CineGrid: A New Cyberinfrastructure for High Resolution Media Streaming
L. Smarr, L. Herr, T. DeFanti, N. Ohta, P. Otto, [invited article] Cyberinfrastructure Tech. Watch Quart., v3,#2. (2007).
Abstract
The shared Internet is being used more and more for transmission of digital video data sets. YouTube is distributing 100,000,000 videos every day.1 However, these digital video streams are engineered to be easily transportable over the shared Internet to home users with megabit/sec rates. In contrast, cinema today is still largely shot and distributed in the century-old silver halide medium of film.2 A major barrier holding back the transition of theatrical film to digital distribution is that to preserve the extreme photographic resolution of motion pictures as seen in theatres requires playback bandwidth of a quarter gigabit/sec or more (depending on compression). Cinema is the next step in the ongoing digital conversion of modern media, and it will require building new image-centric hardware/software/networks to facilitate full-resolution human visual and auditory acuity, for production, distribution and, never possible with film, real-time global collaboration.