The world is gonna change

[USLatin]

:huh:

With Red coming true, I read posts saying 1080 won't be the same to our eyes anymore and I agree. I keep thinking about what will happen, and when and to what extent...

Just taking into account that HD TV sets in people's homes are in most part 720 and only "some" 1080, and that those TV sets represent millions and millions in investment, moreover they represent individual investments anywhere from $700 (for a 720p when the consumer is a good bargain shopper) to several thousand $$$ (nicer/bigger/older purchases, so on...) The shift to beyond 1080 broadcasting will take a while (as in a L... O... N... G... while). And the bigh kahuna is the broadcasting capabilities of networks, wich represent an even longer lasting constraint. Immediate will be the benefit of downrezzing beyond 1080 material yielding a far superior image for existing TVs and, the even greater benefit of the pig picture for the big screen, making HD a great (nice, excellent or what you may) option to shooting 35, at a much lower cost opening doors to many filmmakers.
Please note that I understand the huge leap in cost of production from HVX (and others) to Red, and the myriad of features not present on the lower level, and that these are anywhere from impossible to merely hard to answer to subjects. However if anyone else is interested by this and would care to comment I'd be very interested.

In your opinion:

a. Timeline. Does it seem safe to say that beyond 1080 TV broadcasting will only begin to appear at least 5 years from now? Anyone have an educated projection?

b. Will the cost-of-production to quality of Red be such that the cost-of-production to quality of the HVX and all other lower price HD cameras (with lenses and so forth) be skipped by a large amount of productions? Any educated opinions or plain guess-timations as to this amount or factors to be considered when trying to estimate this?

 

[Jim Arthurs]

a. Timeline. Does it seem safe to say that beyond 1080 TV broadcasting will only begin to appear at least 5 years from now? Anyone have an educated projection?

1080 for broadcast will be with us for a long, long, time. You will have grandchildren before we change broadcast specs again. Heck, there are plenty stations that haven't even gone STEREO, let alone HD or digital.

I disagree that 1080 looks tepid to the eyes... what looks mediocre is the resolution starved, overly compressed "Goop" marketed as 1080 HD... from the massive compression of Dish Network and cable providers, to the much less than full raster cameras we've all adopted. Just walk into a Best Buy or Circuit City and compare what you see on their HDTV's to a trip to NAB or IBC.

Anyone who's seen full raster 1080 projected as such will be very pleased, and that's one of the things RED will do very, very well.

 

[Haakon]

a. Timeline. Does it seem safe to say that beyond 1080 TV broadcasting will only begin to appear at least 5 years from now? Anyone have an educated projection?

Beyond 1080 broadcasting? I can't see that happening for a long time... way more than five years down the road. We've just barely started getting into HD for broadcast; changing that infrastructure would be a huge undertaking. I think you're more than fine shooting in 1080 if your end output will be television.

 

[bakalaj]

a. Timeline. Does it seem safe to say that beyond 1080 TV broadcasting will only begin to appear at least 5 years from now? Anyone have an educated projection?

I think that you are MORE than safe here. It's more like 10+ years, IMHO

b. Will the cost-of-production to quality of Red be such that the cost-of-production to quality of the HVX and all other lower price HD cameras (with lenses and so forth) be skipped by a large amount of productions? Any educated opinions or plain guess-timations as to this amount or factors to be considered when trying to estimate this?

Not quite sure what you mean. If you are wondering whether the improvement of quality with the Red system over the "lower price HD cameras" is significant enough to make it worth a the price jump, than I would say - ABSOLUTELY! The better the acquisition, the better the final results (even on our current NTSC cable).

However, if we take the overall system, than other considerations come to play, most notably, the resulting workflow. Everyone needs to answer this by themselves. One example might be shooting for clients (such as TV news, corporate, etc.) - where one might need the ability to hand over a tape to the client at the end of the day and go home. With RED, there are a few extra steps and pieces of equipment needed. For now, anyway. So, for someone who is mostly a shooter for hire, RED may not be the right camera at this point, whereas a tape-based DVCPRO HD or HDCAM might. Any post facility can deal with either. On the other hand, for a complete facility where you control your workflow and deliver the client a finished product, it becomes a simple question of putting all the required pieces together.

All of these considerations will be a thing of past in a few years, when hard drive price/capacity ratios change more favorable and most post facilities will become fully equipped to deal with hard-drive, file-based media.

In the meantime, the big question remains: if one buys a 'current' tape-based camera, one needs to be able to amortize it within a relatively short time period. Typically some 3-5 years max. As in that time, current formats and cameras will likely start being obsolete. However, if RED renders (as RED claims) obsolescence obsolete, then after getting through the first few years of post-production workflow blues and perhaps some lost jobs because clients' inabilities to deal with Red's files, you just might have a camera that's still good to go and possibly also still keeping its re-sale value.

Frankly, I am not sure that it will quite happen this way. I think that in a couple of years (or sooner), there will be REDTWO with some very significant improvements and many of us will be wondering why we didn't wait for the second (third...etc.) generation. Maybe I sound pessimistic but the way technology keeps improving is not going to change much, if anything, it will accelerate.

 

[Haakon]

Hehe, great minds think alike Jim (and apparently, at the exact same time!) I must say, I wholeheartedly agree with this:

I disagree that 1080 looks tepid to the eyes... what looks mediocre is the resolution starved, overly compressed "Goop" marketed as 1080 HD... from the massive compression of Dish Network and cable providers, to the much less than full raster cameras we've all adopted. Just walk into a Best Buy or Circuit City and compare what you see on their HDTV's to a trip to NAB or IBC.

Anyone who's seen full raster 1080 projected as such will be very pleased, and that's one of the things RED will do very, very well.

 

[USLatin]

Ok, so I understand better now... The timeline for 1080 to 4k will be more like black & white to color TV...

by the way I don't think 1080 looks tepid or bad at all, even if I worked with 4k and then had to shoot something of mine with the HVX @ 1080 I'd still be proud and happy with it, just not as much after being exposed to the added... you get it

 

[ThomSteinhoff]

It think it will be a very long time before we see anything greater than 1080 at home as the infrustructure supporting 1080 is barely getting off the ground as it is (blue ray, HD) let alone becoming widely adopted.

4K is for theatrical distribution and that is where it will rock. the 1080 we pull from it will look amazing on home theater TVs and everyone will be happy.

I think that even if competition drives up the pixel counts on High end LCDs and plasmas, the input will still be maxed at 1080p--they will just use smooth scaling to give a sharper picture.

Mass migration to a new technology usually means there is a dramatic and compelling reason to switch (B&W to color, Vinal to CD, VHS to DVD). A lot of people now are wondering if even HD DVD's are going to be widely adopted as Widescreen SD DVD, with the incredible scalers in todays high end TVs, looks pretty amazing to most people. Look at the failure of HDCD's and the success of iPods: Quality matters to a point--but "is it good enough for me" is the question most people ask and to most people the iPods sound just great and combined with iTunes it is a no brainer. To most audiofiles, iTunes quality is horrendous--but to most users--it is plenty.

A high bitrate, widescreen, DVD on a 60" Sony SXRD television looks pretty stunning. Sure, HD broadcast or HDDVD looks better, but to most peoples eyes--it is all they would ever need.

 

[Jim Arthurs]

by the way I don't think 1080 looks tepid or bad at all, even if I worked with 4k and then had to shoot something of mine with the HVX @ 1080 I'd still be proud and happy with it, just not as much after being exposed to the added... you get it

Yes, but remember, while the HVX is outputting a 1080 signal, it's NOT filling that signal with all possible detail, not even close, heck, it's not even completely filling 1280 by 1080 - the limit of DVCPRO HD... basically, with all of the consumer/prosumer cameras you haven't even SEEN 1080 as it can be...

 

[Jarred Land]

True 1080 is pretty impressive.. Even blueray at 1080p compressed to crap with noise on a 1080 LCD looks very good. You guys are right in saying that 1080p will be around for at least 5 years. Past that though.. i can see 2k and 4k starting to enter the consumer space.... just like the step from SD to HD has happened in the consumer world.


But i gotta say.. ive been lucky enough to be working with 4k images for the last 6 months on almost a daily basis... and going back to a 1080 timeline every once in awhile kinda hurts.. There is something about opening up a frame on a 30" apple cinema display and being forced to scroll to see the whole image that is just mesmerizing.

 

[ThomSteinhoff]

But i gotta say.. ive been lucky enough to be working with 4k images for the last 6 months on almost a daily basis... and going back to a 1080 timeline every once in awhile kinda hurts.. There is something about opening up a frame on a 30" apple cinema display and being forced to scroll to see the whole image that is just mesmerizing.

You're killing us, Jarred, killing us. I, for one, can't wait.

 

[Jarred Land]

you dont need to wait for long Thom

 

[filmmaker1977]

"ive been lucky enough to be working with 4k images for the last 6 months on almost a daily basis... and going back to a 1080 timeline every once in awhile kinda hurts.."

hey gang, now you can figure my love for 4k editing at home.. eheh

 

[Tom Lowe]

I have to disagree with most people here. I think 4K will come sooner than 10 years from now. One thing that nobody has mentioned yet is: Computers. People are beginning to quickly drift away from cable TV, toward their computers. I personally tend to watch movies on my computer more often these days than on my TV. I love my computer and huge flat-screen monitor. A 30" Dell or Apple display will put any TV to shame in terms of resolution.

My computer has 7.1 surround, which I don't have set up in the living room. And I can download content very quickly. In the near future we will see the melding of TVs and computers, and believe me, computers can drive 2K+ displays without breaking a sweat. If you can buy a 2.5K monitor now for $1,300, how long before 3K and 4K LCD monitors pop up for computers? If we could play Battlefield 2142 at 4K, don't you think people would be all over it? Gamers throw truckloads of money into their systems.

4K is not far away my friends.

 

[Homersapien]

I think 4k is quite far off, a system like yours is considered high end computer Tom and probably will be for quite a while, certainly not enough to encourage production companies to reproduce their work in a larger format to cater for you and others with such a setup. Increasing the size of resolution won't happen because of the overheads across the entire gamut of film and television production, from those that make the films or programmes to those who make the televisions or distribute it. The fact is though that eventually and I would say in a minimum of ten years there will be a better broadcast resolution introduced purely so that the studios can rerelease all of their old movies on a new format and reep more cash out of their archives!

That said however the beauty of RedOne is that people from all levels of production will be creating 4k content, that when that time comes, will unlike the HD stuff being shot today be able to handle the leap to the new high resolution. All good for RedOne owners down the road then

 

[Tom Lowe]

But even the term "broadcast" is up for debate in the future. Downloading might be a form of broadcast.

If people have 4K monitors for gaming and such, they will have an insatiable craving to see movies in 4K. Maybe traditional cable TV outlets won't be able to supply 4K movies soon, but downloads could. We already see that 4K can be nicely compressed to 25MBps, so 4K movies could easily be downloaded or bought on something similar to HD DVDs.

 

[Haakon]

We already see that 4K can be nicely compressed to 25MBps, so 4K movies could easily be downloaded or bought on something similar to HD DVDs.

25MB per second = 100MB per 4 seconds = 1GB per 40 seconds. So that means 10 minutes of 4K would fit on a single layer HD DVD at that quality. They're going to have to compress it a whole heck of a lot more to fit a 2 hour movie (with no extras) onto one disc at that rate.

Believe me, I'd love to see a 4K standard in people's homes, but it's just not going to happen for a while. We're barely getting 1080 in our homes and the switch from SD to HD took what, 60 years? People shelling out top dollar for a plasma/LCD/LcoS TVs today aren't going to turn around and spend even more on a 4K set in a few years. As far as computers are concerned, even the huge 30" Apple cinema displays are a fourth of the resolution that you'd need for 4K. Where I think 4K is really going to shine is a) as an acquisition format for great projection in theaters, and b) a fantastic way to get amazing looking 1080 for HD DVD/Blu-ray that you can't get with any sub-1080 camera. RED is going to be a hell of a powerhouse as far as acquisition is concerned. As far as 4K at home though... I just don't see it happening that soon. You need a pretty huge screen to really take advantage of 4K, too. True 1080p on a good ~40" set looks amazing AFAIC.

I'm not gonna complain if I am proved wrong, however.

 

[im.thatoneguy]

I think HD is a hard sale to 90% of the population already. 4K is going to be a rich boy's toy for many years.

Think: big screen TV in the late 80s.

 

[USLatin]

I think Tom is right in that more and more people are adding computers to their entertainment systems instead of just a Tivo.
How long till a good entertainment computer will be trully affordable for most so that it becomes the standard is a good question to ask then. Let's throw some rough estimates up in the air and how about starting off by looking at what things might cost in let's say three years:
_Duos will be super affordable
_10G of RAM will be relatively free
_Quadros will be about $250 (?)
_5TB HDDs should be less than $500
_42 inch 2k LCDs might be...??? not much?

Stop laughing and ignore my numbers now and for a second just contemplate that at the actual rate it will be possible make affordable hardware for 2k content in "a few".

Also, dual-layer HD DVD/BlueRays will have to deliver what they said they would be able to end up delivering with this technology. But that about makes it for enough to fit 2k features, right? Microsoft will have their media center in many homes in just a year or two and people will see how intuitive and non-scary a multimedia interface can be, competitors might have their own.
So double that and make it six years, so it can get to being trully affordable for most, and ad one or two more to allow other people to catch on and want one, and be able to spare the cash, and we'd be already looking up to see 4k with nothing in between. So it might not be broadcasting but downloading, DVDs and gaming first.
Again, I'm just pulling numbers from the back of my head and they're most likely be way off, but that's not the point... I am daydreaming a bit, but the truth is that it will happen... and kinda like this... but probably not (as in NOT) in this time-line.

 

[Rob Lohman]

Here in Holland (Europe) most people are still connected to analog SD TV signals (myself included). Lots of people are moving to digital cable these days, but 99% of that is still SD. No idea if that 1% is 720/1080i/1080p.

So we still have to (really) start the HD stuff here. We do have something like 6 theaters with *a* digital projection room. A couple of 1K and some 2K projectors.

I'm hoping that'll all change soon. Won't be holding my breath though. The move to HD-DVD/Blu-Ray/something else is probably sooner than HDTV.

So I'm betting 720p/1080i/1080p is gonna stay with us for a long time to come...

 

[AuditoryVisuals]

SD has been around since the 1920's. When we switched to digital television (fairly recently) we used moderate compression ratios. When people wanted HD, we pushed it in with brutal compression ratios. HD took a while to get in to more common use, since the average TV set costed $2000+ and broadcast equipment was way more than SD broadcast equipment. It even took a while for television it's self to come along.

Once we find a cheaper way to make all of this stuff, you won't be able to keep up with it. I think that 4K may only be a small step up the road, only here for a few years untill we leap to UHD.