The world is gonna change

folks, don´t forget the "good enough" factor.

1080p is good enough for blockbuster movies, the audiences go happily into sin city, zodiac, sky captain, miami vice, click, flyboys, starwars, apocalypto, superman etc.

same with 2K, almost -any- blockbuster of the recnet production years who had a di is 2K.

The 4K DIs are rare and the 4K process didn´t attract the people additionally.

it is already good enough for the cinemas, which often anyhow do not show you more than ~700-800 lines of measured reesolution, be 35mm, be 2k.

4K is a blessing. for post, for grading for to many reason to mention them all. it simply gives you another degree of freedom for selecting the image, scaling it up, remove atrtefacts, pull better keys, get better tracking results etc pp (and to justify the pimped workstation you NEED to you boss).

but as delivery format, it is overkill as of now and for years to come.

same with SACD etc. Their 24bit/96khz are better than the CDs 16/44.
but what do people buy? MP3 players ala ipod (datareduced), DVD-sourroundsets (datareduced) instead.

same with 65mm vs 35mm.

Once a technical system surpasses the human cognitive limits, its even better bigger technological brother has a hard time.

riule of thumb:

consumer: the good is the worst enemy of the better.
production: the better is the worst enemy of the good.
 
Here in Switzerland, digital TV hasn't been realy set up....so people (I do NOT have TV) are still looking to "Hertz TV", but compare to 20 years ago the quality is really better (no more "snow falls").
TNT (Digital TV) is going to be implemented soon, and it is a really a need as there is no more room for new channels on the Hertz band. But TNT does not means that it is infinite band, and HD programs take more room than SD, therefore there is programs that will stay in the SD format and only certain will go HD.

I think that VOD, TV through VHDSL (very high DSL) will make it's way into home entertainment, and possibly in 4k format.... not sure when...

One thing to take into consideration is that consumer technics are based on compromise and are oftenly back compatible... and sometimes it is for the worst.
 
no need for 4k at home on TV. the human eye can't see it on a small screen. Anyone who has seen HDCAM on a nice big ikegami monitor knows all we really need is high quality 1080p at home (not the crappola is broadcast or available in home tv now). Obviously if that is captured in 4k originally it will be even better, but why clog up airwaves with overkill.
 
"Even blueray at 1080p compressed to crap with noise on a 1080 LCD looks very good." - um, not the ones I've seen which look diabolical. Looks awful to me :-)

Seriously, will "broadcast" television even ride out the intro of HD? I'd hope that everyone would buy specialist programming, on subscription, over the internet, direct from a programme producer.

Now if that broadcaster has very high quality standards, pays for quality productions, insists that their independent producers only shoot with a RED camera for instance, (tongue in cheek there), broadcasters may have a continuiing role.

There's always been a market for people who want quality in art, music, movies etc. They don't have a product they can buy. DVD is over-compress and SD, HD-DVD and Blu-Ray (can you say Blurr(a)y) don't remotely do justice to the source material - can you say over-sharpened to helll??

Graeme
 
Graeme_Nattress said:
"Even blueray at 1080p compressed to crap with noise on a 1080 LCD looks very good." - um, not the ones I've seen which look diabolical. Looks awful to me :-)

DVD is over-compress and SD, HD-DVD and Blu-Ray (can you say Blurr(a)y) don't remotely do justice to the source material - can you say over-sharpened to helll??

Graeme

It seems that a 1080 monitor would be able to give a decent result, some 1080 movies projected in theaters have looked OK to me.

But when I have been to conventions seeing the big companies show up with the new top HD screens and HD DVD and Blue-Ray players, it doesn't look as good as I expected. Is it the monitors not using the full resolution, is it the limitation of the amount of data on the disc, is it the way it is compressed, or is it sharpened before it gets compressed? Probably it is a combination of all or some of the above and will get better.
 
Well, I'm sure more care is taken over 1080 movies for cinema use, but they still think it's acceptable to aggressively process, noise reduce and sharpen movies for home disc use. That's not accecptable to me. It's like engineering a CD to only sound good when ripped to an iPod, ruining the sound for listening on a decent hifi!
 
Graeme_Nattress said:
It's like engineering a CD to only sound good when ripped to an iPod, ruining the sound for listening on a decent hifi!

Sadly that's the way things often seem to go. It's like the Optimod used on radio broadcasts to compress all the dynamic range out of music so it sounds ok in a car. I never worked out why they didn't build compressors into car stereos to do that, so that music could be broadcast as recorded.

Nick
 
Maybe the blessing in this is that it will still be amazing to go to the movies and watch a crisp clean 4K projection,
 
I think the new super secret, widely rumored, badly photographed with a cell phone, Mac 60" 4K monitor will be stunning. A lot of us will buy it, push our 4K images on it and fall on the floor and call everyone we know to see the most amazing thing they have ever seen.

We'll watch our own movies on it with tears in our eyes, but aside from swapping hard drives and watching each other's movies--no one is going to push content in 4K until enough people have it to justify pushing it--and even then distribution will resist (Youtube went from zero to billions in value in a widescreen, HD world with 320x240, 15 fps 4x3, compressed as hell, business model and it worked, apple has a download model in less than SD, oversharpened like hell and it worked.)

But for those of us with 7.1 surround watching around our 60" Mac LCD, any high bit 1080p image put through high quality scalers will look breathtaking to even the closest inspection.

I think laguun is right...

laguun said:
4K is a blessing. for post, for grading for to many reason to mention them all. it simply gives you another degree of freedom for selecting the image, scaling it up, remove atrtefacts, pull better keys, get better tracking results etc pp (and to justify the pimped workstation you NEED to you boss).

But I also think agwah is right...

agwah said:
Maybe the blessing in this is that it will still be amazing to go to the movies and watch a crisp clean 4K projection

Lets save the magic for movie theaters to have people enjoy our movies the way we intended them to--not stuck at home with a laptop on their lap, bluetooth headset alway ringing and kids always screaming.
 
Won't there be a technology that automatically down-rezzes the 4K disks (don't know what those disks will be yet, but they're surely coming) to whatever resolution you're viewing on? So if you have a 1080p TV then you view the 4K disk at that resolution...but if you have a 4K TV then you get full benefit. Is this technologically feasible (and maybe the only practical solution to the very wide array of TV's and monitors that will be stuck in homes for then next 20 years)?
 
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This Dell 30" monitor is 2560x1600, and it's fairly cheap. How long before Dell and Apple bust out the 4K monitors? A couple years, max, IMHO. The gaming industry alone will drive this.

4K is coming, my friends.
 
sean90291 said:
Won't there be a technology that automatically down-rezzes the 4K disks (don't know what those disks will be yet, but they're surely coming) to whatever resolution you're viewing on? So if you have a 1080p TV then you view the 4K disk at that resolution...but if you have a 4K TV then you get full benefit. Is this technologically feasible (and maybe the only practical solution to the very wide array of TV's and monitors that will be stuck in homes for then next 20 years)?

Well, 2K digital cinema projectors are required to be able to extract a 2K image from a 4K file. This kind of thing is easy with wavelet compression. Is it possible to have wavelet-based interframe compression though? You'd want to use interframe compression for a consumer distribution format.

I don't think this will be a major concern either way, though. You can just have both 4K and 1080p versions of the movie on the disc. Holographic discs will have the space for it. Or maybe physical media will be dead by then; just offer two versions of the download.
 
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