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

I own a Samsung 49" 4K HDR set that I watch at around 1.40 meters when playing UHD BD's and BD's but for concert DVD's (Van Halen's Live Without A Net or Live Ritght Here Right Now, Phil Collin's Seriously live, some Yngwie Malmsteen's concerts from the 1980's & 1990's, Rainbow live concert from the early 1980's with Joe Lynn Turner) I sit at around 2.50 meters because of the poor picture quality and I'm not only talking about the quality of the source material, MPEG-2 compression artifacts are greatly visible on big, new 4K sets.

 

My collection consist mainly of hundreds of 480p SD DVDs, so the smaller the screen, the better, in order to mak the artifacts you talk about, barely more noticeable on my 32¨than on my older 27¨CRT. Sitting farther away helps too. Good upscaling on the part of the BDP is critical (got an Oppo)

I hear you on the Phil Collins DVD. I don't own the same one, but on my ¨First Farewell Tour¨ the pic bitrate is seriously compromised because they crammed a gazillion videoclips and multi-angle songs on the double DVD9s, which results in artifacting and lack of definition. Oh well.

 

That happens the same with the 1989 Phil Collins DVD I'm talking about, it's a 2 DVD set with multiangle songs with an added problem: analogue video noise from the poor source. It's surprising how bad this concert video looks on DVD and how badly it was shot and postproduced, they even used tube TV cameras with plenty of "tails" and picture print typical from these kind of cameras. And I own the European DVD set in PAL, I'd like to see the same US version of that concert converted to NTSC, it has to be unwatchable.

 

That was kind of the state of the art of 1989. Tube cameras were still very big back then: CCD cameras didn't really start getting arguably good until the 1990s. And then by the time standard-def was perfected, HD came in and the camera manufacturers had to start over. And ten years after that, 4K became the new industry standard, and all the HD cameras basically got thrown out.

It is possible to take old standard-def material and remaster it and process it in such a way to clean it up a bit and make it look better for an HD uprez. But too often, cheap distributors and cable channels just grab with they have, make a digital file of it, and puke it out for modern audiences... and as you've seen, the results are often disappointing.

 

I have an Yngwie Malmsteen concert video shot on video in Moscow in 1988, they clearly used CCD cameras and it looks fine for an analogue composite video of the era, but that Phil Collins concert video looks lousy even on its native PAL form.
The worst concert video I've ever seen? (from the last 30 something years): Madonna's Ciao Italia. Shot to PAL video with tube cameras, postproduction done in the US on NTSC (so the different video takes shot on PAL had to be converted to NTSC) and the European DVD is converted back to PAL and released on a single layer DVD. Absolutely unwatchable.

 

Yes, that would be bad. What they probably should have done was shot it on film, finished it on film, and then it could be easily scanned or converted to different standards or even 2K or 4K. Madonna was a big enough name that a film concert could have done very well with a limited theatrical run.

 

You don't happen to know the location of the dump where they got rid of off those HD cameras, do you?

 

There was a famous story (confirmed by two different people) that once Panasonic got rid of the MII broadcast video format, they trucked out about $20 million' worth of cameras and VTRs to a landfill and smashed all of it with bulldozers, under the supervision of accountants who wrote off the entire expense. But that was standard def, early 1990s.

I have heard that Panavision is sitting on 300 35mm film camera bodies that nobody wants to rent. They were there as of 3 years ago... but it's possible it'd make more financial sense to maybe smash 250 of them, write them down, and then hold on to maybe 50 of the best ones.

Lenses last forever. Cameras... not so much. HD has been through such a revolution over the past 20 years. There were a lot of weird missteps and stupid decisions. I think there was a huge change from SD to HD, a smaller change from HD to 4K, and a much smaller change from 4K to 8K. I'm not convinced 8K is necessary. Average people have a tough time seeing great HD as it is. Great 4K HDR is possible if they go out and buy a 4K Blu-ray player and a 4K set. Some of the streaming is OK, particularly if you have very high-speed bandwidth. But people out in the boonies are gonna struggle.

 

I won't be buying an 8K TV anytime soon, especially given the $60,000 price tag on the TV I was looking at. Heck, I'm still contemplating whether I want to put a projector into my Home Theatre Room while my new house gets built later in the year. The LG OLED C9 Smart TV's look nice though. It's either a 77" TV or the projector...

 

I'm not going 4K unless I run out of working 720p TV sets and all there's out there to replace them is 4K. I've watched 4k and wasn't impressed. Not worth it to me.

 

I have a 55" Sony OLED 4K TV, and I can see a small (only a small one, mind) improvement going from HD blu-rays to 4K UHD discs. Maybe if I had a bigger screen the improvements would be more apparent - but then I'd have to buy a bigger house!

8K? No way.

 

I've had a Sony A1E77 for over a year and love it. The blacks on the OLED's just makes all the colors pop and the contrast and texture of the picture is unreal. I watched a video comparing 4K OLED to 8K QLED and the because of the pixel structure of each format the 4K OLED delivers a higher quality pic even with lower res. The next TV I'd consider buying would be a 16K 120Hz OLED. That will take a while!

 

Yes,I agree,that have been the way to go but it happens that it was broadcasted live on TV at least all around Europe. I watched it live at a hotel room and it was on Televisión Española,RAI, MTV Europe and I think it was also on ZDF and all of them was exactely the same broadcast.
I watched it on RAI as it was the best looking of the bunch of networks broadcasting it live. I remember despite being 33 years ago that it looked like the typical PAL broadcast of the time, the DVD doesn't, it looks clearly converted to NTSC with tons of motion artifacts and video noise. If the separate PAL videotapes were preserved it could be post-produce again in digital video on native PAL os something better, maybe upconverted to HD and get a much much better end result with current video equipment. This won't happen,is well known that Madonna doesn't like to look back at his career, doing remasterings and the likes.

 

You were not impressed Criosho? Come on, then you haven't seen it right. I own a mid range 49" Samsung 4K HDR set that as I said before I sit at around 120/140 meters from it. I also own two UHD BD players, a Sony X-800 and a Panasonic DP420. 4K is not only about more pixels but also about BETTER PIXELS. HDR/Dolby Vision makes a real difference not only because the extended range,more contrast and more brightness than SDR, also 10 or 12 bit color for me makes a great difference compared to SDR either HD or 4K. 8 bit video looks pastel-like, unnatural, like something drawn with crayons, while 10 bit video looks much more natural.
Ask Vidiot about the difference of working with 8 and 10 bit video and how both look.
And I forgot about this, looked at an apropiate distance properly mastered UHD BD's sourced from film look like real film, you compare the same mastering/restoration (Let's say Indepence Day or The Matrix where the BD and the UHD BD are sourced from the same scan and restoration) and the UHD BD looks almost like film,the BD even upconverted to 4K clearly looks like video.

 

Energy saving TVs don’t look as bright as my old Sony Wega or Panasonic plasma. Are they better Energy Saving tvs available?

 

Go the extra 20m and sit at a whole mile ! You maybe meant 1.4 meters ? I sit at 2m from my 32¨when watching movies, and at 2.75 when watching concerts. Guess I'm not much of a videophile, and frankly, considering how many of my concerts were culled from VHS tapes, I'd say I'm better off not having to upscale that much, or view it any closer, because flaws would be way more noticeable

 

Between flaws from VHS and not from VHS some concert videos shot on analogue video look like $h¡t. I bought for 6 Euros the Phil Collins concert shot in Germany in 1990 from the But Seriously Tour. What a piece of crap! First, it was shot to video and using tube cameras,it has plenty of "comet tails" when the did a panning shot with spotlights. As it was shot in Germany, they used PAL video. Postproduction if memory serves me well was done in Los Angeles on NTSC video, so they had to convert from PAL to NTSC the shots used for the final postproduction. Then, for the European release they had to convert the final NTSC video master to PAL. You can figure out how it looks...
On last Black Friday it was dirty cheap on Amazon US so I got the US NTSC DVD along with some other stuff. At least the US DVD is watchable, even if the original source was PAL and they converted to NTSC for post.

 

I never got to getting that one, sadly. Genesis ¨The Mama Tour¨ is another trainwreck.

 

Is that the one from the mid 80's from the Invisible Touch Tour?

 

I have a friend who is a Madonna nut. He got the European PAL DVD of the Ciao Italia from 1987 shot in Torino.
Same case but even worst looking (yes, it's possible!) than the Phil Collins DVD. Shot in Italy to PAL analogue video also using tube cameras but postproduction was done in the US so again, they converted the selected shot to NTSC and did the final post to that system. The European DVD is sourced from the US NTSC master but converted back to PAL. You can imagine the result, dreadful looking video with tons of video noise, motion artifacts, weird looking color and very little detail.
I also got him the NTSC US DVD (we both had multiregion DVD players, with BD I went straight with a US Region A player) and it was more watchable.
But there are also cases when one gets surprised. I own an Yngwie Malmsteen DVD that has two concerts. The DVD is region free, official as it was released by Universal Music Europe and on NTSC system (PAL is dead even in Europe).The first concert was shot to NTSC video in Tokyo, so no problems with system conversions here, but the second concert was shot to video in Leningrad in 1989 and I doubt they brought American or Japanese NTSC video equipment to the still USSR so it was most likely shot to SECAM. Well, the Russian NTSC converted concert video looks great for analogue video from the late 1980's, and it was shot using CCD cameras,not tube ones. But I suspect, as this DVD was released in 2004 or 2005 they did a SECAM (or maybe PAL) to NTSC conversion with modern equipment, that's why it may look so well.

 

No; that one actually looks great. This is is the Mama Tour :



I looked it up on Discogs and it states it's a russian unnoficial (bootleg). A shoddy transfer for sure, but otherwise only available as used VHS or laserdisc. Hell of a gig and has good sound TBH though.

 

It's incredible how many titles are plagued with this same problem. To think nowadays our players do the conversion perfectly, on the fly.

 

I made a mistake; my copy is from an official boxset. Still looks like kerrap.

 

For typical Home use I feel we’ve hit the mark. The vast majority won’t notice more. Heck, I still read silly comments on Amazon that blu-rays are a con. Lol! When everyone is projecting on an entire wall like a movie theater then maybe.

As for saving and preserving original movie negatives digitally, that’s a different story. Keep those K’s coming.

 

I think for home use 8K is overkill,and that is coming from a Techno-nut that's always an early adopter of every format. I was of DVD on September 1998, I was of BD on June 2007 and I was of UHD BD that even preordered the first model that was marketed in Spain, The curved Samsung, I don't remember the reference, on April 2016.
I don't doubt that on a home projector 8K may be noticiable next to 4K, but even today home projectors strugle to display 4K right on a budget, and let's not forget that we're in the middle of a worldwide pandemia that's having devastating effects on global economy, so for some years budget and affordable mid range components will dominate the market.