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From: dave@onfcanim.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga,comp.graphics
Subject: Re: Amgia World Ray-tracing article...
Message-ID: <15301@onfcanim.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 6-May-87 01:57:53 EDT
Article-I.D.: onfcanim.15301
Posted: Wed May  6 01:57:53 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 7-May-87 06:14:56 EDT
References: <629@puff.WISC.EDU> <448@applix.UUCP> <2948@well.UUCP> <2058@hoptoad.uucp> <7978@utzoo.UUCP>
Reply-To: dave@onfcanim.UUCP (Dave Martindale)
Organization: National Film Board / Office national du film, Montreal
Lines: 31
Xref: utgpu comp.sys.amiga:4287 comp.graphics:584

In article <7978@utzoo.UUCP> henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) writes:
>> ... Tom Duff told me that the resolution of that piece [ST2 Genesis demo]
>> of work was only 512 X 512.
>
>Note that Andre and Wally B. was shot at the same resolution.  And it
>looks better than most of the stuff people do on n-zillion-pixel film
>recorders.  "Work smart, not hard."

The difference between them is in the technology used for film recording.
The ST Genesis demo was shot directly from a monitor screen, since it
was *supposed* to be an image on a video screen.

I believe that Andre and Wally was one of the first pieces of output
from the Lucasfilm/ILM laser film recorder.  To produce output for that,
the images are rendered (with good antialiasing *and* motion blur)
at relatively low resolution (725 x 435 for the SIGGRAPH '86 demo;
I think Andre and Wally was similar) then blown up to about 3000 x 2000
by bicubic interpolation before being sent to the film recorder.
The interpolation doesn't add any more information to the picture,
but it does ensure that you can't seen the pixels in the final result.

So, while the rendering was done at relatively low resolution to keep
the cost down, the film recording was done at higher resolution to
produce really clean output.  (It sure helps to have a PIXAR Image
Computer around to do that bicubic interpolation without waiting all day...)

Also, note that the "n-zillion-pixel" film recorders really are necessary
for some things.  We've done some animation in IMAX format, where the
film frame is about 10 times the area of 35mm (2.07 x 2.72 inches).
The frames were rendered and shot at 4096 x 3072.
Landsat images are even higher resolution, I think.