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Comment by hnha | Hacker News Reader

What are you talking about? Film is 2D. How do you imagine it to suddenly be "encoded in 3D"?

Object-based encoding has long been discussed within the MPEG community. MPEG-4 included VRML as a sort of hack for scene based compositing and Structured Audio Orchestration Language et al, as a parallel.

I saw early whitepapers where they had planned even to do things like recognize people's faces, and deduce geometry, thereby separately compressing a person in the foreground vs background (use case: conference calls, news anchors, etc)

As for whether it is possible to deduce 3D structure 2D, there's been some progress in that regard, check this out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZiSK7OMANw

Using 3d space to represent movement of the textures. Currently a frame is split up into blocks, and they are moved about in 2d (X&Y). Using a 3d model of the movement would theoretically gain you some savings, as it would require less refreshing of the moving blocks.

Quite. You can define a textures+trimeshes+motion format and have the decoder be well defined, then have encoders compete to do better, as we have seen with the 2d codecs. Clearly starting form something in GL, like a game walkthrough (How much of youtube is that?) is easier than starting with Bladerunner. A Pixar movie would be somewhere inbetween.

The world is 3D. I bet the last few films you saw had extensive 3D modelled scenes in them. I bet all the video games you play have 3D cutscenes.

This is true, but the are pre-rendered for a reason. Anything with water you're looking at 24hour+ sim time, plus render, and 1tb of data plus. SubSurface Scattering (translucency) takes a huge amount of CPU time.

The world is 3D. Video isn't.

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