How much longer for 720p?

[Michael Gissing]

Screens are getting higher res but for web access smaller with the uptake of pad/ mobile. 720p at higher frame rates is probably going to be relevant for a while. There are still broadcasters going out SD.

I don’t expect 4k to impact on 1080 cameras for many years. If your client are happy with your work and it is largely for web use then I don’t see you have much need to change. Perhaps the next step is shoot 2k, edit 1080. Lots of interesting cameras like the Blackmagic or the digital bolex to consider.

[Gary Huff]

[Dave Gage] “I saw a PBS station yesterday in HD with Julia Child doing a black and white cooking show.”

Was it shot on 16 or 35mm thought? May not have been an uprez.

[Craig Seeman]

YouTube supports 1080. I believe they briefly supported 4K already but pulled it down.
As far as the viewer is concerned bandwidth is an issue.
With HEVC coming a lower data rate (I hear roughly 40% lower) will yield the same quality. That might begin to make 4K viable. Of course one would need the decoder and the monitor to view it on. I think we’re still 2 or 3 years away from that.
I suspect for most people 720p is still a comfortable frame size but 1080 is becoming easier to support on the web very quickly.
I believe Vimeo supports 1080 in their Plus accounts as well (free are still 720).

[Shane Ross]

With ABC, FOX and ESPN all being 720p…it won’t be going away anytime soon. It takes a LOT of money to retool for a different format. This is why many smaller market stations are still SD.

Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def

[David Roth weiss]

[Shane Ross] “With ABC, FOX and ESPN all being 720p…it won’t be going away anytime soon. It takes a LOT of money to retool for a different format.”

Hey Shane, just a heads-up, a good source I spoke with at the HPA Retreat told me ABC, FOX and ESPN are all switching to 1080p this year, possibly right around NAB.

David Roth Weiss
ProMax Systems
Burbank
DRW@ProMax.com

Sales | Integration | Support

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[Dave Gage]

[Michael Gissing] “If your client are happy with your work and it is largely for web use then I don’t see you have much need to change.”

The client is myself. It’s instructional video for my website in the members area and then I will ultimately make the best/most popular classes available for separate paid download.

Really what I’m doing at this point is live classes via Adobe Connect which I screen capture with ScreenFlow and then edit and add a bunch of lower 3rd comments and notes to clarify what I said (or add something that I may have missed saying in the presentation). They’re actually coming out great, but with 3 new classes a week, it’s a lot of work on top of everything I already had going.

I was shooting 5-10 minute tutorial videos with a camera in my studio, but this class thing has worked out great since members can attend live classes and/or watch the archived videos, so it has helped with membership sales. With that said, when I get caught up, I will also go back to shooting in the studio with the camera. When I do, I will take a look again at the BlackMagic and similar cameras.

Thanks,
Dave

[Andrew Kimery]

[David Roth Weiss] “Hey Shane, just a heads-up, a good source I spoke with at the HPA Retreat told me ABC, FOX and ESPN are all switching to 1080p this year, possibly right around NAB.”

Really? Switching to 1080i60 seems like a lateral move (if not slightly backward due to interlace artifacts, IMO) and 1080p60 would present compatibility issues with many HDTVs wouldn’t it?

I did a comparison of 1080i60 and 720p60 a few years ago and if I paused and did an A/B comparison the 1080i60 was a bit sharper. When I played a split screen test though no one could tell the difference standing arms length away from a 45″ Sony Bravia HDTV we used as a client monitor. I stuck my nose in my 24″ JVC b’cast monitor and couldn’t tell a difference either. Small text on video game huds ended up being the tie breaker (I was developing a workflow for a company that covered the video game industry). The interlacing destroyed the fine detail making the text on the HUDs unreadable where as the progressive was still pristine and legible. Even though the show delivered to the network in 1080i60 on HDCAM (maybe SR, can’t remember) all acquisition and editing was done in 720p60 because it yielded the same, if not better image quality, than 1080i60 in the same workflow. The company is also primarily web-based for distribution and progressive compresses a heck of a lot cleaner than interlaced so that was an influencing factor as well.

With all that being said, I think 720p will eventually ‘die out’ because it’s a smaller number than 1080 and not because people can actually tell a difference.

-Andrew

[Dave Gage]

[Gary Huff] ”
Was it shot on 16 or 35mm thought? May not have been an uprez.”

No way of knowing. But, the video was clearly from the 60’s or 70’s at best. It did look surprising good, but in a “classic” kind of way.

Dave

[Dave Gage]

[Craig Seeman] “YouTube supports 1080. I believe they briefly supported 4K already but pulled it down.
As far as the viewer is concerned bandwidth is an issue.”

Before I post the video at my website, I use Compressor and take the PR422 master from FCP X down to 640×360 and encode with x264 with both .mp4 and .m4v extensions for the Flash player and to also accommodate HTML5. I’m just trying to future-proof as much as reasonable so I don’t have to go back in a couple of years and re-edit 100-400 videos in a 1080 or 2k timeline. But, as I asked in the first post…

How does an up-rez to 1080 or even 2k or 4k come out? Has anyone here had to do that yet? I would think that if you can up-rez SD to HD with good hardware and software, this should be possible. And again, I’m not making movies here, just instructional video that I hope will last for a decade or two since I know the content is good.

Thanks,
Dave

[Gary Huff]

[Dave Gage] “How does an up-rez to 1080 or even 2k or 4k come out?”

I wouldn’t bother uprezzing for “future-proofing”…just a good quality master at the highest resolution that was supported by the original material.

YouTube still supports 4k if you upload to it with that resolution. The trick is to select “Original” as the frame size in the menu where you pick your resolution.