Audio only recording, silent B&W images, B&W + sound, color + sound, getting closer and closer to real-life. Is there something philosophically deeper going on? What happens when you see someone's face in person, live?
CES 2019: ‘8K Is Getting Real’
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Audio only recording, silent B&W images, B&W + sound, color + sound, getting closer and closer to real-life. Is there something philosophically deeper going on? What happens when you see someone's face in person, live?
Answer: You see the artifice. The suspension of disbelief becomes more difficult and ultimately it is our participation in the story which is disturbed.
At some point you have to blur reality in order to make room for the fantasy which is part of the magic of cinema.
So sorry, I don't want to see the makeup artist's powder on Gandalf's face. I want to see a wizard instead.
Not only is 8K not necessary, but it can become an impediment to visual storytelling.
I find this happening more and more often with hi-res imaging.
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joema
Active member
...I periodically visit the Magnolia section in BestBuy to see the latest and greatest top of the line TVs. In 2018 there's still nothing that looks compelling enough to replace the old Sony XBR5. I did find that QLED looks better than the OLEDs (other than blacks; there's a lot more to color/image than blacks/contrast)...What the market really needs is accurate AUTO COLOR CALIBRATION, not more pixels. Pretty much every AV enthusiast has to tweak their TV (or hire an expert) when they get home (including turning off motion smoothing). TVs should display what the content creator intended, and thus extra metadata could be included with the video frames ...TVs should also include a camera/color-sensor to accurately adjust color based on ambient lighting. This would also make the carnival of random color at the TV store be a thing of the past. A CALIBRATED COLOR STANDARD or CCS would be cool. Which brings us to calibrated color-accurate cameras: someday....
I strongly agree. I recently got a 65" LG C8 OLED TV and the big advantage is on 4k material, esp HDR-encoded Blu Ray. Unfortunately there is relatively little 4k material. Neither over the air nor cable companies deliver 4k, in fact Comcast has cut theirs back to 720p. NetFlix has some 4k content but mostly for their own productions. Compared to DVD or 1080p Blu-Ray, there is limited 4k content on optical discs. Some of the disc-based 4k is a poor-quality transfer that doesn't improve over 1080p Blu-Ray. The few really good items (like Blue Planet II) show the potential. Those are very impressive, really breathtaking. Even some Youtube vloggers are distributing 4k which looks pretty good. With a broadband connection, the new "smart" TVs can stream that directly. It's amazing that some of it looks technically better than OTA or cable; so much for "broadcast quality".
As a documentary filmmaker my team has shot only 4k for two years, and it's nice to preview that on a big 4k OLED screen. I agree the OLED advantage doesn't seem that clear cut. I personally like the deep blacks and off-axis capability but QLED is getting better. QLED is better in a high brightness viewing environment.
Your point about consumer calibration vs 8k is very valid. I do color correction on our docs, yet the TV setup confused even me. It's actually worse than it formerly was with HD. I first tried switching the LG through my Denon AV receiver, but it didn't support HDMI 2.x. There was no error, just 4k Blu-Rays looked bad. Finally I directly connected the player to the TV, they did the HDR handshake and it looked much better. In addition you have many deeply-nested color profile settings in the TV. There are similar deeply-nested color and gamma settings in a 4k player, and those interact with the TV settings. I thought if this confuses me, how do regular consumers figure this out? The answer is most of them probably don't. I'm going to have it ISF calibrated, but how many people do that?
As you said there needs to be some kind of end-to-end automated or semi-automated color calibration system. That would overall give many consumers a better experience than an equally non-calibrated 8k TV. However implementing such a standard requires a lot more than TV design -- it would involve new metadata standards from capture through the entire playback chain, inc'l mastering, encoding and decoding standards for how those are used, etc.
Thomas Smet
Veteran
Resolution is like retina on phones. At a certain point no matter how hard you try to look you can no longer see the extra detail. When we moved from 1x to 2x density phones the change was noticeable. The move from 2x to 3x not so much. Moving from 3x to 4x density phone is almost worthless.
Same with TVs. Having a 27” iMac in 2.5k vs 5k can sometimes be noticeable. Going to 10k will be completely worthless. Same with 4k computer monitors. The move from HD to 4k computer monitors did add a certain level of realistic detail but going beyond that when sitting inches away from the screen is going to be completely pointless. I don’t need a 8k computer monitor let alone a 8k TV which is literally just throwing away money. Most professional photos don’t even have that much detail in them.
There comes a point where we as consumers need to send a message to manufacturers to stop screwing with us. I know absolutely no consumers asking for this. They want cheaper TVs that don’t break with good color, adapt well to room conditions and sound good. Maybe manufacturers should actually attempt to put great speakers in these TVs to use as a selling point. Consumers are more to buy a new Tv if it has amazing sound built in vs having to buy and hook up a bunch of other stuff. Make TVs easier to use and have faster processing operations. I miss the old days when I switched a channel on an old tube TV that the channel changed instantly. I despise waiting every time I click a button on the remote control like the processor in the TV is from a TI-85 calculator. How about focusing on the user experience of the TVs to make people actually want to use them again.
Same with TVs. Having a 27” iMac in 2.5k vs 5k can sometimes be noticeable. Going to 10k will be completely worthless. Same with 4k computer monitors. The move from HD to 4k computer monitors did add a certain level of realistic detail but going beyond that when sitting inches away from the screen is going to be completely pointless. I don’t need a 8k computer monitor let alone a 8k TV which is literally just throwing away money. Most professional photos don’t even have that much detail in them.
There comes a point where we as consumers need to send a message to manufacturers to stop screwing with us. I know absolutely no consumers asking for this. They want cheaper TVs that don’t break with good color, adapt well to room conditions and sound good. Maybe manufacturers should actually attempt to put great speakers in these TVs to use as a selling point. Consumers are more to buy a new Tv if it has amazing sound built in vs having to buy and hook up a bunch of other stuff. Make TVs easier to use and have faster processing operations. I miss the old days when I switched a channel on an old tube TV that the channel changed instantly. I despise waiting every time I click a button on the remote control like the processor in the TV is from a TI-85 calculator. How about focusing on the user experience of the TVs to make people actually want to use them again.
Mitch Gross
Veteran
The point of 8K is not to see 8K. It is to no longer see resolution.
Remember in the 90s and early 2000s when computer ads all listed the clock speed of the processors? 300Mhz! After a few years the devices evolved enough that no one bothered anymore. You could look it up on a spec sheet but it was no longer the marketing point, because everything was fast enough that no one really thought about clocking speed anymore.
The same is true for resolution. I recall discussing this with a prominent lens manufacturer. Sensors would resolve higer, then lenses would perform better, and they kept leapfrogging one another. "When will it end?" I was asked. It will end when the numbers are so high that it doesn't matter anymore.
8K is the point when it doesn't matter anymore. Both conscious and subconscious acceptance of additional spatial information is surpassed by 8K, and that's how it should be. Take resolution out of the equation. That's the point.
Be my guest to use all the lens diffusion you want.
Remember in the 90s and early 2000s when computer ads all listed the clock speed of the processors? 300Mhz! After a few years the devices evolved enough that no one bothered anymore. You could look it up on a spec sheet but it was no longer the marketing point, because everything was fast enough that no one really thought about clocking speed anymore.
The same is true for resolution. I recall discussing this with a prominent lens manufacturer. Sensors would resolve higer, then lenses would perform better, and they kept leapfrogging one another. "When will it end?" I was asked. It will end when the numbers are so high that it doesn't matter anymore.
8K is the point when it doesn't matter anymore. Both conscious and subconscious acceptance of additional spatial information is surpassed by 8K, and that's how it should be. Take resolution out of the equation. That's the point.
Be my guest to use all the lens diffusion you want.
Cary Knoop
Veteran
Well if Samsung is reading this and they have an extra 100+ inch 8K TV they can't get rid off, I'll take it and save them the cost of from throwing it away!
But the other question is when are consumers going to ask certain filmmakers to get off their "2K is enough and only 24p is right" high horse?
Does that include a picture of raiding FBI agents of consumers who dare to use "disallowed" motion smoothing by hacking their TVs?
Seriously why do some people get so upset about the industry introducing better technology?
Is it perhaps because they don't want to admit they are behind the technology curve by still recording 2K?
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cpreston
Veteran
At some point, it seems obvious the standard for resolution and frame rate for video are going to be that it exceeds the human visual ability for the delivery medium. I still notice resolution jumps from 2K to 4K on my desk computer, so I am guessing that we haven't quite reached the resolution point. The hang up is still processing power, storage, and data transmission. The hang up on high frame rate will likely end when Gen Z starts controlling video production.
Eric Coughlin
Veteran
I theorize evolution at work here. People keep saying how the human eye can’t notice a difference in 4K, 8K, etc., but it used to be that people couldn’t notice a difference between 1080 and 480. But now we can. We’re evolving, through the processs of natural selection those with inferior eye sight are being killed off or unable to breed to reproduce more half blind children. It’s only a matter of time before a pure race of eyes that can discern 16K rules the planet. Buy 16K today and train your eyes for tomorrow.
Heil Hitler!
Heil Hitler!
Remember the good old days back on the (now defunct) Cinema5D forum with the 5D Mark III and soft 1080p video! Everyone complained it was too soft/lacked detail, lol. Now cameras + displays have too much detail! Let's go to the limit: a "retina" quality capture and render pipeline. We can see detail as in real life. What can we do re: cheap looking settings and bad make up / lighting? We can use diffusion filters on cameras, and even better perform any desired diffusion/softening/re-lighting in post. Basic diffusion is super easy in any NLE without needing a plugin (just copy the video track, blur the top track and experiment with opacity and blend mode). There's also plugins that do fancier things.
It's really up to the artist to decide what the final look will be, regardless of resolution. I'm currently working on a VR game which uses a cellphone as the display. I'm writing code in low-level Metal to provide the most flexibility and once I got the basic system running with a $30 headset (optics and cell phone mount for the iPhone-X) I found the resolution was a bit low (still higher than an Oculus or Vive (but not the Vive Pro)). I needed to increase resolution, and added the necessary code to render the scene at much higher resolution then downsample to the native OLED display (a technique called multi-sampling anti-aliasing (MSAA)). This massively improved the image quality by removing aliasing artifacts, even though the OLED panel resolution was not increased. The net effect was real-time computer generated footage that looks much more like a real camera capturing reality as aliasing artifacts were removed. This same concept applies to the 8K upsampling happening with the new 8K TVs. By upsampling SD, HD, and 4K to 8K "retina", aliasing artifacts are removed, resulting in a more life-like image. "Over detail" of sets/lighting/actors can be dealt with using diffusion/post-fx to provide the best of both worlds!
Or use the Canon 5D Mark III with 1080p displays and embrace the blur
The cool thing about the new Samsung 8K TVs is the AI upscaling. So you don't need 8K content and your 720p and up gets a performance boost in visual quality. It's probably hard to see much difference between native 8K and 4K AI upscaled.
Calibration: perhaps they've been saving this for last? It requires cooperation at many levels in the industry, from capture to display. Seeing color interaction in the real world between devices (cameras to displays) makes one think folks behind the standards are expressing ADD because it really doesn't work very well at this point: not very accurate color reproduction across devices (perhaps Apple comes the closest since they control everything in-house, re: phones, laptops, and iMacs). Having to hire someone to do ISF calibration is nuts! (I purchased the X-Rite i1Display Pro for PC & Mac. Works OK but sometimes things break and color goes off the rails (over time, all by itself- something in the OS). Shouldn't be this hard to get accurate color in 2018!).
OLED blacks and off-axis is nice, however I really liked the more realistic QLED color (from demos seen so far). I'm waiting for the 'full quantum dot' TVs; perhaps with retina/8K before replacing the ancient Sony XBR5 52".
I'm a fan of the now ancient Showscan 60Hz film. It didn't make it as a cinema standard, but found use in location-based entertainment venues as the display tech for motion platforms and super realistic 'stage shows'. 24Hz is an unreality rate that is a useful artistic tool for storytelling. If a consumer who understands what they are doing and wants to change the effective frame rate, that's cool, however it would be useful for content to be played back as intended by the artist. Seeing a dramatic film at 24 fps will have a very different emotional effect (for most people) than at higher frame rates.
Suspension of disbelief is related to Uncanny Valley: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley , and 24Hz/fps helps keep things away from the valley (on the side of less realism). As the frame rate approaches 'reality', the quality must go up significantly, else there's a negative emotional reaction (Uncanny Valley effect).
dmitrizigany
Veteran
I’m looking to get a TV for the first time since they got flat screens
But seems all with the newer technology are 55” and up??? Don’t have space for anything much bigger than 43”... (and 8K probably is wasted on that size)
But seems all with the newer technology are 55” and up??? Don’t have space for anything much bigger than 43”... (and 8K probably is wasted on that size)
combatentropy
Veteran
Couch-Potato Joe says his HDTV is barely sharper than his old SDTV. Colorist Delores says her 4K monitor is barely enough. Both are right.
Pixel count is meaningless without a context of angle of view. Joe's 55" TV is 12 feet away, covering less than 20 degrees of his horizontal field of view. Delores's monitor is right on her desk, and sometimes she leans forward to squint at a corner of the screen. Even though it's only 27", when she gets that close it covers 60 degrees of her angle of view. So her screen is 1/4 the area of Joe's, but it covers 9 times the area in her retina. Naturally she's going to want greater pixels.
The human eye's resolution is per degree of angle of view. Some say it's around 60 pixels. Some say it's twice that. I did my own tests and found it to be 60-90. It's hard to give it a hard stop. At 60 I definitely wasn't thinking about pixels anymore. At 90 I couldn't see a difference even if I was focused on looking for pixels. So 60 is definitely a comfortable resolution. Couch Potato Joe, at 20 degrees, won't normally notice resolution beyond 1.2K (20 x 60) and physically can't see it beyond 1.8K (20 x 90). Delores, with her face up in her screen, can discern something like 5.4K (60 degrees x 90 pixels). I guess 8K will finally satisfy her.
It doesn't look like it's a lot more expensive for a company to make an 8K screen instead of a 4K one or even a 2K one. My phone has 50 times the density of my TV, yet they cost the same. So in a few years an 8K TV may cost the same as a 4K TV today.
But here's the rub. 4K is 4 times the data as 2K. 8K is 16 times the data as 2K. So as a producer of content that people would watch around 20-30 degrees, there is no practical benefit to delivering in greater than 2K. I would rather have a 2K camera that records RAW to cheap SD cards, with 14 stops of dynamic range and global shutter, for $2,000; than an 8K camera that records compressed to expensive CFast cards, with rolling shutter, for $8,000.
Pixel count is meaningless without a context of angle of view. Joe's 55" TV is 12 feet away, covering less than 20 degrees of his horizontal field of view. Delores's monitor is right on her desk, and sometimes she leans forward to squint at a corner of the screen. Even though it's only 27", when she gets that close it covers 60 degrees of her angle of view. So her screen is 1/4 the area of Joe's, but it covers 9 times the area in her retina. Naturally she's going to want greater pixels.
The human eye's resolution is per degree of angle of view. Some say it's around 60 pixels. Some say it's twice that. I did my own tests and found it to be 60-90. It's hard to give it a hard stop. At 60 I definitely wasn't thinking about pixels anymore. At 90 I couldn't see a difference even if I was focused on looking for pixels. So 60 is definitely a comfortable resolution. Couch Potato Joe, at 20 degrees, won't normally notice resolution beyond 1.2K (20 x 60) and physically can't see it beyond 1.8K (20 x 90). Delores, with her face up in her screen, can discern something like 5.4K (60 degrees x 90 pixels). I guess 8K will finally satisfy her.
It doesn't look like it's a lot more expensive for a company to make an 8K screen instead of a 4K one or even a 2K one. My phone has 50 times the density of my TV, yet they cost the same. So in a few years an 8K TV may cost the same as a 4K TV today.
But here's the rub. 4K is 4 times the data as 2K. 8K is 16 times the data as 2K. So as a producer of content that people would watch around 20-30 degrees, there is no practical benefit to delivering in greater than 2K. I would rather have a 2K camera that records RAW to cheap SD cards, with 14 stops of dynamic range and global shutter, for $2,000; than an 8K camera that records compressed to expensive CFast cards, with rolling shutter, for $8,000.
That's why TVs need to come shipped rolled up in a tube. You unroll it and hang it from the wall. At 120+" everyone is happy
The take-away I got from the 8K TV release is that AI upsampling is more important/useful vs. 8K content (or even 4K content, which is still scarce).
As computing power-per-Watt increases along with advances in AI/machine learning, resolution and aliasing issues will become a thing of the past. That's because instead of capturing and storing compressed pixels/motion blocks, a deconstruction process will store AI data which will later be reconstructed, which is a completely different process and will be massively more efficient. Think of an interactive videogame or VR experience: it's all rendered in real-time, and you can look in any direction. Trying to precompute and store all that data would be impractical (impossible). Instead, each frame is reconstructed- rendered in real-time. AI reconstruction will be a similar process in the sense that neural-network elements will be combined to create the appropriate image at the appropriate time. Since it's a rendering, it can be rendered at any resolution, so the displays simply need to be "retina" based on viewing distance/FOV. Samsung's 8K TVs are giving us a taste of what's to come: deconstructing an image in real-time, then re-rendering it at 8K with no artifacts (in real time). That's pretty impressive if it works as claimed!
puredrifting
Major Contributor
You know how they say "The concept wrote itself"? Great idea for a feature Eric, get on it! Better than most Dystopian sci-fi concepts.
Mitch Gross
Veteran
My basement wall is 16 feet by 9 feet. I am sorely tempted to empty the place out and turn it into my home theater. If only I had a screen that would fit it...
Run&Gun
Veteran
TheTrickster
Well-known member
Samsung are making a big push in Spain on their 8K OLED TVs, at the front of all the electrical shops here.
Yes, they all look amazing, they are all in excess 75" on display, and the demo reel is exceptional - but I would love them to show a current 4K OLED side by side to see if I can visibly see the difference before putting down $7k (which I won't anyway...)
Yes, they all look amazing, they are all in excess 75" on display, and the demo reel is exceptional - but I would love them to show a current 4K OLED side by side to see if I can visibly see the difference before putting down $7k (which I won't anyway...)
Bassman2003
Veteran
I am just hoping my Plasma never dies. A sobering thought - how about a 1 1/2 hour 8k 2 pass-VBR x265 encode with Neat Video applied? Probably would take a week to finish!
Probably would take a week to finish!