Technical 4k-8k video question (Vidiot?)

Discussion in 'Visual Arts' started by DaleClark, Oct 12, 2018.

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  1. DaleClark

    DaleClark Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    Columbus, Ohio
    8K televisions are being slowly rolled out in the US although 4k content is still not the norm. My question does not apply to new content made for Hi Def.

    At what point (4k, 8k, etc) will the output quality be "peaked" for traditional filmed (70mm, etc) content? Similar to audio-Hi rez, is any quality gains (outside of modern manipulation or added effects, etc) for the filmed content worthwhile on a film (again traditional film) released in 8k over earlier 4k versions? At what point on the resolution scale where one has maxxed out any information from original print?

    I know TV shows that were videotaped are still released in 1080 DVD's. Really no reason for Blu Ray unless more space is needed on the actual disc.
     
  2. will_b_free

    will_b_free Forum Resident

    Location:
    Boulder, CO
    No such thing as 1080 DVDs. DVDs predate the invention of 108o.
     
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  3. Ghostworld

    Ghostworld Senior Member

    Location:
    US
    8K video. Egads. Once trip to Chuck-e-cheese for a birthday party and your hard drive is full.

    You know the downside of all these giant screen tvs and hi-rez is all that old cool stuff looks like crap, which is kinda a shame. Someone here was saying how he still really enjoys his VHS and laser disc collection on his THIRTY-TWO INCH TV. Maybe all progress isn't that great, sometimes. I loved the hell out of my 32" Sony and practically had an orgasm watching 'The Revenant" on it -- but then along came a 70" TV and you think: "How could I have enjoyed that tiny set!"

    But you did.

    Who among us wasn't exceeding proud of their VHS and DVD collection.

    Ignorance CAN be bliss.
     
    Last edited: Oct 12, 2018
  4. 500Homeruns

    500Homeruns Peaceful Punk

    Location:
    Lehigh Valley, PA
    I just want sports in 4K! What is the hold up?
     
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  5. genesim

    genesim Forum Resident

    Location:
    St. Louis
    There is visual gains from 4K of the 16mm Texas Chainsaw Massacre negative.

    The negatives and the prints are millions of silver nitrate molecules that are far smaller than a pixel scan.

    Where does it stop to get all you can...the negatives or print becomes damaged beyond physical scanning ability. Good luck with that where millions of prints are still out there.

    Just so wrong. All I can say is do some research. I can't help opinion, but the data says different.

    Broadcast videotape is beyond DVD space limitation wich is more important then pixel count.
     
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  6. DaleClark

    DaleClark Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    Columbus, Ohio
    I did not know that. Good info. I was hoping for an ELVIS -Aloha From Hawaii Blu-Ray...however, I was given the impression not worth the upgrade since the original video quality does not exceed standard DVD specs.
     
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  7. DaleClark

    DaleClark Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    Columbus, Ohio
    sorry I meant 480
     
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  8. These days, I watch a lot of video content on my iPad! At least it’s a Pro model so bigger screen size but still. I imagine more and more content is watched on portable devices.
     
  9. tmtomh

    tmtomh Forum Resident

    Don't forget that increased resolution becomes meaningless when it exceeds the natural resolution of your eyes at whatever viewing distance you're watching from.

    My understand is that at typical TV sizes and viewing distances, 4k already exceeds the detail level many (most?) people can see. In fact, in a real-life room at a normal viewing distance, not everyone can distinguish 1080p from 4k.

    I think as 8k becomes a thing among higher-end videophiles, the discussion/arguments might start to look a little like the discussions about 48k vs 96k vs 192k audio sample rates.
     
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  10. DaleClark

    DaleClark Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    Columbus, Ohio
    I would say, especially in today's "portable" world, the more important discussion would be how compression effects video quality.
     
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  11. tmtomh

    tmtomh Forum Resident

    I think you make a great point. Even for home video, the high-res disc market is small and shrinking. I would venture that the majority of 4k video - and the majority of HD video - is viewed over streaming devices, where the resolution is rendered effectively moot by the compression. High-res streaming (via Roku etc) is far better than it used to be, but there still are 10s of millions of American consumers with plain-vanilla 25mbps cable-internet connections that, when combined with poorly configured routers, dodgy home wi-fi networks and so on, are still probably getting all kinds of small video artifacts when streaming HD and 4k, which probably makes the actual viewing quality no better than watching, say, totally uncompressed, pristine 720p.
     
  12. genesim

    genesim Forum Resident

    Location:
    St. Louis
    Think in these terms. Just like with film and silver nitrate...you have million (billions?) of aluminium oxide particles that are making up some part of that picture and sound.

    While it is easy to match up resolutions as SD to HD it ignores the fact that we are talking analog that isn't so easily defined in such finite values.

    VHS transfers often look not so good when tranferred to DVD for good reason. Not only are the elements likely damaged in one way or another but we are also talking about the quality of the pixlel equivalent not being uniform as is the case on a DVD where it is one color, one quality etc...

    A given area of a VHS magnetic footprint is all over the place.

    So in short broadcast tape in high quality like 2 inch and above is going to kick the ass of 1/2 inch consumer grade let alone the pitiful 9 gig of DVD compared to a 4K bluray which has up to 100 gig of space.

    For someone like me who has done analog transfers, more space say up to 25 gigs has seen significant improvement and that is just VHS.

    Compression in lots of cases especially DVD mpeg-2 doesn't cut it, and most certainly for anything longer than 15 minutes at maximum analog quality.

    So Elvis Aloha on bluray. Hell yes. Even having the soundtrack alone in HD sound should tell you that there is plenty to gain vs the pitiful Dolby Digital barely better than mp3 quality of most discs.
     
  13. genesim

    genesim Forum Resident

    Location:
    St. Louis
    I agree that increasing exponentially will finally give you a brick wall with the eye...but it has a long way to go.

    According to NASA the human eye can see 576mp wich is a conservative estimate.

    While that are lab technicians who are not scientists that will make claims at far less and fans of those workers that will support no matter what ...the facts are what matters.

    Deductive reasoning tells you that a million optical sensors are going to be a tad more complicated then "4K", but yet like religion it is hard to convince otherwise.

    All I can say is read up. 8K is not enough for 70 mm and let alone what the human eye can actually see.
     
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  14. tmtomh

    tmtomh Forum Resident

    This runs counter to what I have read so far, but I appreciate this and will read further before coming to any conclusion. Thanks!
     
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  15. sberger

    sberger Dream Baby Dream

    I continue to be happy with my Panasonic 50" 1080i/720p from 10+ years ago. I recently had to opportunity to house sit for a week for somebody with a brand new, 70" LG 4K, and while it was beautiful, it in now way made me think about replacing my my Panny.

    Until it dies, that is:shh:
     
  16. genesim

    genesim Forum Resident

    Location:
    St. Louis
    The thing about the eye it is concentrated to our focus. While there is the angle which is 120 degree there is also where we choose to look. So in any moment ot comes down to choice.

    I worked with optical formulation for a while and was amazed by what kind of ability we are dealing with.

    Nothing wrong with that. Plasma? CRT?

    There is arguments there too. The eyes adjust to the information they are given for sure.

    Bigger is not always better (that's not what she said *rim shot*).

    Xxx

    P.S. I don't think the better quality optical media is shrinking....it is just getting back to normal status after the renters have jumped ship.

    I hate how Disney is pushing stream only exclusives, but I feel strong that there is still life left for those that desire quality save state.
     
    Last edited: Oct 12, 2018
  17. Ghostworld

    Ghostworld Senior Member

    Location:
    US

    I'd never heard that figure before, either, so I looked it up and the ARE some caveats.

    The average human retina has five million cone receptors on it. Since the cones are responsible for color vision, you might suppose that this equates to a five-megapixel equivalent for the human eye.

    But there are also a hundred million rods that detect monochrome contrast, which plays an important role in the sharpness of the image you see. And even this 105MP is an underestimate because the eye is not a still camera.

    You have two eyes (no kidding!) and they continually flick around to cover a much larger area than your field of view and the composite image is assembled in the brain – not unlike stitching together a panoramic photo. In good light, you can distinguish two fine lines if they are separated by at least 0.6 arc-minutes (0.01.Degrees).

    This gives an equivalent pixel size of 0.3 arc-minutes. If you take a conservative 120 degrees as your horizontal field of view and 60 degrees in the vertical plane, this translates to …

    576 megapixels of available image data.

    Curiously – as a counterpoint to this – most people cannot distinguish the difference in quality between a 300dpi and a 150dpi photo when printed at 6×4″ when viewed at normal viewing distances.

    So: although the human eye and brain when combined can resolve massive amounts of data, for imaging purposes, a 150dpi output is more than enough to provide adequate data for us to accept the result as photographic quality.

    But don’t forget that women have more cones and men have more rods – I kid you not. Therefore the ladies see colors brighter than gents but can’t see as well when it gets dark.

    The new iPhone camera is 8-megapixels. Meanwhile, Canon is reportedly testing a new DSLR with 75-megapixels. But how many megapixels is the human eye? That is, how many megapixels would an image the size of your field of vision need to be to look normal?

    Well, as Vsauce explains in its latest video, the better question is actually: What is the resolution of the human eye?

    It’s a complicated question, one that must take into account the peculiar anatomy of the eye which is different than the less peculiar engineering of a digital camera. As such, it’s worth watching all ten minutes of the video, explaining not only how we see but also how well. Spoiler: the human eye is 576 megapixels—but really only about 7 megapixels matter.

    The Resolution Of The Human Eye Is 576 Megapixels | Art-Sheep
     
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  18. genesim

    genesim Forum Resident

    Location:
    St. Louis
    The last line of the article is bull. It is all about focus.

    Putting something so complicated as the human eye in megapixels was just an example but the real question is this.

    Not 7 megapixels only really matter but WHICH "megapixels" is the focus?

    Pretty deceptive if you ask me. It is obvious that you oversample so you catch all details that the human eye can hone in on to feed information to the brain to assemble an accurate assessment.

    If one is only doing a less than 4K scan to capture something as detailed as say dual Imax 3D you are not only grossly underscanning the detail of the image, but you are throwing away what the eye can see!
     
  19. ggg71

    ggg71 Forum Resident

    Location:
    Boston, MA
    Were you watching any 4k content? If not, you weren't getting the full benefit. That being said, the difference between Blu-ray (1080) and 4k is not mind-blowing. It's more iterative. The remastering of the source become very important as well. UHD might be a bigger benefit then the increased resolution.

    I would say unless you are a videophile, or have a huge screen screen you are sitting quite close too, it's not critical.
     
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  20. Deesky

    Deesky Forum Resident

    I don't think it's so much about trumping film resolution - 4k is already there (give or take). 8k displays are more about screen real estate, which is why it's used on huge displays.

    Look at it this way. You have a 50" 4k TV but want to upgrade to a 100" screen. If that 100" screen still had a 4k pixel count, the TV would have a lower resolution (or pixels per inch) than the 50" screen. In order to keep the same pixel/inch resolution, the 100" screen needs to have 8k pixels. Effectively, it would be like taking two 50" 4k screens and putting them side by side.
     
  21. genesim

    genesim Forum Resident

    Location:
    St. Louis
    First of all that mindset would render projection useless when it comes to that same thing being thrown up in the theater at 4K (most are still 2K) on a 50 foot screen....let alone consumer level which has no issues with blowing up that image for standard exhibition covering complete walls.

    Film prints will always look better peojected because there is more information there. Why do people question this? It is not like the chemicals involved are a secret. We are most certainly not there yet with the quality of scans and Arris themselves have estimated print quality of a 35mm film to be at 6K ( have actually read 12K which wold not surprise me).

    You think 4K covers 70mm or dual Imax? Yeah right

    4K on a 100 inch screen is nothing. What is key is not pushing more pixels to fill up a screen, but to more accurately represent the source.

    You simply got it backwards and it reminds me of arcade discussions years back where people would debate me about screens being a limiting factor when in truth screens could do far more then what the computer processor could push.

    In many ways it is the same misleading argument. 4K Blurays in all their beauty are nothing compared to the source. They can only approximate and judging from some of the work and the techs putting their spin on it...the results can suck.
     
  22. Deesky

    Deesky Forum Resident

    What 'mindset'? Since when have facts become a mindset. As for rendering projection useless, things are going that way. Samsung is already producing a digital cinema display for theaters using RGB micro LED pixels.

    Man, if I had a dime every time you misrepresented a technical issue, I'd have a lot of dimes!
     
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  23. genesim

    genesim Forum Resident

    Location:
    St. Louis
    Oh dear, I am talking about what has been done for the last 18 years or so. Talk about deflecting. Did you even understand my point?

    Name ONE. I backup anything I have said.
     
  24. SamS

    SamS Forum Legend

    Location:
    Texas
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  25. genesim

    genesim Forum Resident

    Location:
    St. Louis
    In my opinion there is something about live streams that seem more vibtant even though I now there is tons of compression.

    I feel like it is a high speed capture or doing maximum quality on a reel to reel. Live is just that good.
     
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