4K VP9 Red Scarlet Footage

[Jonathan Salvia]

I posted this in the Shot On Red forum, but reposting for clarity. If you're interested in seeing 4K VP9 footage watch the video below.

As the finishing editor for YouTube Nation I work with Red Scarlet MX footage on a daily basis. This “Best of YouTube” show is co-produced by YouTube and Dreamworks Animation. As far as I know this is the only show in the world delivering 4K content daily. Our Post Production Supervisor Peter Salvia worked with Google engineers to encode our videos using VP9, which is Google's next generation high resolution streaming video codec. What you’re about to view is one of the only shows streaming in 4K that you can actually watch in 4K. It is nearly visually lossless to my eye. Make sure to select 4K under settings.

 

[Nick Morrison]

Haha. Great job. Piece is super fun, and very well made recap. And...in 4K!

 

[Marc Wielage]

The first clip I see is San Diego fires shot vertically with an iPhone camera. I'm assuming that is not 4K.

 

[Adam Montville]

Obviously I'm talking about the parts that were shot on the Scarlet.

I hope they can roll VP9 out faster! That looks WAY better than their H.264 4K renders. I didn't see any macro-blocking, and it actually loaded without buffering while watching for me, (which NEVER happens when I try and watch other 4K videos on YouTube. They normally take forever to load.)

Side note to give to YouTube engineers:

What I'm not a fan of with YouTube, is that I have to play with the player to actually "force" it to start showing me the res I choose. (Change it to 4K, skip ahead, it breaks, then choose the res again, and start the video over.) It's like clockwork for me that I have to do that every time. I know that after 10 seconds or so (sometimes longer!) that it should switch to the new res, but I don't like watching 360p for ANY of the video, sorry.

 

[David Kuhn]

The first clip I see is San Diego fires shot vertically with an iPhone camera. I'm assuming that is not 4K.

Yea that's definitely not 4k... the fire and inline skate videos both stuck out like sore thumbs compared to the commentator shots around them - the Michael Sam piece was a lot better (and was very funny) but still looked a bit fuzzy.

Other than long buffer times, the video played smooth as silk on my laptop (with a 4k external display connected). The video quality looked heavily compressed compared to playing .RED files on the same monitor... but it still looked pretty good for a streaming format.

 

[Les Dittert]

The only footage that looked 4K was the 'talent' talking heads, whom I would have rather seen in standard definition, quite frankly. What is the benefit of seeing that dudes stubble defined so well ?
The VP9 looked great! What public codecs are ready to use ? Anything in 10 or 12 bits yet ?

 

[David Kuhn]

What is the benefit of seeing that dudes stubble defined so well ?

It's a very manly stubble though. I think when 4k catches on one of the things that will have to be addressed is how to treat talking head shots... when you can clearly make out the makeup, blemishes and fine wrinkles on even young attractive talent - that's a problem.

 

[Stacey Spears]

What public codecs are ready to use ? Anything in 10 or 12 bits yet ?

I believe VP9 is 8-bit only at this time. If you want 10-bit you will need to use HEVC. You can give x265 a try. Its evolving every day. HEVC 10-main 4:2:0 though. You do have to worry about the decoder itself actually producing the true 10-bits out.

 

[Jonathan Salvia]

The "talent" segments and interstitials are natively shot 4K Scarlet with a Tokina 11-16mm. The YouTube footage is usually upscaled to 4K. So far nothing uploaded to YouTube in 4K has made it into a show. The turnaround on the show is so fast we're doing the majority of color in camera. We are compositing in 4K for the "outro" segments of the show.