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8K at 60p, and the future of post?
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Jessh I’m still on the fence whether to shoot my next movie on 1080 or 4K.
Maybe we can all get together, rob a Vegas casino and put the money down on the Quantel?
It was at a Vegas premiere that I resolved to become an avid FCPX user.
Lance Bachelder
Writer, Editor, Director
Downtown Long Beach, California
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1680680/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1 -
[TImothy Auld] “But it has taken many years just for the HD home TV market to reach close to 80% penetration. 4K (or UHD as they so cleverly label it) is a long way off from home adoption, in my opinion. People won’t even buy blu ray players. Not to mention that the broken down and hobbled internet service we have in this country can barely deliver HD at this point.”
I agree. I can’t even get my wife and kids to watch HD cable shows and we have all of the proper equipment. They are constantly watching SD channels stretch horizontally and they see nothing wrong with it and claim that I am the one who is “obsessed” with HD if I say anything. Most of my relatives that I visit are also watching SD stretched on their HD TV screens. If this is any indication of what’s going on in other homes, no one is selling their HD TV’s for 4K any time soon and forget about what comes after that. You can shoot whatever you want (4K, 6K, 8K) but I don’t see a demand for content delivery in the home above HD any time soon because the average person really doesn’t care.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
[Andrew Kimery] “YouTube went from sub-SD streaming quality to 1080p in about 5 years and it was all pretty much invisible to end uses. Same with Netflix going from SD to HD (and now 4k) streaming.”
No matter how they label it – SD, HD, 4K or whatever – the reality is that these streams are completely dependent on internet connection speed and their resolutions are automatically adjusted accordingly.
Tim
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There is a reverse Moore’s Law at play always. As the power and price of hardware comes down the power and bandwidth is soaked up by ever hungry video formats, frame rates and codecs. Drives get cheaper and bigger and faster but still seem full. I think it is bold to predict we are on the threshold of what can be further achieved so I don’t think this trend is going to stop.
For my money higher frame rates and international standardisation of a HFR would be fantastic. But already we have legacy issues like 24-48 backwards compatibility. Shaving the .1% to remain faithful with a giant engineering mistake from last century NTSC broadcasting means we will also have 59.94 instead of just 60. I would love to see a single agreed frame rate for cinema and broadcast. Douglas Trumbull has done all the hard yards and I would be happy with 60fps for 2D and 60fps per stream for 3D.
I haven’t seen 8k on a monitor or projection screen to see what spatial advantage there may be over 4k. Temporal resolution helps all frame sizes so if I were to go into bat as to what matters most then HFR should be the priority for our new found processing grunt.
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[TImothy Auld] “No matter how they label it – SD, HD, 4K or whatever – the reality is that these streams are completely dependent on internet connection speed and their resolutions are automatically adjusted accordingly.”
Right, which is why I also said that the ISPs (which have their own IPTV/VOD services) will gladly offer higher tiers of connection speeds to those willing to pay. Comcast, Timewarner, Verizon, AT&T, etc., want people to find reasons to saturate their current speeds so they’ll upgrade.
The consumer world wasn’t beating down the door for HD either but here we are. Given the choice today I doubt many people would by an SD TV or an SD video camera. The switch from analog b’casting to digital was required by the Feds but the move from SD to HD was not. It was a push from consumer electronic makers and studios/networks that saw a new revenue stream from a new format. SD TVs were phased out to ‘encourage’ people to buy HD TVs and HD sets will be phased out once 4k sets hit the right price point.
All of our ‘screens’ (TV, computer, tablet, phone, etc.,) will keep getting ramped up in resolution because it’s the low hanging fruit of marketing bullet points. More pixels, more gigs, more this, more that. I mean, the original iPad Mini is the only iPad Apple still sells that has a sub-HD resolution. And that’s par for the course in the tablet world. I’m sure TV set makers are just waiting for the iPhone/iPad that shoots 4k video because there will suddenly people 10’s of millions of people with 4k video cameras that don’t want to settle on streaming their 4k videos on a TV that’s ‘only’ HD.
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[Andrew Kimery] “TV set makers are just waiting for the iPhone/iPad that shoots 4k video because there will suddenly people 10’s of millions of people with 4k video cameras that don’t want to settle on streaming their 4k videos on a TV that’s ‘only’ HD.”
And in my opinion TV manufacturers are going to wait a very long time for that to happen. Because consumers will gladly settle for looking at content – either personal or purchased – on their phones or tablets and never take it any further than that.
Tim
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[Jeremy Garchow] “4k ProRes in FCPX is a breeze. It really is. What I like about 4k is that it makes for more creative HD in that I can do more with the 4k resolution in 1080, than I can with 1080 in 1080. With 8k, it seems like you’d need to shoot 16k (QQQHD) to have the same freedoms.”
You’re talking about reframing in post here? What about shooting 8K to allow 4K mastering with post-framing?
[Walter Soyka] “What does the next generation of post look like to you?”
[Jeremy Garchow] “I don’t think it’s about the hardware, I think it will be about how the viewer interacts with the footage. It will require a tremendous amount of content, which may or may not be good for us as content creators.”
Interesting! Do you care to elaborate?
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
[Michael Gissing] “Drives get cheaper and bigger and faster but still seem full. “
But really, they don’t.
SSD drives, which I think we can agree on, are more expensive for less capacity. I would love to be able to replace our SAN drives with SSD and increase the capacity, and get more power out of the same number of drives, but it is prohibitive. Hard drives do not follow Moore’s Law.
[Michael Gissing] “For my money higher frame rates and international standardisation of a HFR would be fantastic.”
I completely agree. I think it will do more for the audience.
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[Walter Soyka] “You’re talking about reframing in post here? What about shooting 8K to allow 4K mastering with post-framing?
“Not just reframing, but being able to do software based camera moves, and make better edit decisions with the higher resolution.
The Pablo system is decidedly an 8k system, though, right? Not a 4k mastering system (although I’m sure it will do just fine at that, too). The Pablo system is designed to display 8k, which means in order to have ‘reframing’ you’d need to shoot 16k. Shooting 8k for 4k is fine (provided you have an 8k camera), but that’s not what the Pablo system seems to be selling.
[Walter Soyka] “Interesting! Do you care to elaborate?”
It’s nothing fancy, although maybe it could be.
What’s that old saying? Once you have children, you will always see the world through their eyes?
I look at where my little son is starting from in terms of content and technology. I watch how he interacts with it, how he chooses to watch it, where those choices come from, who is generating it, and why. He gets confused when I am talking on the phone, asks to “see” who I am talking to, and when I show him that there’s no video call, he literally doesn’t quite get it. He Facetimes his grandmas and even other friends, so to him, phone calls involve video.
Even today, you can get a brand new season of a show on a streaming service, and churn through the material with breakneck speed. This is going to create huge demand for more programming, and production is going to get even more slender in terms of budget and time, just to fill the demand, but content providers will need the content to stay relevant. Then, if you start throwing resolutions around (adding 4 or 8k) there’ll be very little material that will be worth watching on your 85″ 8k TV/Device that you picked up at the local store for $499.
I just feel like hardware development is moving so fast, that resolution isn’t going to do much for us but create demand that is going to be difficult to supply. So, perhaps a hybrid approach of user generated content, as well as professionally created content is going to be the answer. It may have to be the answer.
Soon, everyone will have a 4k video camera in their pocket, and then everyone will want to display 4k, and then soon after that, it will be 8k. I just don’t think resolution is going to be an impressive enough selling point to get more people to view more things, or buy more content. Something else is going to have to happen to up the viewing ante. What will it be? 8k? I just don’t know if it has enough chutzpa.
To provide anecdotal evidence, we are getting many more requests to shoot ultra high speed footage. Once you put the bid together for a phantom shoot and all that it entails, clients start to wonder if we are pulling their legs once they see the cost. Their frame of reference is that their cell phone can shoot 240fps (or shoot 4k video). If my cell phone can do it, why does it cost so much to get 3000fps? or 20000fps? And when shooting at such high frame rates, why is the resolution so low?
The lines are blurred as to what constitutes “high end” because arguably, there isn’t one, or isn’t much of one, when it comes to equipment/hardware. In the average person’s eyes, “their cell phone can do it” or come close, then paying us professionals to do it in a professional way becomes a difficult sell.
I’m not proposing that the Pablo 8k system is not high end, or that this is a “sky is falling” argument but rather a bit of a reality in the market of today, and certainly tomorrow.
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[Jeremy Garchow] “Hard drives do not follow Moore’s Law.”
I think HDD and SSD follow Moore’s law but SSD’s, being much new technology, just haven’t hit a cost per gig number that’s similar to HDDs yet.
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