High Frame Rate & High Bit Rate Test Equipment and Test Series For Cinema Image Quality

The target is a series of tests in early June 2012 in Burbank, CA, area, coordinated by Michael Karagosian of MKPE Consulting, and cinematographers Kommer Kleijn SBC and David Stump ASC, each of whom are co-chairs of the SMPTE 21DC Study Group for Higher Frame Rates.

Image Matters – intoPIX – MikoM – Virident

These tests will be conducted in collaboration with studios and the cinema creative community.

They will measure the minimum JPEG 2000 codestream bit rate requested by high frame rate content to reach the visually lossless quality demanded by digital cinema applications.

The experimental equipment set will enable playback of JPEG 2000 codestream bit rate higher than 1 Gbps (i.e. more than 4 times the current DCI specification). The decoded 2K images will be transmitted to a single projector at a frame rate of up to 120 fps (i.e. 60 fpe for Stereoscopic 3D content).

In order to speed up the test process and to allow the easy production of multiple encoding flavours, the equipment set will also be capable of encoding high frame rate content from uncompressed files in near real-time.

The assembled equipment will consist of one server incorporating 4 Virident FlashMAX boards and one intoPIX JPEG 2000 PRISTINE-P4 board. The PRISTINE will playback the decoded codestream on four 3G‑SDI links to the MikroM IMB inserted into the projector. The MikroM’s IMB will receive the four 3G-SDI links and pass the uncompressed image data directly to the projector backplane. Image Matters will insure project coordination and integration.

The integration has enough headroom to allow, on request, multiple equipments to be combined to achieve higher bit rates and/or higher frame rates.

Storage:

Four 1.4 TB Virident FlashMAX MLC cards

total capacity of 5.6TB
total read bandwidth of 5.2 GB/s
total write bandwidth of 2.2GB/s on XFS file system

each Virident card has:

a half height and half length form factor
a PCIe x8 Gen1 bus
power consumption of 25 W
a sustainable random read of 1,3 GB/s

JPEG 2000 Encoding/decoding:

One intoPIX PRISTINE P4 board

2K & 4K JPEG2000 decoder FPGA IP-cores
high frame rates capacity: up to 120 Fps
high bitrate capacity: up to 1 Gbps
four 3G-SDI outputs
one Genlock input

Integrated Media Block

One MikroM Integrated MediaBlock MVC 201

four 3G-SDI input
formatting and pass through of uncompressed image data
up to 120 2K fps

www.image.matters.pro
www.intopix.com
www.mikrom.com
www.virident.com