Is 4K a game changer?

[JayEmm]

Originally Posted by ray0414

Can you explain I simple terms what this means?

The most popular type of digital camera in the professional arena (give or take) is the ARRI Alexa. It has a chip whose resolution is between 2 and 3.4K, depending on how you like to count it. Recently they introduced a mode where you could get a 4K picture out of the camera, using an internal upscaler.

Netflix (rightly so) saw this as a massive cheat, so have banned people from using that on their shows where 4K is a requirement.

Bayer Patterning is too complex to try and explain in a post here, but long story short your TV has a red,green and a blue sub-pixel for every pixel on the screen (if you've never seen them, just walk up very close to it - easier in the SDTV days!). Cameras can only have each pixel red OR blue OR green - so there's a fair bit of guesswork involved in creating colour and resolution suffers. Hence cameras with three chips (one each of red,green,blue).

I'm happy to answer any questions on the camera side of things, but opening a new topic might be wise

[richieb1971]

Originally Posted by Alan A

Interesting article by John C. Dvorak
I think he has a point with the general public, will they even notice or care about HDR?

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2496390,00.asp

This article very much applies to most people that go into electronic stores. Most people don't even change the picture settings on the TV so all this HDR is just nonsense to them.

Although I do think its about time factories actually calibrated TV's to the standards that HDTVtest.co.uk use. I mean, why make a TV that does not conform to a standard?

Going OLED 4K is probably a bigger game changer than HDR on its own.

As for 4K being a game changer, no its not going to be a game changer. As long as there is choice nobody in their right mind will buy only 4k material. Just like videogames with myself, the graphics are far far beyond what I would call acceptable even though there is this group of PC craving lunatics that want better than Pixar animation at 120fps.

Most people buying TV's in 2016 will upscale to 4k, by 2020 you might see some up take on the native format.

[ray0414]

Originally Posted by C. Anton

I sit a little over 5 feet from a 40" 1080p, because the room is so small, and not sure what HDR is or if my TV has it. It does have a great picture, and I ordered a Samsung BD-H6500 yesterday from Amazon to replace my Sony, which says Upscale Every Disc to Near UHD Quality with UHD Upscaling, but that really won't matter if the TV isn't 4K. Right?

Correct. Hdr is a grading technique that uses expanded colors and you get brighter highlights and better black levels, a very basic explanation.

[ray0414]

Originally Posted by JayEmm

The most popular type of digital camera in the professional arena (give or take) is the ARRI Alexa. It has a chip whose resolution is between 2 and 3.4K, depending on how you like to count it. Recently they introduced a mode where you could get a 4K picture out of the camera, using an internal upscaler.

Netflix (rightly so) saw this as a massive cheat, so have banned people from using that on their shows where 4K is a requirement.

Bayer Patterning is too complex to try and explain in a post here, but long story short your TV has a red,green and a blue sub-pixel for every pixel on the screen (if you've never seen them, just walk up very close to it - easier in the SDTV days!). Cameras can only have each pixel red OR blue OR green - so there's a fair bit of guesswork involved in creating colour and resolution suffers. Hence cameras with three chips (one each of red,green,blue).

I'm happy to answer any questions on the camera side of things, but opening a new topic might be wise

So they've banned the pseudo 4k cameras, and only allow true 4k cameras?

They should put as much effort into their 4k encoding and transmission because most of their 4k looks like crap and is grainy as hell.

[AK65]

Is every movie being made from now on going to be native 4k+ with HDR?

[UFAlien]

Originally Posted by AK65

Is every movie being made from now on going to be native 4k+ with HDR?

No way. 4K adoption in Hollywood is still piss-poor. Even most of the big, major blockbusters are still mastered at 2K; a lot are even still shot in 2K or 1080p.

[AK65]

Originally Posted by UFAlien

No way. 4K adoption in Hollywood is still piss-poor. Even most of the big, major blockbusters are still mastered at 2K; a lot are even still shot in 2K or 1080p.

That sucks. They can borrow my iPhone it can shoot 4K.

[UFAlien]

Originally Posted by AK65

That sucks. They can borrow my iPhone it can shoot 4K.

Yes, but iPhone's 4K looks a lot worse than a professional cinema camera's 2K. There's much more to image quality than the pixel resolution. Phone cameras, compared to cinema cameras, have poor dynamic range and color sampling, rolling shutter artifacts if you turn them too fast, and the tiny sizes of the image sensors limit how much detail you can actually get (no matter how high the pixel count goes).

[Penton-Man]

Originally Posted by Alan A

Interesting article by John C. Dvorak
I think he has a point with the general public, will they even notice or care about HDR?

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2496390,00.asp

John C. claims..."“The next big thing in display technology is HDR (High Dynamic Range). If you thought 3D TVs were a flop, this might be worse. Not because the technology is bad or sketchy, but because this is more confusing than anything we've seen……And to answer the original question as to whether the public can deal with HDR: the answer is no.”

It’s not confusing if you constantly lose detail of the play and players in the shadows from the stadium stands on a bright sunny afternoon (from 2013)….

Originally Posted by Penton-Man

Answer: It’s not just useful to make brighter scenes brighter, think of when you’re watching a match on TV and the player kicks a soccer ball into the deep shadows caused by the surrounding stadium stands….with HDR you’ll be able to clearly see the soccer ball when it's kicked from the sunshine into the shadows and then back again to the sunshine….

Pictorial illustration (from 2014) of SDR's truncation from the same thread….





Finally, concept illustrated via video (2015) in demo (SDR on left, HDR on right) with American football footage, timestamp ~ 2 min 45 sec.…https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydqz...utu.be&t=2m15s

And last I checked, sports remains a big driver of TV sales, be it whether or not viewers understand the science behind the technology.

[Geoff D]

Originally Posted by UFAlien

Yes, but iPhone's 4K looks a lot worse than a professional cinema camera's 2K. There's much more to image quality than the pixel resolution. Phone cameras, compared to cinema cameras, have poor dynamic range and color sampling, rolling shutter artifacts if you turn them too fast, and the tiny sizes of the image sensors limit how much detail you can actually get (no matter how high the pixel count goes).

Indeedy, when I was working in retail the megapixel wars for cameras and phones were always highly amusing to me. What's the point of cramming 20 or 30 million pixels onto a sensor the size of the nail on your little finger? More noise, yay!

[renegadeviking]

Originally Posted by dvdmike

Niche like bluray? Or Niche like nuon?

A lot of people I know have more DVDs than Blurays. I see the trend continuing due to inflation. I cant replace what I have in 480p. I spend it on videogames.

[dvdmike]

Originally Posted by Geoff D

Indeedy, when I was working in retail the megapixel wars for cameras and phones were always highly amusing to me. What's the point of cramming 20 or 30 million pixels onto a sensor the size of the nail on your little finger? More noise, yay!

Plus bitrate

[JayEmm]

This is the problem we have in production. We are being told to "shoot it in 4K" with no real thought as to what that means, and the joke is no cinema has ever rejected a film for being in 2K (which the vast majority are) - but Netflix, a STREAMING CHANNEL, are demanding higher quality than a hollywood studio. It's madness.

There is so much to the picture quality debate beyond simple resolution but basically without something new the TV makers would have a hard time shifting new TVs.

I have seen reference quality 2K and 4K compared in a reference-quality cinema and there is a noticeable difference. HOWEVER I do not think this difference will be visible except on the most extreme of home setups.

Grading to HDR from existing cameras is not difficult, most of the cinema cameras can be easily adapted to the Rec2020 standard. They've been exceeding the capability of Rec709 for nearly 20 years. You can't just make a camera higher res though - not in software anyway, and not in post.

Where it gets really tricky is when you have many different cameras all claiming to be "4K" - as others pointed out it's like having a 40MP sensor in your phone. A 6MP DSLR will wipe the floor with it, PQ wise.

For what it's worth, Kodak once estimated the resolution in their release prints to be around 1.4K - a more accurate measurement being around 1.2K. Great 1080P in my mind suits nearly any cinema except IMAX/special venues.

[dvdmike]

Originally Posted by JayEmm

This is the problem we have in production. We are being told to "shoot it in 4K" with no real thought as to what that means, and the joke is no cinema has ever rejected a film for being in 2K (which the vast majority are) - but Netflix, a STREAMING CHANNEL, are demanding higher quality than a hollywood studio. It's madness.

There is so much to the picture quality debate beyond simple resolution but basically without something new the TV makers would have a hard time shifting new TVs.

I have seen reference quality 2K and 4K compared in a reference-quality cinema and there is a noticeable difference. HOWEVER I do not think this difference will be visible except on the most extreme of home setups.

Grading to HDR from existing cameras is not difficult, most of the cinema cameras can be easily adapted to the Rec2020 standard. They've been exceeding the capability of Rec709 for nearly 20 years. You can't just make a camera higher res though - not in software anyway, and not in post.

Where it gets really tricky is when you have many different cameras all claiming to be "4K" - as others pointed out it's like having a 40MP sensor in your phone. A 6MP DSLR will wipe the floor with it, PQ wise.

For what it's worth, Kodak once estimated the resolution in their release prints to be around 1.4K - a more accurate measurement being around 1.2K. Great 1080P in my mind suits nearly any cinema except IMAX/special venues.

Plus add the black crush in the 90s release prints, but tbh quite a few release prints resolve over 2k in detail mostly older LPP titles

[JayEmm]

Yes, very true. Fortunately from the DVD perspective it is very, very rare to use a release print as a source. Usually only in the case of extremely rare/unusual films or if a print was made of an early/foreign/different version of the film, something like that.

[dvdmike]

Originally Posted by JayEmm

Yes, very true. Fortunately from the DVD perspective it is very, very rare to use a release print as a source. Usually only in the case of extremely rare/unusual films or if a print was made of an early/foreign/different version of the film, something like that.

Indeed, but there are ways to "access" them..
They need to start referencing them when they produce a home master, that is how films were timed and meant to look.
Going back to OCN is great, but that is not how the film was timed to look.
That is how the teal and orange nightmare began, and with HDR is needs to happen even more but won't.

[Geoff D]

Agreed about 1080p being good enough ('specially with no colour subsampling and the wider cinema gamut) but it's nice when it actually is 1080p; someone mentioned it earlier about there being no anamorphic support for 'scope in digital projection, and just recently I released exactly what he meant. I saw Star Wars and Mockingjay in 2K on 'scope screens, the trailers looked excellent but when they embiggened the image to fit the screen for the movie proper I could see the pixel structure and that was from the back row! 858 pixels height vs 1080 may not be earth shatteringly different but that 25% increase might make all the difference. Or perhaps it's just the 2K projectors, if they were changed over for 4K then even with the source still being 2K the increased pixel density helps to make it look less 'digital'.

[dvdmike]

Originally Posted by Geoff D

Agreed about 1080p being good enough ('specially with no colour subsampling and the wider cinema gamut) but it's nice when it actually is 1080p; someone mentioned it earlier about there being no anamorphic support for 'scope in digital projection, and just recently I released exactly what he meant. I saw Star Wars and Mockingjay in 2K on 'scope screens, the trailers looked excellent but when they embiggened the image to fit the screen for the movie proper I could see the pixel structure and that was from the back row! 858 pixels height vs 1080 may not be earth shatteringly different but that 25% increase might make all the difference. Or perhaps it's just the 2K projectors, if they were changed over for 4K then even with the source still being 2K the increased pixel density helps to make it look less 'digital'.

God yes, I can tell when showcase run actual 4k and 2k its mindblowing at that size.
But look at hateful 8, its basically 480p in 2k, I am so disappointed that UHD does not have anamorphic support

[Geoff D]

Nearer 720 lines of res for H8 in 2K by my calculations (2048/2.76 = 742) but yes, it's a shame all that 65mm loveliness is being frittered away like that. I can't get to a 70mm showing so I'm gonna wait for the Blu, there's no point seeing this on a 2K screen for the reasons outlined above.

[dvdmike]

Originally Posted by Geoff D

Nearer 720 lines of res for H8 in 2K by my calculations (2048/2.76 = 742) but yes, it's a shame all that 65mm loveliness is being frittered away like that. I can't get to a 70mm showing so I'm gonna wait for the Blu, there's no point seeing this on a 2K screen for the reasons outlined above.

Same here, if its running end of Jan I may try but its blu for me all the way.