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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Cinematography.com Naysayers: "4K display won't catch on for 25 years"

I definitely support the naysayers on 4K in regards of cinematography, why?

"Cinematography (from Greek: kinesis κινησις (movement) and grapho γραφω (to record)), is the making of lighting and camera choices when recording photographic images for the cinema."

"Films are cultural artifacts created by specific cultures, which reflect those cultures, and, in turn, affect them. Film is considered to be an important art form, a source of popular entertainment and a powerful method for educating — or indoctrinating — citizens. The visual elements of cinema gives motion pictures a universal power of communication. Some films have become popular worldwide attractions by using dubbing or subtitles that translate the dialogue."

I don't care if the film is shot in SD, HD, 35mm, 16mm, 8mm, VHS, SVHS, you name it.
I almost cried while watching a film shot in consumer SD last year. I laughed at a film shot in RED last week because the story was ridiculous. Both happens with films shot in 35mm.

In the end, cinema is about the story. Not about resolution. It will never be. And cinematography.com implies in its name that it's mostly about cinema, so people there have the right to say nay to 4K I guess. So if you shoot anything for video output where resolution is important (yeah nowadays we definitely need 4K for a musicvideo which is going to be watched on MTV, which is something like 30% SD TVs and 20% 1080p TV's, and 50% low-res streams like youtube), be my guest to love RED and 4K and be a prophet and predict the future of 4K and sharp high resolution images, but if you talk about cinema, I wouldn't dare to say things like "the people at cinematography.com are idiots" if I am just shooting corporate crap myself.

It will NEVER matter what a film is shot on as long as the story and the film is whole as a film and works as a film.

So give yourself and the HD vs. Film discussion a break and concentrate on story and impact if you're talking about cinematography, not pixels or resolution or latitude.

In the end I am always going to be inspired what David has to say because he really tries to see the big picture as a whole and objectively discusses things without being biased at all. Really very much appreciated!
 
I don't see what's so wrong with 25 years, its not like the idea of even HD is selling like hot cakes and to suddenly ram 4k displays at them less than a few years after telling them how amazing 1080p is would be a mistake it will backfire.
Not to mention that perhaps the majority of the films in the past 20 years are 2k or less!
4k just isn't making a whole lot of sense at this stage and I think TVs have more important advances to think about like say black levels in LCD? Lower power consumption stuff like this.

As for 3D, it's a gimmick it hardly works in the cinema it won't work in the home.
 
High resolution TVs

High resolution TVs

TVs have more important advances to think about like say black levels in LCD? Lower power consumption stuff like this.
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O.K so give them one more year to achieve the blacks, the power issue is already solved.
 
XiaoSu Han said:
It will NEVER matter what a film is shot on as long as the story and the film is whole as a film and works as a film.
Click to expand...

Even assuming that this is true (which I'm not entirely convinced of, since it's nearly impossible to entirely separate the originating format technology from the form of a film and often its content), we're not talking about what a movie is shot on, but how the film is seen. And it's VERY important how a film is seen. In many ways much more important than how it was shot.

It's completely different to experience a movie projected on 35mm in a theater (or 4K or whatever) than on a DVD on a 27" TV. Many a great movie simply doesn't work terribly well when viewed on DVD (especially those that are more aesthetically adventurous or extreme in their treatment of cinematic time and space). The more faithfully that you can replicate the original film for home/personal viewing, the better a chance that it will affect the audience as intended.

Blu-ray is a great leap from DVD, but on a large display, even 1080P can break down, particularly if you're sitting close to it. Now, I doubt that 4K is going to take off anytime even remotely soon as far as home viewing goes, but I'll certainly welcome it when it does.
 
Without getting too insulting -- in an ideal world everyone would be watching 4K movies on 4K displays -- this community is a very narrow one.

I know accomplished DPs who own 13" TV sets, and at least one world-famous classical pianist/educator with a cheap and poor speaker system, despite his encyclopedic knowledge of recordings.

The values of their disciplines are not reproduced in the home, and there's no urgency (for them) to do so, despite high levels of accomplishment. Whether the average consumer is any more demanding, or discerning enough to know the difference (how many people can tell 720p from1080p, for example?), only the market-place will reveal. But there's nothing inevitable about 4K, unless that standard becomes so cheap that it's the prevailing system being manufactured.

In that sense only, is 4K inevitable.
 
David Mullen ASC said:
The displays may become inevitable, and products to watch on them... but considering how paranoid the studios have been about releasing movies in 1080P, not to mention that many of them don't even finish movies to 4K... I don't see a rush on their part to start giving the public 4K versions of their movies.
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The studios didn't drive the push to 1080P, the computer manufacturers did by driving down the cost of LCD panel production. Very soon producing a 4k panel at various sizes will be just as cheap as producing a 2k one. When indies will be able to shoot, post, and distribute 4K (and simultaneous 2K) content, consumers will be asking why the studios are stuck at 1080P.

The same pattern has repeated itself in publishing, then music, and next film. The main difference between the three is bandwidth and processing power.
 
Deanan said:
The studios didn't drive the push to 1080P, the computer manufacturers did by driving down the cost of LCD panel production. Very soon producing a 4k panel at various sizes will be just as cheap as producing a 2k one. When indies will be able to shoot, post, and distribute 4K (and simultaneous 2K) content, consumers will be asking why the studios are stuck at 1080P.

The same pattern has repeated itself in publishing, then music, and next film. The main difference between the three is bandwidth and processing power.
Click to expand...

right, it's the same thing. 4K won't be pushed by the studios, it will be accepted by them.
 
jpp said:
I know accomplished DPs who own 13" TV sets, and at least one world-famous classical pianist/educator with a speaker system which is cringe-inducing, despite his encyclopedic knowledge of recordings.
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I don't own a TV but that doesn't mean anything.

I've been watching 4k digital content for the last 4.5 years and doing post/vfx at 4k for about 12 years. Sure HD looks fine but so did SD. I'm not sure why HD is good enough for an industry that is all about 200M budgets and shooting Imax for Batman.

If anything, every single one of our products about the status quo (HD) being inadequate and driving the adoption by increasing accessibility. REDray and REDrocket more specifically so.
 
Joseph Ward said:
What is the optimal? The eyes and brain can only see/interpret so much.
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Resolving power isn't everything. When you have more pixels to work with you can represent edge transitions more smoothly or more sharply. Higher resolution on both acquisition or display gives you the choice. Lower resolution doesn't.

The optimal resolution a function of ppi, viewer/screen distance, and screen size.
 
The computer industry will certainly push for higher resolution panels, mostly because ~200 dpi allows for vastly better text rendering. I tend to think that the technology will be in place for reasonably priced consumer 4K within the next four years or so, but that there really won't just be much consumer demand. You have to sit almost comically close to a 50" TV before you start wishing you had more detail than 1080p provides. Consumer 4K stands a good chance of ending up like SACD and DVD Audio; most people thought CDs were more than good enough, so these formats went nowhere. In fact, the formats that eventually did largely replace the CD -- MP3 and AAC -- were lower quality, but more convenient.

Maybe if TVs keep getting bigger... but I think they may already be large enough that most people don't really want something bigger in their living rooms, so there might have to be some big change in technology for that to happen. ("Screen paint" that turns walls into screens or something. Give it 20 years.)

Maybe I'm wrong about all this, and consumer 4K will be the big summer hit of 2014. But I suspect if Red wants to make a play for the mainstream consumer distribution market, what they should do is develop a version of the RedRay codec optimized for 1080p Internet streaming. If what happened with music is any guide, Blu-ray won't be replaced by a higher quality physical media format, but by a substantially more convenient (and possibly somewhat lower quality) downloadable and streamable format.
 
*Didn't see Chris' post above - he nailed what I was trying to say about audio.*

I wouldn't bring music in as a comparison to this argument as a means to support the idea that there is an acceptance of better quality media; I'm no audiophile, but I do know that the majority of music being listened to everyday is nowhere near as good as it's supposed to sound. For music, the analogy to video would be that people are watching over sharpened, over processed low resolution movies on their phones in favor of Blu Ray 1080p....which for a lot of people is true.

It's ALL about convenience; once you get sub $1000 4k screens (you can get a 1080p screen for less that 300$) and streamed content (easily done with RED RAY I'd say), you'll have 4k mainstream in a snap. That's a given. It's all about affordability and availability. Of course, not trying to condescend as we all know this.

The studios on the other hand...you won't be seeing a RED RAY release of The Big Lebowski...and even if it came out I wouldn't buy it even though I LOVE that film; there's just no point in seeing the Dude light a J in 4k...and I'd imagine it wouldn't look any better than a 1080p Blu Ray version. That goes for almost ALL movies up to date. There are only a few that would make a worth while benefit from 4k.

The truth is, and this is the way I see it, before 1080p, there was always a "It COULD look better". Now we're at the point where we can SEE everything we were meant to see in the movie theater. When the shots go wide, you can make out details that weren't there on the 720p broadcast. I've tested this. Of course The Dark Knight would look amazing in 4k...and there are other exceptions, but not enough to warrant every movie re-released in a 4k format. So it makes sense to think that there's really no need for anything beyond 1080p...but we can't deny the future of cinema.

For all the media that tops out at 2k...once you have a Blu Ray copy I'd say you can archive that baby for good. For the future of cinema, we will have 4k and beyond, it's inevitable as has been said. But that doesn't mean that everything made up til now is going to be dragged into these new formats.

Also the argument about quality of films related to format;it doesn't have any real relevance to this discussion. There are always going to be many bad movies on every format. Doesn't mean there won't be mind blowing accomplishments down the road. Who's to say a movie shot in SD wouldn't look better in HD or film? There is a point of diminishing returns, as I mentioned above with The Dude. But there is a happy place that we've discovered over the last 100 years, which is around 2k, 1080p. But again, there will be great films made in the future using the resolution and scope of 4k, it's just a matter of time and convenience before it becomes commonplace.
 
let me repeat some sentences from RED team members in this topic:

Deanan: "When indies will be able to shoot, post, and distribute 4K (and simultaneous 2K) content, consumers will be asking why the studios are stuck at 1080P."


oh yes, we all know what Red has done with 4K. Cameras, codecs, 10Mbit/s 4K indistinguishable from uncompressed right?





My understanding is that two years ago, RED said "well OK, we don't see affordable 4K, 5K and 6K camers on horizont = let's make one or two". They did.

... and now the root of my message:


Graeme : "4k and beyond displays are inevitable."
Deanan : "Very soon producing a 4k panel at various sizes will be just as cheap as producing a 2k one."
Graeme : "Before long I think we'll see whole walls as your view into the world"


TODAY they say "well we don't see 4K panel "whole wall big"...

OMG, THIS LOOKS LIKE NEXT YEAR RED WILL PRODUCE 200" 4K TV FOR $3999 :)

Jim, Graeme, please do. May I have the one with serial number #00000000004 please ? Make sure you have enough decimal places in serial number, this one is going to sell better than Scarlets :)
 
Stephen Williams said:
I think you nailed why DV was so sucessful, most people don't care what the picture looks like. Content Content Content.
Click to expand...
me loves stephen's posts.. :couch: well not all :biggrin5: but a lot of them :beer:
 
"For all the media that tops out at 2k...once you have a Blu Ray copy I'd say you can archive that baby for good. For the future of cinema, we will have 4k and beyond, it's inevitable as has been said. But that doesn't mean that everything made up til now is going to be dragged into these new formats."

There is much complaining about the quality of specific BluRay discs on the web. Probably half of them look crappy.

This may be the technology, the compression, the uncaring idiocy of those churning them out, I don't know.

But, if RedRay versions are significantly more appealing on the screen, then there is certainly a place for some competition against a format (BluRay) that has some obvious problems. We need to see how it plays out, but so far the reviews of RedRay are very positive. The reviews of BluRay have been quite mixed.
 
I think a lot of Bluray copies are probably getting churned out from crummy old masters done 10 years ago, before HD really took off.

If a studio was going to put out 4K REDrays, they would be forced to go back to the negative or best source material and really do a restoration and remaster, like what was recently done for Strangelove and Bladerunner.
 
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