Tracking the light

Transcontinental transmission of high definitionfilm inaugurates 10-gigabyte optic fiber foracademic Internet

Marcos de Oliveira

Print edition 163 - August 2009

The lights of the cinema and the lights of photonicsmet at the simultaneous viewing of a digital filmtransmitted in super high definition, in real time,from São Paulo to San Diego, California, in theUnited States, and to Yokohama, in Japan. The

experiment highlighted the inauguration of an opticfiber line with Internet transmission capacity of 10gigabytes per second/Gbps connected to countriesabroad; this line will cater to Sâo Paulo´s academiccommunity. The event took place during the 10ºFestival Internacional de Linguagem Eletrônica/File,Electronic Language Festival, held on July 30 and 31at the theater located on the premises of Sesi, in thecity of São Paulo. The film Enquanto a noite nãochega, directed by Beto Souza, is the first long-feature film to be produced in Brazil in 4K, a videotechnology equivalent to four times the resolution of high-definition digital TV used around the world orto 24 times the resolution of traditional commercialTV. “The 4K technology does not make us miss thestandard long-feature film,” says professor Jane de Almeida, from the post-graduate program inEducation, Art and History of Culture atUniversidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie university, who coordinated the event together with professorEunézio Antônio de Souza, from the Photonics Lab of the same university. The experiment, which hadnever been performed in the Southern Hemisphere,also included a conference in real time with screen

projection in the theater. The conference includedparticipation by Brazilian researchers fromMackenzie and researchers from abroad, from theCenter for Research in Computing and the Arts/CRCA and the California Institute forTelecommunications and InformationTechnology/Calit2 at the University of California inSan Diego/UCSD, and the Research Institute inDigital Media and Content/DMC at Tokyo´s KeioUniversity.During the transmission, the researchers´ film andimages were transformed into photons by lasers anddelivered by optic fibers from the theater in SãoPaulo to the universities abroad, without goingthrough any copper wire or the like. Incoming andoutgoing 1.5 Gbps connections were made at eachpoint, totaling 3 Gbps. “We worked at the cuttingedge of optic and cinema technology,” says professorSouza, also known as Thoroh in the academiccommunity. Each frame of the film, in digital 4K file,equivalent to one frame of photographic film intraditional film, contains 8 million pixels (4.096 x2.160 pixels) in comparison to the existing 2 million