published on Wednesday, February 14, 2007

SARA premieres 4K digital cinema technology

Amsterdam, February 14, 2007 – SARA Computing and Networking Services has built the first 4K visualization setup on which highly detailed movies can be shown. SARA has recently demonstrated this facility to the early adopters of 4K cinema in the Netherlands.

The world of cinema is on the eve of a great breakthrough. Movies in the near future will be digital and highly detailed. The new technology that is being used is the so-called 4K technology. 4K refers to resolution of the movie, which is 4096x2160 pixels. This resolution gives a more detailed image than can be realized on contemporary HD-TVs, plasmas, computer screens or digital projection systems.

4K recording equipment is scarcely available at the moment. Therefore the content has been created with a virtual camera (computer animation). SARA has used the movie “Elephants Dream”, world's first Open Movie. A short clip has been rendered in 4K resolution and was demonstrated on one of SARA's high-resolution visualization facilities.

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More information:

About SARA
As advanced ICT innovation center SARA offers a complete package of high performance computing & visualization, storage, networking and infrastructure services and products.

For more information, please contact Marina den Hartog, (PR officer) (020) 592 8009, e-mail: m.den.hartog@sara.nl, or Paul Wielinga, division manager High Performance Networking, (020) 592 3000, e-mail: wielinga@sara.nl.

About Elephants Dream
Elephants Dream is the world's first open movie, made entirely with Open Source graphics software such as Blender. All production files are freely available under a Creative Commons license. Elephants Dream (c) copyright 2006, Blender Foundation / Netherlands Media Art Institute / www.elephantsdream.org.


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