the technology further with 4K resolution and led to extensive discussions with technical innovators.

For Lee, the higher temporal resolution and considerable reduction of phenomena such as strobing and motion blur all combine to make three-dimensional motion picture images “clearer” and closer to “reality” than previously possible. “I think we’re still finding out what digital cinema is,” Lee said, noting that he’s already discovered the benefits it offers in terms of “more detail, more resolution, more light. I think [the viewer’s] mind functions differently the more [visual information] they get. It’s more at 4K than at 2K, more at 120 frames than 24, more with 3D than 2D. But we’re still figuring this out and how we can use it.”

This was a recurring theme throughout the discussion. The panelists, Lee most of all, were quick to point out that they were constantly experimenting in the production of both “Pi” and “Billy Lynn,” trying new things they weren’t even sure could be done; they felt that rules and theories and received wisdom were no substitute for creative experimentation.

Before editing “Pi,” Squyres recalled, “People were saying you have to cut differently in 3D. I was skeptical.” He didn’t believe these new rules about how long 3D shots need to stay on the screen or what kind of image should cut with what. So he always piped the 3D image through his Avid and wore glasses to edit: “That way I could see for myself what I could do.”

On “Billy Lynn,” he wanted to edit in HFR so he could make decisions based on his own creative instincts. This, he explained, was no small feat. He used a beta version of the Avid software that could let him work on a version that had been down-converted from 120 to 60 fps to get as close as possible. “I’m very confident if I’m editing a traditional movie on a monitor or an old Steenbeck that I know what it will look like on the big screen,” Squyres said. “I don’t have that confidence if I work in 2D that I know what it will look like in 3D or if I work at 24 fps how it will come across to the audience at 120.”

The entire representation of reality is different, said Lee, at 24, 60 or 120 fps. Of that highest frame rate, he posited, “It’s clearer, brighter, you see more. We didn’t dare put make-up on any of the actors [in “Billy Lynn”], except one cheerleader, and you’re supposed to see she has make-up on.”

Likewise, Lee said actors’ performances read differently. For example, a moment that might seem “real” in traditional cinema might feel like “acting” under the heavy scrutiny of the higher-resolution, brighter, 3D system. (Or the reverse, as in the case of the performance of an actor in one scene that disappointed Lee when he saw it on Squyres’ Avid system at 60 fps. “I thought, ‘Oh no, this is going to be that much worse at 120 fps. But then I saw it at 120 fps and it was much better!”)

Lee concluded by stressing how excited he is about the potential of 4K/3D/HFR to take the magic of the cinematic experience he’s loved his entire life to an entirely new level. After infusing the large South Hall auditorium with a palpable excitement about “Billy Lynn” and all the new technology it necessitated, the director humbly apologized for being a bad salesman.

[DCI forum]

NAB: First Reactions to Ang Lee's 'Billy Lynn' 120 Frame Rate Footage: 'Awesome,' 'Unbelievable' by Carolyn Giardina

The Oscar-winning director, who is pushing the envelope by using an unprecedented 4K, 3D, 120 fps format, unveiled 11 minutes of footage from his new film, "Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk," to an enthusiastic audience.

An overflow crowd of filmmakers and tech execs at the National Association of Broadcasters Show in Las Vegas enthusiastically applauded an 11-minute clip from director Ang Lee's upcoming Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk when it screened Friday for the first time in public in 4K resolution, 3D and a whopping 120 frames per second — an unprecedented production format for a Hollywood feature-length film.

Although a few viewers complained that the results looked too much like video — the same complaint that greeted Peter Jackson's Hobbit movies when Jackson went beyond the Hollywood standard of 24 frames per second to present those movies at 48 fps — most of the reactions to Lee's footage were overwhelmingly positive, with viewers tossing out words like "awesome" and "unbelievable."

Lee, the Oscar-winning director of Brokeback Mountain and Life of Pi, is offering multiple screenings of the clip at NAB, where he is delivering Friday afternoon's keynote as part of the Future of Cinema conference. In introducing the demonstration clip, he said that the footage was unfinished and and included some temporary visual effects.

Sony's TriStar and Britain's Film4 are partnering with Jeff Robinov's Studio 8 on Billy Lynn, an adaptation of Ben Fountain's novel about a 19-year-old Army private (newcomer Joe Alwyn) who survives a battle in Iraq. He and his company of soldiers return to the U.S. for a promotional tour culminating with a halftime-show appearance at a Thanksgiving football game.

The clip cut back and forth between the war scenes, which used the high frame rates for a realistic, some would say hyper-real, way to put the viewer in chilling combat situations, showing the horror of war in the closeups of the soldiers. Scenes from the halftime show had a different look, with all the lights and the star-like flashes in the stadium. Lee is said to be varying the frame rates throughout the film for creative purposes. In the film, Destiny's Child performs during the halftime show, though in the clip, only the backs of the performers' heads were shown from a distance.

Those attending the first screening of the footage included Avatar producer Jon Landau, visual effects master Douglas Trumbull, technology execs from the Hollywood studios and representatives from many digital cinema technology companies.

"I'm shaking," said Society of Motion Pictures and Television Engineers standards director Howard Lukk immediately following the screening. "That content combined with the technology — it was the most compelling 3D I have ever seen."

Trumbull — the director and VFX pioneer who created effects for such classics as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Runner and who is a proponent of high frame rates, having developed his own system — said: "Awesome. And this was the worst possible scenario [for a screening setup]. It was like being there, which I anticipated. It looks like he will be delivering a stunning movie experience. I'm trembling."

Since there is currently no single digital cinema projector capable of playing back 4K, 3D at 120fps, a projector configuration that used two 4K "Mirage" laser projectors from manufacturer Christie, Dolby 3D glasses and 7th Sense's Delta Infinity III servers for playback was installed at the Las Vegas Convention Center for the screening. There was a long line that snaked around the hall as delegates eagerly attempted to get into the screenings.

Billy Lynn, which given Lee's track record is considered a potential Oscar contender, is currently in postproduction and scheduled for a Nov. 11 release. It will be the first studio feature in the experimental, cutting-edge format, and Hollywood's entertainment technology community has been abuzz with anticipation about this demonstration for weeks. Some even stayed in Las Vegas after CinemaCon ended on Thursday, just to catch a glimpse of the presentation.

Sony hasn't announced how and in what format it plans to release the film, but insiders say the intent is to project it in various formats, extracted from the master format.