First Outside In Footage Released, Featuring Mosaics/Images by several UMSF members Options

[stephenv2]

Several members here (Ugordon, Juramike, IanR, Malmer) have donated images and mosaics to my art IMAX film "Outside In" that features a fly-through of Saturn system built only from Cassini images (no 3D, no CGI). Their generosity, talent and many hours of hard work are deeply appreciated.

This is fly-through of this image - Saturn Equinox. Only a little brightness and contrast has been made to balance the moons with Saturn's body. Do note that several thousand layers of many Cassini photographs were animated to make the fly-through work without any 3D CGI. The saturation is off due to lack of Flash Player ICM support.

This is still a work-in-progress and it's an art film, not a science film, but as new image data comes down I will tweak this shot for improved accuracy.

Outside In clip on Vimeo

[stephenv2]

I'm very touched and inspired by your responses. You never know exactly if what you are trying to create is going to connect with others.

I can give you some geek info to give some insight on how much better this will look in IMAX. The clip you are seeing online is 1/27th of the size of what you see theaters and only 8-bit color. Each frame of this clip (and the whole film) is 5600 X 4200 pixels. All the processing is done in 32-bit floating point. Even though Cassini data is 8-bit and/or 16-bit, this allows "natural light" processing which obeys the laws of physics and is key to be able to do this only using real images, not CGI or models.

The result is each frame runs about 900 MB (yes, nearly 1 Gig) per frame at 24 frames per second. With lossless compression, frame averages take about 400 MB to store. But when you project an film like this on a 8-story screen, it really matters how much resolution.

The final film will incorporate 90% of the unmanned space flight imagery from all history. The Saturn fly-through is the climax of the film, but everything from all the visible light Hubble image to New Horizons makes an appearance.