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Comment by mistercow | Hacker News Reader

I was really surprised to find out (because this post piqued my curiosity) that the Star Wars prequels were shot in only 1080p. I'm really surprised that that didn't look atrocious on the big screen. Hell, that's like half a centimeter per pixel.

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DLP cinemas (i.e. digital cinema projectors) are 2k (as in not must more than 1080) 35mm film prints are nominally 2k in resolution (4k if you put the cash in)

Its only a few cinemas that are capable of 4k (thats 4098x 2160) and even fewer films released in 4k.

Does TI even make a DMD with more than 1920 pixels across? When I was researching before, that was the biggest I saw. I suppose you could tile them, but that sounds like a nightmare.

They make 2k and 4k chips, but only for their licensees I believe, not the public: http://www.dlp.com/technology/dlp-press-releases/press-relea...

Attack of the Clones was shot in less than 1080p, at that point the camera (HDW-F900 camera) only did 1440x1080, and it was cropped from 16:9, as they didn't have an anamorphic lens, so that's 1440x817. Revenge of the Sith used anamorphic, so was 1920x817

Once you start delving into the science it gets really interesting; resolution is the least important part of the image. A high contrast ratio will improve the picture more than going from 720 to 1080 or 1080 to 4k.

Am I the only one who finds that anamorphic lenses create really distracting bokeh? The lens flares are always squished, and whenever the camera changes focus, there's this strange vertical stretching effect.

Since they were switching to new hardware anyway, why didn't they just make the CCD the shape they actually wanted, rather than relying on this weird archaic workaround?

There are techniques to hide it, like make the prints to grainy film to alias the pixels, as it was still projected on film.

Both _Attack of the Clones_ and _Revenge of the Sith_ were projected digitally as well as on film. And yes, if you looked closely at some points you could see the pixels on the projection. (Although _Attack of the Clones_ was also one of the first movies shown in IMAX via process of taking a 35mm film print to IMAX film[0]. So with _Attack_, instead, they upconverted a 2K master that was derived from 1080p source to IMAX film stock (as far as I know). Yes, it had a lot of weird smoothing artifacts when seen projected on an IMAX screen.)

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_IMAX_DMR_films

Remember that the prequels weren't really "shot" so much as "composited." The effects shots, which were pretty much all of them, could have been rendered at whatever resolution they wanted, then downconverted to 2K for distribution.

Same idea as recording individual audio tracks at extremely high quality. The final mix ends up sounding better than you might expect.

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