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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 :)

Resolution, IBC and 4K +

Stephen Matthews said:
I would love to go computer for all games but alas it will never be, was raised a FPS console gamer and will die one(goldeneye N64) can't explain it really nothing against computer FPS just not for me. Strategy and role playing games are a whole other deal(kings quest on an old IBM running DOS was my first computer game).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King's_Quest:_Quest_for_the_Crown.
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Funny i am the opposite.. not really a console guy always been a PC gamer but role playing games on old PC's we have in common. I still think after all these years Amulet of Yendor was the best game ever made. You had to actually use your imagination... those days are long gone. Man that game kicked ass.


T789552.jpg
 
Ah that's a nice one, Jarred :) though I really fell in love with "the pawn" and other (older) text adventures.... Now where is that old 512K Amiga in my attic???
 
Btw I believe this is a recent screenshot from your office PC? ;)

now, what were we talking about actually? Hehehe
 
Compared to what

Compared to what

Does anyone know if the extension of the H.264 standard using EAVC4 Langer mentioned could co-exist with current H.264 implementations? Fortunately we now live in an era where stepping up to a newer standard is usually as easy a downloading the newest version/driver but for the living room it would be advantageous if newer encodes played back smoothly on existing devices even if there was a quality hit vs optimized decoding.

In terms of optical disc, or other physical media delivery of content, those days are numbered. That said, I do believe there will be at least one more iteration of optical disc tech that will handle compressed 4K and provide a low cost per GB archive medium. Even if I am correct in forecasting a last hurrah for disc media, broadband delivery of all content - including 4K motion media - is certainly the tidal wave that I expect to obsolete all other distribution options within 5 years.

How does 4K fit into a broadband/IP infrastructure? Only a small percentage of US households can sustain the bit rate needed to stream decent 1080P right now, let alone 4K, so typically its heavily compressed and buffered 720P. The big MSOs are more interested in offering hundreds of channels than improving quality and I'm not holding my breath for that to change. I keep hoping for a fundamental change in the distribution model that allows one to dedicate a huge chunk of their available bandwidth to a selected source rather then using most of the pipe to carry 200 channels you aren't accessing at that moment. From what I understand about current distribution modalities that is not achievable, but logic suggests it eventually will be. For now, they are busy paying off current hardware and getting very little blowback on the quality front so it may take a while.

The best option I can think of in the short term, is a download model that would require you to make a selection in advance of viewing to allow time for the data to be delivered to local storage media. Think PS4 with a 2TB HDD and a "menu" service where you would make your selection the day before. The viability of that model in our instant gratification society, especially when so few people are even aware of how much better their picture quality could be is a tough sell. Most of the "suits" in our industry believe that 4K will only propagate widely when it is at least as convenient for consumers as 1080P is now at a similar price point.

I truly believe that for significant interest in 4K to manifest it will require widespread opportunities for people to actually see well displayed 4K content, preferably in side by side or A/B comparison to MPEG-2 compressed HD or an average release print. Without a reference point the typical consumer simply doesn't understand - which, BTW, is why I think so few people have ever questioned the roughly 1.2K delivered resolution of most 35mm release prints. Even a mid-level multiplex offers a big image, the room is dark, the sound is loud and you're eating junk food. Now if you watched the first 10 minutes of the movie from a 4K DCP on a 4K digital projector and suddenly they switched to a film print of the same movie I'd wager 90% of the audience would notice immediately. Of course, based on the many soft focus presentations I've come across in the average multiplex I suppose that's questionable (though I suspect if an in focus presentation went soft all of the sudden 10 minutes in many would notice).

If RED can manage to hit the bit rate targets they have discussed for 4K playback via REDray then the equation changes. If 4K delivery is no more demanding than 1080P is currently then uptake should be much faster than if it requires 4 times the data load. Of course S3D and HFR might have to wait... ;-)

Cheers - #19
 
Ryan Koo said:
I'm talking about reality. Will there be an actual distribution format available to consumers? Disc, download, what? If 4K is going to be a serious standard then these are the important questions.
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Well, in reality there's no PS4 released yet and no official plans to have streaming service of 4K content, as far as I'm concerned. I'd just watch it in VOD mode anyway, since I mostly rent digital copies nowadays. I'm sure there'll be multi-layered BD with advanced codec for the movies you want to have in hard copy.
 
Jarred Land said:
I just read 2 interesting articles over at Studio Daily. First was their IBC newsletter that starts with "Resolution is king here at IBC in Amsterdam " and then another http://www.studiodaily.com/2012/09/roger-deakins-digital-odyssey-not-in-4k/ .

First article.. we are happy to see our friends at almost every other company enter the 4k Space.. It was getting lonely there for awhile. The more cameras and more projects that are shot in 4K everyone wins. 4k Televisions and Projectors are starting to trickle into the market and we are even seeing laptops and ipads blow past 2k in resolution. This means that the customers are starting to see what most of you have been seeing for the last many years.. that 1080p (and 2k) just isn't enough. Looking around at IBC that message is pretty clear, just as Studio Daily points out.

The 2nd article, with the legendary Roger Deakins commenting on his new film confused me a bit though - not Roger's comments, He seems to get it.. he at least seems to know that he needs to get to 4K and is ending up there the only way he can ( uprez ) .. so that part isn't confusing... But the part that stumped me was the comments from someone at ARRI where that person seems to really think 2K is enough.

Everyone has heard RED scream that 2K isn't enough for years. Hell... when the original Scarlet came out of the oven and we actually shot it.. we discovered 3K isn't even enough.. You guys know where we stand.

So instead of me telling you one more time why we think 4K (and above) is needed.. I thought I would let Arri actually tell you why 4K + is so great.

Yes.. ARRI.

Someone over there did a ton of tests between 2K and 4K a while back and in every test the conclusion was the same.. It really is a great read.

http://www.efilm.com/publish/2008/05/19/4K plus.pdf

Just one of the great take-aways from this article is that ARRI actually calculated the resolution people experience in the theaters... Their diagram shows that even the back row being able to absorb 3K is a great visual.

I hope the person that wrote this still has their job.. if they don't, call me. :)

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Agrees with my research I've been saying for years, but what limit are they talking about, not 1200 or 2400dpi, but over 150dpi?
 
Blair S. Paulsen said:
How does 4K fit into a broadband/IP infrastructure? Only a small percentage of US households can sustain the bit rate needed to stream decent 1080P right now, let alone 4K, so typically its heavily compressed and buffered 720P. The big MSOs are more interested in offering hundreds of channels than improving quality and I'm not holding my breath for that to change.
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Blair, I work in broadcast cable, and I can confirm you are SPOT ON. Everything airs at 720p. Materials DELIVER at 1080p (they want everything to be 1080 ready). And YES...the push is MORE CHANNELS, MORE CONTENT...not more bandwidth. There is a war being waged to add channels, because they are seen as a rapidly diminishing resource. Claim your channels now, or forever be stuck with what you have.

BUt....I do see 4K as a rapidly emerging format. The nascent market for 4K televisions reminds me of the dawn of HD and Blue Ray. At first it seemed too expensive and rarified, but very quickly...it took over. It wouldn't surprise me if CABLE TV becomes 1080p over the next 3-5 years, but VOD/Streaming/Downloads become 4K standard in that time.

By then, we'll be shooting 8K on the COLOSSUS sensor (my made up name for the sensor after DRAGON), haha!
 
Ryan Koo said:
I tried to see The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo in 4K, drove an extra half hour to watch it at a theater listed on Sony's 4K cinema website, and when I got there it was being projected in the small side theater... on film. Plenty of digital IMAX screens aren't even 4K, which is a travesty.
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There is something nice about a small theater where screen size and your distance from it just "work" somehow.

"Soft" film projection becomes complete magic. Sure you can scan film at 4K but the end result is never laboratory perfect, and it excites me to think that the digital replacement will start off at 4K and get watered down in delivery. "Dirty it up" doesn't just work for old glass.

Keep in mind that every projector, either the ancient Christies I remember building up prints on.... or the brand spanking new 4K monsters that download their movies to a drive...

...each one has a pane of glass in front of it, often two, often thick, that the projectionists NEVER ever clean :) The "black box" of digital needs something, either in the playstation or in the theater, that roughs up the image in a good way... it always worked for film.
 
The Arri article may well have been written a few years ago to promote their 4k film scanners.



Mike Brennan
Melbourne
 
Red has obviously been the prime mover in the push toward the adoption of 4k. Now other camera manufacturers, TV and monitor makers, and peripheral equipment makers are on the bandwagon - a win/win situation for those of us who work in the motion media industry.

Sports has usually been the driving force for change in technology and resolution in the television industry - huge ratings and audience numbers, commensurately large budgets, a visually stimulated audience (think adrenaline), etc. Sports television is a significant part of my background. Just nine days ago I was fascinated (but not surprised) by an article in TV Technology magazine about how CBS Sports and Fox Sports are in the process of migrating to 4k cameras for acquisition. The quotes from the TV executives in this article shed a lot of light on that. Also the quote at the end of the article about the sluggish rate of 3DTV adoption is also way informative:

Link: http://www.tvtechnology.com/feature-box/0124/networks-ponder-future-proofing-nfl-coverage/215273

Those execs are obviously talking about hardlined (or "trucked") sports television. Sony cameras dominate in that industry. But Epic (and Red One before it) is being used for a lot of creative montage roll-ins, inbump/outbump, and interstitials in hardlined TV sports. Red One and now Epic have also been used for a long time now in non-hardlined (created in post) sports television productions. Red's new Meitzler Module, REDSync Master, HD-SDI and HDMI receivers should have the hardlined sports television thinking about ways to also integrate Epic into their arsenal of cameras.


In the past two weeks in TV Technology there have also been some significant announcements about 4K TV sets and 4k monitors - well worth a read through:

Links:

9/13/12 – “JVC Announces 84-Inch 4k LCD monitors”
http://www.tvtechnology.com/news/0086/jvc-announces--inch-provérité-k-lcd-monitors/215437

9/7/12 – “LG to Beats Sony to U.S. Market With 84-inch Ultra HDTV”
http://www.tvtechnology.com/news/0086/lg-to-beat-sony-to-us-market-with--inch-ultra-hdtv/215360

8/30/12 – “Sony Unveils its First Consumer 4k TV”
http://www.tvtechnology.com/feature-box/0124/sony-unveils-its-first-consumer-k-tv/215194
 
I don't know about the rest of the country, but the Verizon tech who installed our fibre two years ago told me that a massive bandwidth bump was coming "in the next few years". I seem to recall him talking about download speeds in the 300's. It made me think that they could indeed support 4k delivery in the near term.
 
Scott Crawley said:
I don't know about the rest of the country, but the Verizon tech who installed our fibre two years ago told me that a massive bandwidth bump was coming "in the next few years". I seem to recall him talking about download speeds in the 300's. It made me think that they could indeed support 4k delivery in the near term.
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They can deliver or for the most part is possible from a technical perspective. Its their business model prevents them from doing so. Their perception is to charge for bandwidth or per byte and that can't to that proportionately for the low bandwidth circuits proportionately if they heavily drop rates on the faster circuits. This won't come right until the business model changes and in most parts of the world this may need to legislative changes to make this happen, this in turn is set by telco lobbying rather than value and services for the consumer.
 
Scott Crawley said:
I don't know about the rest of the country, but the Verizon tech who installed our fibre two years ago told me that a massive bandwidth bump was coming "in the next few years". I seem to recall him talking about download speeds in the 300's. It made me think that they could indeed support 4k delivery in the near term.
Click to expand...

It's coming, slowly but surely. A few telecomm companies are pushing 100+ Mbps fiber into the market now. Most DSL systems can be retrofitted with fiber optic service to the remote DSLAMs and that hardware upgraded with current tech to operate upwards of 1Gbps, but it will obviously take years for the hardware costs and installation schedules to align. There's also the matter of being able to switch and manage that much traffic on the backbones that support end users at these speeds. Some of the fastest fiber switches out there are operating (multiplexed) at 200Gbps. Kinda hard to support communities with thousands of users at these speeds -- the necessary hardware doesn't even exist yet. So, yes, it's coming. No one really knows when... I've heard the 100Mbps service offered by CenturyLink and similar from BAJA and Verizon all suffer from overload. The bandwidth is there, but the network drops back to typical DSL/Cable speed at peak times when everyone is surfing the net and trying to watch Netflix or whatever. ...Ah, someday.

I have a 7Mbps pipe into my house and at peak usage times I can rarely manage better than 1.5Mbps download speeds, even from servers that I know for sure are not throttling me back. My area is just overloaded. As are many/most and that doesn't even take into account all the people out there who can't even get the level of service I enjoy. Until I moved into my current place about 6 years ago, the best I could get at my previous home was dial-up, or direct line of sight radio service with a huge installation costs and flakey antenna. Or a T1 if I wanted to pay $400+/month.
 
Sure 4K is coming we all know that. Good for RED and the theaters. But right now so many people absolutely love the Alexa, the look of it and the of course the workflow. Its popularity with high-end professionals is undeniable.

BTW, when Deakins discusses a camera is it not about the resolution. It is about the look of the camera. He is an artist. A very respected one!



Steve
 
You do realize a lot of the "Alexa look" is down to the in-built low-contrast filter as part of the OLPF stack. At RED we don't think the choice of filtration should be ours, but that of the creatives on the project and the DP.

Graeme
 
Hi Graeme

My experience suggests that there is significant differences between behind the lens and in front of lens filtration. So until Red offers us some OLPF stack options we wont have a full choice. Hint hint...

Kind regards

Michael


Graeme Nattress said:
You do realize a lot of the "Alexa look" is down to the in-built low-contrast filter as part of the OLPF stack. At RED we don't think the choice of filtration should be ours, but that of the creatives on the project and the DP.
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