All content on Hulu comes from shareholders, and is generally popular content that has been digitally converted. Therefore, 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. Therefore, there is a lot of subpar content on Netflix. The suppliers of this content are very poor, so they need to digitally convert them themselves.

So in this field, people at Netflix know better.

This is not only a conversion, but also 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 Alexei Bilan. When he speaks, his tongue seems to be curled up, which sounds very laborious. Fortunately, Zhou Buqi deals with foreigners every day and is not familiar with English.

My understanding is getting better and better, and I can understand clearly.

Alexey once worked at 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 pixels of film, but the content recorded on the film is subject to the optical and chemical technologies of the shooting equipment. What kind of content can be captured by the shooting equipment can be recorded on the film.

If the shooting equipment cannot capture a high resolution, the film cannot be recorded.

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

.

Back then, the resolution was even smaller.

1k resolution is considered excellent, 0.8k resolution is the passing mark, and most old Hollywood movies have resolutions less than 0.8k.

This is where the trouble lies in digital restoration during film transfer.

Now, the standard resolution of cinema movies is 2k, and the minimum resolution of a Blu-ray DVD disc is 1k standard. Therefore, during the film transfer process, the resolution of old films needs to be upgraded.

Convert film content with less than 0.8k resolution into digital content with 1k or 2k resolution.

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

This statement sounds so familiar!

Ziweixing and the Chinese University of Hong Kong have a project on artificial intelligence, which is to intelligently process low-resolution, blurry pictures to make them clearer!

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

No wonder Shen Xiangyang persisted in hoping that he could come over today. It turned out to be this.

After resigning from the position of CTO of Ziweixing, Shen Xiangyang's current position has not been reduced but has been increased.

He is currently the chairman of the Ziweixing Technology Committee, the dean 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 to link the technical businesses of the entire "Ziwei Galaxy" group of companies to achieve the effect of complementing each other and complementing each other.

Ziweixing Digital Media is headquartered in London and mainly focuses on the football industry. It can be called a technology desert. Without the help of foreign technology, it is difficult to develop;

Purple Star Global is headquartered in Hollywood and mainly focuses on the film industry. It is incompatible with Silicon Valley and has a natural rejection of Silicon Valley technology, so it also needs a lubricant.

There is also the coordination between the domestic and overseas technical teams of Ziweixing and Ziweixing International.

This is a very difficult task.

So far, Shen Xiangyang is perfectly qualified for this job!

At least the linkage between Ziweixing Global, Ziweixing and Asda has achieved very good results. A few days ago, it was about Lucasfilm's 3D structured light to 3D movies, and now it is linked from film conversion to artificial intelligent.

Alexey is just a technical director who came from Hollywood. His understanding of new era technologies, let alone compared to Shen Xiangyang, may not be as good as Zhou Buqi.

He could only explain the film transfer at a relatively basic level - "The digital information transfer in the past twenty years 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 reduce the hassle of rate upgrades.”

Eric Feng has not officially joined the company yet, but he is already a member of the Zhou Buqi team. He seconded: "It is easy to downgrade the resolution, but it is difficult to upgrade the resolution."

Alexei said: "Yes, upgrading is the most complicated. With the existence of Blu-ray format and Super Blu-ray format, the current conversion market has already seen the demand for 2k. Upgrading from 0.8k to 2k is a very complicated task. .”

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

Alexey said: “Technicians modify it frame by frame, manually completing color distortion, over-brightness, over-darkness, color gamut conversion and other issues, as well as color cast correction for special objects such as faces and subtitles, including color cast correction on the screen. Removal of mottled noise, etc.”

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

Alexey sighed, "Yes, if it is some complex lens repair, our best restorer can only repair 24 frames a day."

"this……"

Zhou Buqi looked at each other with several people in the team, and they all felt horrified.

Are you kidding?!

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

In 1 second, it takes a day to repair?

What a joke!

You've wasted all your money on this.

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

This is only 2k resolution.

As the level of technology improves, 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 it is all repaired manually, it will be an endless nightmare.

From 2k to 4k, the workload has not increased by 2 times, but by 4 times. This does not include the increase in the number of frames. If it increases from 24 frames to 36 frames, 48 ​​frames, or 72 frames, the workload will increase again. It's exponential growth.

Only artificial intelligence can save this industry!

Sure enough, Alexey then talked about the topic of frame number, "In the past, it was generally 24 frames, but now higher frame numbers are popular, such as smoothing from 24 frames to 36 frames, which requires solving the inter-frame continuity. The problem will be more complicated. However, this part of the work is not needed for streaming media for the time being. The basis of streaming video is 12 frames. The expansion of the frame number is more of a job for Hollywood."

Zhou Buqi understands this fairly well.

With the technological upgrade of movie theaters, various versions of newly released movies have appeared, including 2D version, 3D version, and imax copyright. There are also 2k version, 4k version, 24-frame version, 36-frame version, and 48-frame version.

etc.

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

But Netflix can put aside the relationship, but MSI Global cannot. The "Iron Man 2" released in May this year will have 8 versions released globally at the same time, the "2d24 frames 2k" version, the "3d24 frames 2k" version,

"3d36 frames 4k" version, "2dimax36 frames 4k" version, "3dimax36 frames 4k" version, "3dimax48 frames 4k" version, etc.

So many versions are all converted at a later stage.

If this is all manually converted, how much post-production cost will it cost? A Hollywood blockbuster investment of 200 million US dollars, I am afraid that 10 million US dollars have been spent on this.

Hollywood has no choice but to resort to clumsy methods, asking re-producers to manually process it frame by frame. For example, "Avatar" was filmed as early as 2007, but the release date was repeatedly delayed because of late production.

The production was too complex, with various copyrights to be released, and the post-production alone took a year and a half.

For an ordinary movie, one and a half years would be enough to complete the entire process of "project establishment, start-up, shooting, finalization, distribution, publicity, screening, and payment collection."

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

Alexey knew that Boss Zhou was the largest shareholder of Netflix, and did not want to discourage him, so he smiled and said: "It's okay here at Netflix. The more complicated transformation work is undertaken by the distribution company. Netflix's

For the conversion work, the focus is still on the 1k resolution Blu-ray format. 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 moment and then said slowly: "There have been discussions, but there is no technical application in this area in the market."

"What about researching on your own?"

Zhou Buqi continued to ask.

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

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

"Um?"

Zhou Buqi raised his eyebrows.

Eric Feng quickly explained 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 there are 10,000 film sources, the scale is too large, and the cost is too high to be repaired manually. We must first study artificial intelligence technology, and then rely on new technologies to repair. If there are too few film sources, there is no need to research new technologies.

, just rely on manual repair.

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

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

In the past, DVD digital versions were generally 0.7k. Nowadays, in the world of Blu-ray, users like to watch ultra-high-definition versions, so a large part of the content in MSI Global's inventory needs to be upgraded in resolution.

The future is the era of streaming media.

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

How does Purple Star Global ensure that its streaming media platform is absolutely competitive? In addition to more attractive content, it can also start from the technical level!

On other platforms, many old movies are in 360p and 720p resolution.

If almost all content on MSI Global’s platforms has 1k or 2k resolution, this competitiveness will be reflected.

For example, Warner authorized the copyright of the old 1980s film "Terminator" to both Hulu and Netflix. 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. Netflix can use its own technical means to launch an exclusive 2k restored version with more viewing value.

In order to pursue a better movie-watching 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 "technical content".
Chapter completed!