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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 :)

8K Post - The Reality

M

Mark Pedersen

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So, what is the reality of 8k post in today's hardware/software environment?

We currently edit in Pemiere with 5K and 6K R3Ds on nMac pros or our souped up Mac 5.1 Resolve/Pemiere suite with a Cubix expander.

Would we be able to do the same workflow with 8K? Of course monitoring would be a bitch...

We're thinking of going with the Linux version of Resove so we can leverage multiple Titan cards regardless.

Thoughts?

M
 
Quantel have done press about an 8K 60P workfow they are working on for NHK.

Sufficive to say 8K workflows will likey be the following - half or quarter res monitoring on systems that can do current 4K in realtime, and a very sow final output.
 
I can work with 6K on a pretty low standard PC. With some upgrades I would be able to work with 8K.
The only thing I struggle with is getting VFX departments to work with 4K resolution, if we are going to do 8K or higher that would be a challenge.
VFX heavy workflows will have a hard time going into 8K. It's the same thing as for video games. Higher resolution means scaling down other aspects of the graphics, if they release a game at 720p they could use heavier shaders and better quality post effects, but if they want to go 4K they need to reduce a lot of it to be able to release a game that could process all that information at that resolution. When doing VFX work it's the same thing. Doing heavy VFX renderings at 2K is much easier than 4K and if filmmakers want realism they might need to scale back on resolution in order to sell the effect to an audience and still make it to the deadline of release.

Processing 6K or 8K through grading is easy enough, it's nothing we won't be able to do even on lesser systems, but VFX and manipulation of these images is a big stopper when pursuing higher resolutions for release.
 
Mark Pedersen said:
So, what is the reality of 8k post in today's hardware/software environment?

We currently edit in Pemiere with 5K and 6K R3Ds on nMac pros or our souped up Mac 5.1 Resolve/Pemiere suite with a Cubix expander.
M
Click to expand...

When you get those 8K R3Ds - you can always just use your EXACT same workflow - working in 1/2 debayer (4K) until you export/render your your final, finished project. Of course, if you are going to master in 8K you need to monitor in 8K - but I suspect MOST people will be shooting 8K and finishing in UHD (3840x2160) or 4K DCI for the cinema and archiving the 8K raw material.

If you are gonna push a LOT of Weapon footage around at full resolution - you should suck it up and make your piece with a Windows PC. Price, flexibility, scalability on a PC vs MAC for hardcore processing and GPU multi-card crushin' - it's a no brainer.
 
Mark L. Pederson said:
When you get those 8K R3Ds - you can always just use your EXACT same workflow - working in 1/2 debayer (4K) until you export/render your your final, finished project. Of course, if you are going to master in 8K you need to monitor in 8K - but I suspect MOST people will be shooting 8K and finishing in UHD (3840x2160) or 4K DCI for the cinema and archiving the 8K raw material.

If you are gonna push a LOT of Weapon footage around at full resolution - you should suck it up and make your piece with a Windows PC. Price, flexibility, scalability on a PC vs MAC for hardcore processing and GPU multi-card crushin' - it's a no brainer.
Click to expand...

This ^

I bought a Weapon CF 8K not because I plan to finish in 8K, but because I shoot live events and want the freedom to shoot wide(r) and crop in post, finishing in UHD. And to have archival/still images in 8K. That said, I've been checking out some live footage of Snarky Puppy shot with 8 DRAGON cameras and there's something to be said for having lots and lots of cameras, not just lots and lots of pixels:

 
Im sure there will be work done in 8k and by the time it´s here there will be machines and people that can handle it. As Christoffer says, Grading and editing is not much of an issue same work flow as for 6k. i.e work with fraction debayering while edit and doing the setups for grading and then render at wanted resolution. Sure it will take more time to render but even if more than doubles it´s still workable.


For VFX work I´m sure Autodesk flame 2017 that will be out beta end of this year is setup to handle 8k work, if renders are done as 16bit QTHQ it will work fine with playback from the stones and render speed can be pretty much infinitely fast by stocking up on backburners.

Same for nuke, you need to start work with proxies to make it and it´s not 100% in nuke so far but I´m sure they will get it right by the time it´s requests for 8k work.

For CGI/3D renders it also just a question of bigger/faster render farms. there is a lot of 8k 3D work done allready... even if that´s pretty much all print work. Render a sequence takes more computer power for sure but it´s nothing impossible.

But yes the VFX stuff will be the bottle neck for sure. And I think just like now, VFX heavy stuff will be done at lower resolution. Think of it, King Kong and the first Lord of the rings had their VFX scenes done in less than HD resolution I think 1440 in width at the time when "normal movies" showed neg cut film. Still they made an box office success, think it will remain the same in the future, some films will finnish in 8k but have VFX shots in 4k.
 
I will shoot 8k for swedish commerical work... those master as 720x576. :)

Still more pixels is never a bad thing, and 8k capture and in camera downscale to QTXQ 2k will most likely be the cleanest 2k we seen so far. So thats all antoer discussion but people will finnish stuff in 8k and I think that will happn sooner than we think as it´s something that will be used in competition in pitches and so on an if you are able to deliver 8k, it will attract a certain type of clients.
 
Mark K. said:
Surely this is where the great benefit of Redcode Raw kicks in? You can just increase your compression ratio until you're dealing with the same data rates you're used to with 5k or 6k, and edit away as you usually would.

...right?
Click to expand...

Not correct. If you do a 2:1 punch-in on an 8K image, you have 4K horizontal pixels to work with. If you do a 2:1 punch-in on a 5K image, you have 2.5K horizontal pixels to work with. Lossless compression is not going to keep your 4K deliverable as clean as if you started from 8K.
 
What Mark said is pretty much dead on. Weapon 8K Dragon provides both more resolution and a larger format size. Both things I'll be exploring as they meet my interests and shooting needs. The general .R3D won't be that different in terms of general workflow. VFX will need to deal with larger file sizes which will be interesting. I've already knocked out 16K, 20K, and 50K matte paintings in my life, but 8-16K will be common at an 8K finishing resolution. Rendering and comp will be interesting and there is an exponential growth there. Proper textures on 3D models "should" have increased resolution as well. High resolution textures are nothing new though.

There will be times I'm shooting 8K for a 4K finish, but I know the very first footage from 8K Dragon will be finished out at 8K and it will likely have VFX involved.
 
I don't know about you guys but my DVDs will never look better once I shoot in 8k! thats like ten pixels to one in every direction! BEST DVD EVER!


No but seriously I am just going to cut 8k on my laptop with my rocket x. Y'all were making fun of us Rocket X buyers when GPU acceleration made us useless, well 8k footage will surely need a rocket x for fast turn arounds so thankfully us DITs will have everyone by the balls yet again! MUAHAHAHAHHAAH (from evil subterranean DIT cart somewhere near the center of the world)
 
Björn Benckert said:
Think of it, King Kong and the first Lord of the rings had their VFX scenes done in less than HD resolution I think 1440 in width at the time when "normal movies" showed neg cut film.
Click to expand...
No, they were doing 2048x858, which was pretty standard Cineon/DPX output. It's true that there were some 1990s films, going back to Terminator 2 and The Abyss, which had 1440-res film renders. I believe Toy Story was also done at under-HD resolution, then uprezzed at the end. My understanding is that the shots were redone at some point for one of the reissues.

Even The Hobbit was just done at 2K resolution, as were all the Marvel movies, most of which made over a billion dollars each. I don't think 4K or 8K will make any of these movies obsolete or unwatchable. I do believe even 4K end-to-end post is more difficult and costly than many believe, especially for certain kinds of films (regardless of budget).
 
Should be the same as any other R3D file if the cards are staying as Mini Mags. The data throughput is fixed, so you'll likely have to be shooting at higher compression at 8K to get the data rate to work. Unless theres new media introduced, you'll be pretty much at that same as 6K / 4K / any low compression R3D. If you have a system that works for your Epic X on Mini-Mags at the lowest compression possible, you should be able to handle 8K Carbon Weapon footage.

There could be a data bump on Mini-Mags, I just haven't come across it yet.
 
Phil Holland said:
What Mark said is pretty much dead on. Weapon 8K Dragon provides both more resolution and a larger format size. Both things I'll be exploring as they meet my interests and shooting needs. The general .R3D won't be that different in terms of general workflow. VFX will need to deal with larger file sizes which will be interesting. I've already knocked out 16K, 20K, and 50K matte paintings in my life, but 8-16K will be common at an 8K finishing resolution. Rendering and comp will be interesting and there is an exponential growth there. Proper textures on 3D models "should" have increased resolution as well. High resolution textures are nothing new though.

There will be times I'm shooting 8K for a 4K finish, but I know the very first footage from 8K Dragon will be finished out at 8K and it will likely have VFX involved.
Click to expand...

I'm considering 8K for jobs where we are doing wide screen video for events. Our last two CES shows were over 11K wide by just under 1080. We did panoramic shots of Lake Tahoe by doing three 5K passes of the scene using a moco head to repeat camera moves and handle the overlap. We then stitched each pass together and blended the overlap. One of the main reasons we went with three passes was to minimize lens distortion by using too wide of a lens.

We just shot a job in 6K that we're finishing in a full 4096x2160 output. We're editing natively from R3Ds in Premiere (no transcoding), and that's pretty seamless. For the grade, we have a full Resolve panel but monitoring at 1080, and the 6K footage is pretty steppy. We currently have a Rocket X in our Cubix in addition to two Titan Blacks. 5K playback is no problem, so I start worrying about 8K. We are planning to go to Linux for resolve so we can stuff a bunch of Titan Blacks and hopefully get better performance overall, but I wonder how many GPUs we'll need to get good grading performance with multiple nodes in 8K ;)

We have 3 edit bays on a fast SAN so data throughput to the nMac pros isn't a problem. Of course storage would be a bitch. For that we use LTO for offline/backup.

We have another job in process with three 11k by 1920 video walls. So having 8K for acquisition would be great. But the job will probably be over before Weapon ships ;)

We haven't pushed 8K content through our video display cards (currently black magic) and our grading monitor is a 2K Sony OLED. I'm holding off on a 4K viewing monitor until LG releases their flat 4K OLED.

SO, bottom line, is this a good time to go to 8K or wait a couple of years until the processing power/video cards and monitoring catch up?

M
 
One other question. WRT lensing, right now I have a full Leica R set from 15mm to 280mm including zooms. Would I see the same field of view using those lenses on Weapon as their full frame 35mm focal length equivalent?

In other words, would the FOV from a 50mm Leica R lens mounted on a full frame 4:3 SLR match what I'd see on the Weapon? Or would it appear wider?

Probably a stupid question that I should know the answer to, but it's late... ;)

M
 
We are getting to that point now where glass needs to be perfect... or whats the use.
4k 8k... more dots does not mean a sharper image if your lenses are not up to speed.
Superior optics is whats going to make 8k sing.. or its just a big waste of data and time.

In saying that... most anamorphic lenses are soft, old glass from the 60's to 80's are not perfect and you get a beautiful look out of them. So resolution for these bottles is not important.
But if you are after that 'WINDOW EFFECT" choose wisely your glass.

I can say out of the boxes and boxes of lenses I own... I have 3 lenses that can make the grade for pin sharp 8K. The rest.. ?.. 4k will be enough.
 
Mark Pedersen said:
SO, bottom line, is this a good time to go to 8K or wait a couple of years until the processing power/video cards and monitoring catch up?
Click to expand...

There's never going to be one answer to that question that "fits" everybody, but if you're doing work like this I'd say 8K makes a lot of sense. The general overhead isn't that much larger than 6K, workstation will take a hit, but we aren't reinventing the wheel here.

For some a single quality GPU and powerful CPU will be enough for certain workflows. More GPUS, RED Rocket-Xs, and bigger CPUs will make life easier as always though.


Mark Pedersen said:
One other question. WRT lensing, right now I have a full Leica R set from 15mm to 280mm including zooms. Would I see the same field of view using those lenses on Weapon as their full frame 35mm focal length equivalent?

In other words, would the FOV from a 50mm Leica R lens mounted on a full frame 4:3 SLR match what I'd see on the Weapon? Or would it appear wider?

Probably a stupid question that I should know the answer to, but it's late... ;)
Click to expand...

Not a stupid question actually. The FOV is actually wider in the HFOV and shorter in the VFOV when comopared to a 3:2 FF35 DSLR. The general characteristics of the lens will still be in the wheelhouse, but they all will be slightly wider than you'd expect.

If taking a 3:2 FF35 frame and cropping it down to 1.9:1 DCI aspect ratio RED Weapon 8K Dragon 8K FF is about a 0.88X crop factor and 8K HD should be around 0.92X. We don't know exactly what the resolutions are of 7.5K, 7K, or 6.5K are just yet though and there might be some other special formats RED will toss in there.


Mark Toia said:
We are getting to that point now where glass needs to be perfect... or whats the use.
4k 8k... more dots does not mean a sharper image if your lenses are not up to speed.
Superior optics is whats going to make 8k sing.. or its just a big waste of data and time.

In saying that... most anamorphic lenses are soft, old glass from the 60's to 80's are not perfect and you get a beautiful look out of them. So resolution for these bottles is not important.
But if you are after that 'WINDOW EFFECT" choose wisely your glass.

I can say out of the boxes and boxes of lenses I own... I have 3 lenses that can make the grade for pin sharp 8K. The rest.. ?.. 4k will be enough.
Click to expand...


8K displays are demanding and you're right on that front if you want to achieve that effect for sure. The real kick will be if you are attempting to have good edge and corner performance on a lot of the FF35 glass and there's where I see many reasons to explore MF glass. There's some gems out there though. Anything recent from Zeiss fits the bill nicely when it comes to technical merit, contrast, micro-contrasst, and general sharpness. I can't say much for sure until I have all this glass on the 8K sensor. I have pretty much everything at my disposal here when it comes to FF35 and certain MF glass. I'm really curious to see what "sings" on 8K Dragon.
 
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