Prime Video allegedly eyeing 8K content

[Ryan Chernin]

I don't think they'll be releasing 8K content anytime soon, but I also certainly didn't expect to see this article so soon.

Could be nothing. Could be something. Caught my eye either way.

What do y'all think?

 

[Phil Holland]

How soon is anytime soon to you?

#sneakyGrin

 

[Phil Holland]

I'll add a little fire to that reply. Decent quality and even decent size 8K televisions hit sub-$3000 USD in 2021. I suspect around the end of the year we'll be below $1500-$1000 making the technology much, much more approachable. It's also worth noting every television manufacturer has been putting the most effort into their 4K and 8K series, which has been extremely evident.

As with HD and UHD 4K, UHD 8K tracks the logarithmic market trajectory. I'll even be bold enough to say, the last two years actually slowed things down a bit.

There's different sides to this industry and everybody will deliver whatever is necessary, but for many 4K is the thing being focused on for many markets now. 8K is still the smaller growth cateogry, but I can assure you it's a larger market today than it was in 2015/2016.

I've been not as vigorous as of late regarding resolution and delivery standards now that all the manufacturers stepped up to the 4K or 4K+ realm. A good chunk of my core desires have arrived. Now it's about pushing harder for data rates, image quality, etc. All of this is being worked on hard behind the scenes. H.266 plays a role in this, but you can indeed deliver a decent H.265 8K stream for a while now.

I should also underline many streaming services targeted 15MB/s for a years as the ideal. That's mainly tied to broadband and wifi as well as buffering related data rates. It's 2022 now however and broadband is in many more places and people do have more bandwidth. One of the somewhat obvious ties to who owns 8K televisions and what sort of internet access they have and I can tell you it leans towards a better than you'd expect data rate.

The realest question will be how streaming services deploy this in either premium tiers, moving 4K into standard tiers, marketing as an "us vs them" mentality, etc. Hard to know that. I suspect it will be a variety of strategies.

 

[Marc Wielage]

While I'm really negative on the viability of 8K -- I'd rather see "better 4K" (like 10-bit & 12-bit color) supported -- I have it on good authority that HBO, Disney, and some of the other streaming services are actively researching and testing 8K. A lot of this is a plausibility test just to see where this is going.

I'm a big fan of shooting in 6K/8K for reframing in post, and that makes total sense. 8K delivery... not so much.

 

[John M Taylor]

What is the minimum data rate or internet download speed needed for reliable streaming of 8K content?

 

[Phil Holland]

I'm a big fan of shooting in 6K/8K for reframing in post, and that makes total sense. 8K delivery... not so much.

How do you feel about delivering 4K?

It happens in stages. One of my main post houses in the 2010s got to experience the full gamut of what I do. 8K and 8K+ delivery hasn't been their bag of tea just yet, but I did get them to 4K. I suspect in 1-3 years they'll be ready. The unfortunate thing for them is all of my 8K projects were out of bounds. And I guess fortunately for me, moderate VFX and MOGR has been a part of this journey so far. But not for long.

What is the minimum data rate or internet download speed needed for reliable streaming of 8K content?

Most data rates for streaming are calculated in Mbps, but I like to keep things simple for my sanity across the board and deal with MB/s.

As of January 3rd, 2022 outside of purely uncompressed material and intermediate codecs, all streaming 8K material I've delivered is between 2MB/s and 75MB/s. There's a great, great deal of variance among streaming services in how they encode, which codecs, and proprietary optimizations. If I had a hunch on where things will go between now and harder rollouts with H.265, H.266, AV1, and two things that aren't widely used; I'd bet it's going to land around 6-16MB/s. Japan has been an interesting test bed to see what's working via NHK's streaming. Globally YouTube is around 2.5-6.25MB/s currently.

It will be very, very interesting to see what actually occurs once big players decide to push out content. It's tied to the market and value for sure. The tech has been there for a while now. The market size wasn't of interest until about 2019 or so.

Can't break any blood pacts or NDAs, but CES is right around the corner and you'll be seeing some interesting new models and a range of televisions targeting a Q2-Q3 release. Much like 4K before it, I've truly enjoyed producing content even beyond 8K for this tradeshow in particular as well as IFA when the world is normal. Something incredibly special about that first time when people see 8K done well. Hard part is designing the content and still hitting the new models' briefs regarding features and how to show them off. You typically get 15-120 seconds to grab eyeballs, but one of my longer projects was in the 8 minute range and people literally stood in crowds huddled to watch every frame. Love that.

 

[Marc Wielage]

How do you feel about delivering 4K?

I'm fine with delivering in 4K. I think the first 4K project that I actually delivered (and it was 4K Raw for 90% of the feature) was way back in 2014, and it went fine. This was back in the "bad old Trashcan Mac" days, so I had to render it out on 9-10-minute sections and then stitch everything together at the end. We had dozens of rener hits where the machine heated up and glitched at right around the 10 or 11-minute mark, even running it at a slow speed (like 10fps or even 5fps). A later replacement Trashcan has been flawless. We traditionally will do a 4K pass and then a subsequent HD pass just to make sure all the titles line up and there's no surprises with NR or sharpening.

Our current 2019 MacPro cranks out anything we throw at it and has no problem. We also just doubled our online storage, so I think we now have roughly 500TB in the room, which is a lot for a 2-man company. We have to juggle a few things for conforms and media management, and backups are a challenge, but we get by.

 

[Matt W.]

I just switched to 2K ProRes. :/