4K for All.

[Matt Ryan]

Matt do you know anybody close to you with a BMD UltraStudio 4K?

Please test

I don't know anyone who has one but if someone does I'd love to test out the combo...

 

[Cid J Salcido Uyarra]

It's about time

All the footage we shot years ago can be seen in new light it's pretty exciting.

4k "Check"

 

[Cid J Salcido Uyarra]

I have worked with some people in the past on this and from what I understand is UHD4KBR can support up to 60fps. Which to me means 48p is in there.

Thanks to HDMI 2.0 4k 60p is possible.

Atomos Shogun will soon support 4k 60p for all the sony owners. The most recent NVIDIA 980 GTX support HDMI 2.0 for all you 3D gamers I would love another play through of Mass Effect 2 in 3D HFR.

 

[L. Langer]

Not all the high-end Nvidia cards are packing HDMI 2.0. Only a few of them are. I think it will become standard on all new cards with the Pascal GPU release, which should also be packing DisplayPort 1.3.

 

[Maik Müller]

Thanks to HDMI 2.0 4k 60p is possible.

Atomos Shogun will soon support 4k 60p for all the sony owners. The most recent NVIDIA 980 GTX support HDMI 2.0 for all you 3D gamers I would love another play through of Mass Effect 2 in 3D HFR.

4k 3D HFR will probably work with DisplayPort 1.3, but i doubt it will work with HDMI2.0. You need 120fps for that. It's 60fps per eye. And that was my original concern. If Blu4k gets finalized with HDMI2.0 and 60fps max, then there is no hope for movies being released in 4k+HFR+3D.

 

[Cid J Salcido Uyarra]

DisplayPort 1.3 and Thunderbolt 3.0 will support 5K which we hope will drop along with the Apple Cinema Display.

120fps at 4K is allot of info not quite there yet for consumers.

HDMI 2.0 yes is optimized for 3D up to 30fps as far as gaming goes, your correct Maik. But perfect for 24p 4K 3D only reason I haven't sprung for a 4K TV yet.

 

[Roshdi Alkadri]

4k streaming yes, 4k for digital cinema of course, but as far as the mainstream broadcasting industry and home consumer market, 4k will take a very long time to become mainstream. It took almost 40 years for TV stations to switch their infrastructure from SD to HD, and in a world where it's business to them, they're not going to jump overnight, additionally they're not mandated to switch.

I love the freedom of cropping, stabilizing and shooting at the higher resolution of 4k, but the reality is most stations still require their deliverables in HD in different flavors. Not talking about the specialty networks mentioned, because even those will still offer HD for a very long time along with 4k.

 

[Adey_L]

I believe only Vimeo PRO accounts can stream 4k... I've got PLUS and the only options for 4k is to 'download original'.

I'm very curious to see how the infrastructure copes with 4k along with more and more net only media consumers. It wasn't long ago that ISP's considered 250GB/month to be an 'extreme user', 4k streaming will crush that pretty quickly. I just checked December usage for my house... between Streaming (we are net only... no cable since 2003) and the Steam Holiday sale we hit our ISP for 750GB. Pretty extreme definitely (our average monthly use is 250-350GB) but the trend has been upward steadily as more content providers deliver higher quality media (the majority of our bandwidth consumption is streaming media).

I do work for a telecoms company in the UK. They are fully expecting households receiving four 4K video streams simultaneously to be the norm in the next two to three years and are working on their infrastructure accordingly. Interestingly (and I guess it's crystal ball gazing really), they don't see much extra bandwidth requirements after that.

 

[David Kuhn]

The next couple years will be very interesting on the content delivery front... as Roshidi mentions - it typically takes the "Industry" a LONG time to adopt new standards... but when I look at the market today I see that as a huge problem for them. The Internet tends to adopt first and then grow to handle the bandwidth, if traditional delivery (cable, satellite) can't match the quick 4k adoption we're already seeing online then they're leaving themselves exposed to mass migration as more and more people move to 4K and start demanding content delivery in 4k.

I still see the occasional '4k is overkill' posts... but as more people actually see the difference that argument seems to be getting weaker. A couple years ago I was posting about how I'll never buy another display or monitor that's lower than 1080p res. At this point I'll never buy another display that's less than 1440p, and that would only be for a phone or laptop (as a PC guy I find the number of new Wintel laptops being released with only 1080p... even high end units... to be embarrassing), I'll never buy another monitor or TV less than 4k (excluding on-camera).

 

[Phil Holland]

What we know as "broadcast" is going to be the slowest to adopt change.

As mentioned and what's already been seen is internet based download and streaming services were the early birds. Specifically Google/YouTube and Netflix. Good on them both for pushing the envelope.

Cable and Satellite services are in a real conundrum as some of their business is hardware based. However, we've already seen some signs with Time Warner Cable moving to open up a streaming plan for HBO (TWC owns HBO btw).

SmartTV and these various startups entering this realm will be interesting. It's tricky to see if and who will gain traction there. Content is what attracts viewers and right now that's their biggest problem.

For me TWC and similar providers are the ones who need to make the play and offer up an internet only package and design channel navigation and all that chaos. The trick there is it's a big back of wires and needs to be designed in a very simple way as it's going to be an effort of combining time restricted programming and merging it with On Demand features. It's honestly not a big job when you wrangle all the little devils, but for larger companies like this and they way technology is often deployed it's like moving mountains with shovels.

Nobody is going to want to have 5 or 10 streaming services. There will need to be a "culled" service that provides what viewers will actually want with sleek navigation and quality content.

Advertisement is going to be a big part of this at some point and integrating that is going to be tricky when compared to say a Netflix model, but I personally don't think it's that tricky. Hulu had something going for it early on, but it's a bit of a miss from the user experience point of view and certainly from a content point of view.

 

[Roshdi Alkadri]

Imagine the thousands if not millions of movies and content which were shot in HD or lesser, that's one huge library of money generators that would go down the drain. Studios, distributors and filmmakers would not risk something like that. I believe that even if 4k eventually takes over, it will not be the end of HD. Streaming services will still be releasing in both 4k and HD.

Motion pictures that are being shot in 4k find the most benefits, whether the project will be projected in 4k or most often in 2k. 4k streaming will make these projects shine but the end user has to have the ability to view it as such. Future proofing in 4k is an excellent idea, but the vast numbers of project shot over the past 50 years will not be ditched, most 4k TV's offer the up-ressing option just like HD sets offered to upress SD, we don't like that word but it is a reality.

I shot a film in which was broadcast on a major network here in Canada. The maximum they would accept was 1080P. The fellow who was covering the making off who came from that station was shooting in S-VHS, don't ask. Generally speaking though, most mainstream stations still shoot in Digi-Beta, XDCAM or DVC Pro HD.

Shooting in 4k is one thing, even if it's destined for TV, it will look amazing.

I have an international TV box with about 300 major stations across the middle east, the U.S., turkey, spain and france. Only about 10% of them offer an HD alternative. When i shoot corporates, 1% of the clients are requesting a blu-ray or an HD upload, most are still asking for DVD!?

Everyone is unique in their clientele and destination market, shooting in high res definitely gives us more options. As you know, one always has to ask what his/her target market is. The world is full of formats.

 

[Lakis Amarantithis]

Well gosh. Those folks who were saying 4K would never take off, as recently as last year even, must be happy

Seriously though. For those creating and viewing moving pictures this might be the most exciting time.

Thankfully 4K and 4K+ is what I'm all about and it's the right direction for the industry as a whole. It's beautiful.

I'm sure in few yrs you'll see 128k with unreal 3D being the normal. The problem of high quality Meaningful movies still remains though.

 

[Phil Holland]

I'm sure in few yrs you'll see 128k with unreal 3D being the normal. The problem of high quality Meaningful movies still remains though.

I agree in general. Though I do think if we get to 16K+ delivery in the future right around that time resolution isn't likely going to play a role as we know it. But, who knows.

High quality meaningful movies are tricky to define. I've certainly broadened my scope a bit on being highly critical of many studio films, even certain things I've done work on. Mostly because at the end of the day the general concept is "entertainment". Sometimes that means fighting robots blowing up stuff. Sometimes that means having your brain twisted and lost in a psychological thriller. Sometimes that means walking out of a theater after a dramatic film feeling a new attachment to the world around you.

Whatever it is, I do feel the general concept of adventure films is becoming a lost art. Note, I'm not stating action films, but rather adventure. That is something I want to experience more of.

The Goonies for instance is not a meaningful film on the surface, but it was an adventure film that was meaningful to me as a child more than many other motion pictures at the time.

 

[Josh K]

I don't know about 128K but I'm sure there is a point beyond which there's no reason to increase resolution. On the other hand, DSLRs passed that 4-6 years ago but keep pressing on for marketing reasons. So maybe it won't stop until improvements are imperceptible and prohibitively costly to deliver.