Top of the Great Era

Chapter 1578 Deep Combination of Content and Technology
All of Hulu's content comes from shareholders, and it is generally some popular content that has been digitized, so Hulu does not need a dedicated film conversion team, but Netflix is ​​different.

Netflix’s content sources are very limited, and it is difficult to cooperate with Hollywood, so Netflix has a lot of unpopular content, and the suppliers of these content are very poor, so they need to carry out digital transformation by themselves.

So in this field, Netflix people know better.

It's not just a conversion, it's a restoration.

There are three main types of restoration, physical restoration, digital restoration and artistic restoration.

Among them, digital restoration is the most labor-intensive and costly.

The director of Netflix's digital conversion team is a Russian immigrant named Alexey Bilan, who sounds like he's struggling when he speaks with his tongue curled up.Fortunately, Zhou Buqi deals with foreigners every day, and his understanding of English is getting better and better, and he can understand it.

Alexey has worked in Paramount for eight years, mainly responsible for the conversion of film and television versions, so when talking about this matter, he is more professional.

Theoretically, there is no upper limit to the number of pixels of a film, and the recording of the content of the film is subject to the optical and chemical technology of the shooting equipment.What kind of content can be captured by the shooting equipment, what kind of content can be recorded on the film.If the shooting equipment cannot capture too high a resolution, the film cannot be recorded.

As far as the current technical conditions are concerned, ordinary 35mm film can reach a resolution of up to 6K.But this is only at the laboratory level. For general movies, 35mm film means 2K resolution, which is the norm.

In those days, the resolution was even smaller.

1K resolution is considered excellent, 0.8K resolution is a passing line, and most old Hollywood movies have a resolution of less than 0.8K.

This is where the trouble with digital restoration during film conversion comes in.

Now, the standard cinema movie resolution is 2K, and the minimum resolution of a Blu-ray DVD disc is also the 1K standard.Therefore, in the process of film conversion, it is necessary to upgrade the resolution of the old film.

Convert film content with a resolution of less than 0.8K into digital content with a resolution of 1K or 2K.

Zhou Buqi was still in a daze at first, but when he heard this, he cheered up.

This kind of statement is so familiar!
Ziweixing and the Chinese University of Hong Kong have a project on artificial intelligence, which is to intelligently process low-resolution and blurred pictures!

This is almost the same thing as upgrading the resolution of old movies!

No wonder Shen Xiangyang persistently hoped that he could come over today, so that's what happened.

After resigning from Ziweixing's CTO position, Shen Xiangyang's current position has not declined but increased.

He is now the chairman of the Ziweixing Technical Committee, the director of the research institute, the senior vice president of Ziweixing International, the director of the research institute, the director and technical consultant of Ziweixing Global, the director of Ziweixing Digital Media, and the chairman of the technical committee.

There are many titles.

In fact, his job is one thing, to link the technology and business of the entire "Ziwei Galaxy" company group, so as to achieve the effect of complementing and complementing each other.

The headquarters of Ziweixing Digital Media is in London, which mainly revolves around the football industry, which can be called a technology desert. Without the help of foreign technology, it is difficult to develop;
The headquarters of Ziweixing Global is in Hollywood, which mainly revolves around the film industry. It is incompatible with Silicon Valley. It has a natural rejection of Silicon Valley technology, and it also needs a lubricant.

There is also the coordination between Ziweixing and Ziweixing International's technical teams at home and abroad.

This is a daunting task.

From the current point of view, Shen Xiangyang is perfectly qualified for this job!
At least in the linkage between Ziwei Star Global, Ziwei Star and Asda, very good results have been achieved.A few days ago, it revolved around Lucasfilm's 3D structured light to 3D movies, and now it has been linked from film conversion to artificial intelligence.

Alexey is just a technical director, and he came out of Hollywood. His understanding of new era technology, let alone Shen Xiangyang, may not be as good as it is.

He can only explain film conversion on some basic levels-"The digital information conversion in the past two decades is actually very simple. Because the resolution of video tapes and DVDs is not high, generally around 0.7K. There is no resolution It’s easy to worry about rate upgrades.”

Eric Feng has not officially joined the job yet, but he is already a member of the Zhoubuqi team. He seconded: "The downgrading of the resolution is very simple, but the difficulty is upgrading the resolution."

Alexey said: "Yes, the upgrade is the most complicated. With the existence of the Blu-ray format and Super Blu-ray format, there is already a 2K demand in the current conversion market. Upgrading from 0.8K to 2K is a very complicated job .”

Zhou Buqi asked, "How did you do it?"

Alexey said: "The technicians modify frames one by one, and manually complete problems such as color distortion, over-brightness, over-darkness, and color gamut transformation, as well as color cast correction for special objects such as faces and subtitles. The removal of mottled noise and so on.”

Zhou Buqi twitched the corner of his mouth, "That's a lot of work!"

Alexey sighed, "Yeah, if it's some complicated lens repairs, our best restorer can only repair 24 frames a day."

"This……"

Zhou Buqi looked at the eyes of several people in the team, and they all felt terrified.

What are you kidding? !

24 frames, when the film is shown, is actually the content of 1 second.

In 1 second, want to fix a day?
It's a fart!

Wasted money on this.

What age is this? This kind of repetitive and large-scale work should not be done manually, especially in the United States where labor costs are abnormally high.

And that's only at 2K resolution.

With the improvement of technical level, the resolution of film and television content will inevitably become higher and higher.The current trend is 2K, and it will be 4K in a few years.

If they are all manually repaired, it will be a nightmare in the foreseeable future.

从2K变4K，工作量可不是增加了2倍，而是增加了4倍。这还不算帧数上的增加，如果是从24帧增加到36帧、48帧、72帧，工作量又是指数级的增长。

Only artificial intelligence can save this industry!

Sure enough, Alexey then talked about the frame rate, "In the past, it was generally 24 frames, and now a higher frame rate is popular, such as smoothing from 24 frames to 36 frames, which requires solving the continuity between frames. The problem will be more complicated. However, this part of the work is temporarily unnecessary for streaming media, and the basis of streaming video is 12 frames. The expansion of the number of frames is more the work of Hollywood."

Zhou Buqi still understands this.

With the upgrading of cinema technology, various versions of newly released movies have appeared, such as 2D version, 3D version, and IMAX copyright.There are also 2K versions, 4K versions, 24-frame versions, 36-frame versions, 48-frame versions, and so on.

However, as Alexey said, this super video version has little to do with the streaming media industry, and is more for movie theaters, and a distribution company of a Hollywood giant must undertake the relevant transformation tasks.

可是奈飞可以抛开关系，紫微星环球抛不开，今年5月份上映的《钢铁侠2》就会同时有8个版本在全球上映，“2D+24帧+2K”版，“3D+24帧+2K”版，“3D+36帧+4K”版，“2D+IMAX+36帧+4K”版，“3D+IMAX+36帧+4K”版，“3D+IMAX+48帧+4K”版等等。

So many versions are all converted later.

If this is all hand-transformed, how much post-production cost will it cost?A Hollywood blockbuster has an investment of 2 million U.S. dollars, and I am afraid that 1000 million U.S. dollars have been spent on it.

Hollywood has no choice but to use a stupid method and find a converter to manually process it frame by frame.For example, "Avatar" was filmed as early as 07, but the release date was repeatedly skipped, because the post-production was too complicated, and it took a year and a half for the post-production alone to release various copyrights.

For ordinary movies, one and a half years is enough to complete the entire process of "project establishment, start-up, shooting, finalization, distribution, publicity, release, and payment".

For Alexei, he only cares about Netflix's streaming media, and these more complicated post-production conversion work has nothing to do with him.But Zhou Buqi has more industries, and he needs to consider the business cooperation of various companies more comprehensively.

Knowing that Boss Zhou is the largest shareholder of Netflix, Alexey did not want to discourage his enthusiasm, so he said with a smile: "It's okay for Netflix, and the more complicated transformation work will be undertaken by the distribution company. Netflix's For the conversion work, the focus is still on the 1K resolution Blu-ray format, and it is not too difficult to convert the 0.6K and 0.8K resolutions of some old movies into 1K resolution.”

Zhou Buqi asked, "Have you never thought about artificial intelligence?"

Alexey was silent for a while, and then slowly said: "There have been discussions, but there is no technical application in this area in the market."

"How about researching it yourself?"

Zhou Buqi continued to ask.

Netflix is ​​a technology company in Silicon Valley. It shouldn’t be difficult to start an artificial intelligence project and do some research on post-transformation work independently.

"This..." Alexey hesitated, "Actually, it's not necessary, we have statistics. The investment in research and development is far greater than the investment in manual repair."

"Ok?"

Zhou Buqi raised his eyebrows.

Eric Feng explained quickly beside him, and said with a smile: "It's because there are too few film sources!"

This is related to the marginal cost of transformation work.

If it is 1 film sources, the scale is too large, and it will be repaired manually, and the cost will be too high.It is necessary to study the technology of artificial intelligence first, and then rely on new technologies to repair it.If there are too few film sources, there is no need to research new technologies, and honestly rely on manual repairs.

Zhou Buqi didn't like this short-sighted arrangement.

Ziweixing Global's next streaming media plan is to reach a strategic cooperation with Netflix, which will authorize most of its film and television content to Netflix, which will include a huge workload of post-production conversion.

In the past, the DVD digital version was generally 0.7K.Now is the world of Blu-ray, and users like to watch ultra-high-definition versions, so they need to upgrade the resolution of a large part of the content in Ziweixing Global's inventory.

The future is the era of streaming media.

There will be dozens or hundreds of streaming media platforms on the market.

How does Ziweixing Global ensure that its streaming media platform can be absolutely competitive?In addition to more attractive content, you can also start from the technical level!
On other platforms, many old movies have a resolution of 360P and 720P.

If almost all the content on Ziweixing Global’s platform has a resolution of 1K or 2K, this competitiveness will be reflected.

For example, Warner has licensed the copyright of the old film "Terminator" in the 80s to Hulu and Netflix at the same time. On the surface, users can choose either Hulu or Netflix.

However, the "Terminator" provided by the publisher Warner only has a 1K version, and Hulu can only provide a maximum resolution of 1K.However, Netflix can use its own technical means to launch a 2K restoration version with exclusive copyright and more ornamental value.

In order to pursue a better viewing experience, users will choose Netflix.

This time, Zhou Buqi has a clearer understanding of the streaming media industry.

The streaming media industry is "Internet + Movies" and "Technology + Content".

Not only content is king, but science and technology can also play a very important role.

(End of this chapter)