Animators face 4K film technology challenge

The advent of 4K and high frame rate films presents a "huge challenge" for studios using computer-based animation, an expert has said. Bruno Mahe, technical head at studio Illumination Mac Guff, said the resolution of animated films would have to be increased by about 2.5 times.

The time required to generate such high-resolution images could hit production schedules. It may mean studios having to re-think the way they make movies, Mr Mahe said. Current animated movies are made to be viewed at 24 frames per second (fps) and at resolutions of about 2K. But the advent of technologies such as 4K and frame rates of 48fps and higher means that the resolution of animated films will have to be substantially increased, said Mr Mahe, whose studio was behind films including The Lorax, Despicable Me and Minions. "They are both going to present a huge challenge," Mr Mahe told the BBC. Simply scaling up existing images to bridge the gap would not work. "That just looks horrible, no-one wants that," he said.

Illumination currently has 20,000 computers in a "render farm" that is used by animators to produce the individual images and scenes that eventually become a movie. Shipping high-resolution images back and forth to animators consumes huge amounts of memory, said Mr Mahe. In 2007 the total amount of memory used while Illumination worked on its Dragon Hunters movie peaked at about 12 terabytes, he said. This grew substantially by the time Illumination made Despicable Me 2 when peak memory use hit 680 terabytes.