InBroadcast
The number of film and TV projects acquired in part in 8K
resolution is growing but a sharper image is not the first or only benefit to
cinematographers.
With 4K
production still expensive and bandwidth throttling the throughput of ultra HD
content into both cinemas and the home, camera technology continues to advance
higher resolutions. 8K cine cameras from RED, Sony and Panavision have raised
the bar for the spatial attributes of an image at very least. Meanwhile
Japanese state broadcaster NHK is preparing to start domestic satellite
transmissions of its Super Hi-Vision system in December 2018 having helped fund
an end to end 8K production ecosystem.
8K
broadcasting is currently considered a Japanese luxury and unlikely to be
exported to other countries any time soon (if at all). While the pictures are
undoubtedly pin sharp – especially when played on smaller OLED screens – work
needs to be done in terms of editorial grammar to make the content more
compelling than mere pretty wallpaper.
For high end
recorded content, though, the arguments for use of 8K are more compelling, and
not just in the way you’d think.
“The
flexibility of having that extra resolution, whether you are downsampling or
reframing/cropping, or simply stabilizing footage is too powerful to ignore on
a pure image quality level,” says Phil Holland, a DIT (X-Men: First Class) turned DP. “When filming in 2K there's
literally detail and color transitions that ‘aren't there’ that you can 100%
see when captured in 8K. There's no amount of upscaling that can
create detail that's not captured during that specific moment. When you
see upscaled content, while the algorithms are impressive, you are just evoking
a perceptual response to mostly edge detail.”
Holland says
he was handling 4K film scans in the late 1990s and has been finishing in 8K
lately, working from material captured on the RED Weapon with Helium S35
sensor. “Subtleties, like a deep red velvet pillow's texture, is something
often lost in lower resolution capture,” he says. “Beyond that, it's again the
flexibility of the format and what you can do with higher resolution
material. Some people punch in for digital zooms, reframe, crop, etc...
With more capture resolution than your desired output resolution you have the
ability to do that while the image still holds.”
Timur Civan,
a New York based DP with spots for Nike, Samsung on his CV agrees that 8K is
not about a sharper picture but a softer, more organic one. “Think of it
like this,” he says. “The Apple Retina displays (on iPhone, iPad, Macbook)
displays more resolution than your eye can see. The edges of text, hard lines,
and high contrast edges are rendered sub visual acuity thereby making it appear
more natural, lifelike and frankly easier to look at.
“There’s
been a lot of argument about 8K and what that means versus 4K or 6K or RED
versus the Alexa versus Sony. I think many people haven't had a chance to try
8K, and see what that actually does to your image.”
He says the
most fun he’s had is shooting vintage lenses on 8K and letting the sensor soak
up all the character; “Small subtle blooms, smeared edges, smeared highlights
are not just flaws, but now a fully rendered part of the image.”
One episode
of the science-fiction TV drama series Electric
Dreams, produced by Amazon Studios, Sony Pictures and Channel 4, was
largely shot in 8K on a RED Epic with Helium in order for the DP to accommodate
the look of vintage anamorphic lenses and still deliver a 4K 16:9 master. The
team calculated that if they shot compressed at 8.1 the total data would be
little different to shooting 4K ProRes.
“What seemed
so unrealistic in shooting 8K for a fast turnaround TV project with lots of
set-ups suddenly became very doable,” says DP Ollie Downey. “An 8K resolution
was a creative choice since it allowed us to take a few steps back and use
older lenses to warp and bend the image.”
PostProduction
The chief
benefit of recording 8K today is being able to perform basic post corrections
in a bigger information space. Whether that’s grading, post zooms, crops,
VFX or stabilization, getting all the image degrading work done in the ‘big
space’ of 8K means a 4K output (or lower) will still be super sampled.
“If your
pixels are so small they can't be ‘seen’ you can't see their noise either. “The
magic of downscaling cleans up an image significantly,” says Civan. “Even for a
1080P output, shooting 8K means your get 2 extra stops of noise protection.
With the 6400ISO noise performance of the Monstro, I can realise a 1080P finish
for a commercial or broadcast, shooting 25,600 safely.”
Molinare’s
Commercial Director, Richard Hobbs reports a rise in the number of films
acquiring and posting in 4K as that gives producers increased opportunities for
future proofing and sales. “In some instances, we’re doing camera tests
at 8K even if delivery may be in 2K, for productions to discuss the possibility
of archiving camera rushes at much higher resolutions for future use,” he says.
Studios are
also exploring the prospects of producing VFX in higher resolutions.
Technicolor recently delivered its first 8K rendered visual effects piece. The
Marvel Studios’ blockbuster feature Guardians
of the Galaxy Vol 2 was shot by cinematographer Henry Braham on the large
format Panavision Primo 70 Prime lenses with the RED Weapon 8K Dragon
Vistavision as the best way to render the complexity of the final images.
DPs shooting
RED suggest an 8K data footprint works well using its compressed RED Raw
format. “You can get about an hour of 8K footage per terabyte shot,” Holland
reckons. “Most of my days on set in the last 18 months we've filmed 1-8TB,
which is very manageable. The cameras are capable of recording
scaled proxies via intermediate codecs like Apple ProRes and Avid
DNxHR, which makes that potential time consuming task of creating dailies
something you can do on the fly if you explore that workflow. 8K is where
things get heavier if we're talking uncompressed DPX sequences and that's a big
hurdle to undertake for some studios.
“I know the
post houses I've worked with, literally all of them in the last year or so, I
was the first person to bring 8K into their houses,” says Holland. “And in
reality, the workflow isn't that difficult if you're targeting 4K or 2K output.”
Lens
manufacturers are getting on board with the larger format size and there's a
great deal of cinema glass at all sorts of budget levels that cover
VistaVision, in particular. The Tokina Cinema Vista Primes were the first
new set designed for the format. Cooke offers S7s, Leica has large format
Thalia primes, there are the Zeiss CP.3s, Sigma Art, and many others which
work very well with Vistavision and Full Frame 35 formats.
“I've even
adapted and modified some vintage and modern glass from Leica, Mamiya, Olympus,
and the more recently release Zeiss Otus Primes,” reports Holland. “It's been a
wonderful and exciting world to explore from a cinematography perspective
as all of it was creatively and technically challenging to find lenses I liked
for each project. When I began primarily working in 8K VistaVision I
certainly heard a lot of ‘you can't pull focus for that format or
resolution’, but seriously, this format has been around for many years and we
have more advanced focus ‘helpers’ on camera and on set than we did before, so
for me that was never part of the hurdle for me. In fact, my first
8K VV project I shot at T1.5-T2.8 just to showcase some the appeal of the
larger format size in relationship to the depth of field.”
RED is
leading the way in pushing sensor resolution, recently adding the Monstro, a
full frame sensor for Weapon cameras. This combination, captures 8K full format
motion at up to 60 fps, produces 35.4 megapixel stills, and delivers data
speeds of up to 300 MB/s.
Sony has
launched the 6K Venice and continues to market the 8K F65 CineAlta. Venice
houses a 36x24mm full-frame sensor and is compatible with anamorphic, S35mm and
full-frame PL mount lenses. Future firmware upgrades are planned to allow the
camera to handle 36mm wide 6K resolution.
Panavision’s Millennium
DXL Camera outputs 4K proxy files – ProRes or DNx – and large-format 8K RAW
files. At the core of the camera is a proprietary image mapping process called
Light Iron Color, developed by LA post facility Light Iron, which provides a
unique, cinematic look. SAM’s Rio finishing system is one of the few
software tools able to work with the files and the Cinematic Image Mapping
Controls.
Of course, a
focus on resolution alone is largely dismissed by creatives since what matters
is applying the appropriate look for the story. Temporal resolution – or
dynamic range – is considered a more perceptually noticeable tool to delivering
greater contrast and colour depth.
This is
exacerbated by the widening gap between the image quality which can be captured
and the quality of the final image on display. While an increasing amount of
content for feature films or TV are acquired 4K only a few titles will be
mastered for 4K theatrical projection or home entertainment distribution.
According to
Holland the argument about which characteristic is more important – resolution
or HDR – simply misses the point. “It's about improving the overall image
quality. That is what is important when it comes to getting our carefully
captured images to the discerning and deserving eyes of the audiences who
experience our efforts. Motion pictures have always been where science,
technology, and art have met and over the years there's been great efforts to
improve the visual fidelity to produce a more immersive image for the
audience. That's in my opinion part of the core of how we advance forward
in our industry and in our medium.”
When it
comes to shooting 8K Civan says resolution at this point isn't about resolution
anymore. “The effective pixels are so small, and so good, that they act
less like digital dots and more like paint.”
Broadcast 8K
NHK’s 8K
system encompasses cameras (Ikegami’s SHK-810 handheld system and Sony Systems
Camera UHC-8300 plus others from Hitachi), switchers (from NEC), Lawo consoles
for 22.2 channel audio and giant LCD displays (from LG).
Belgium
codec developer Image Matters is backing a European project intended to skip 4K
and help broadcasters leapfrog directly from HD and to 8K. Called 8K SVIP, the
collaboration between Belgium and Czech manufacturers and researchers intoPIX,
Cesnet, Image Matters and AV Media aims to gives broadcasters the tools to
migrate from HD and 4K, and to develop advanced transport technologies to
manage 8K signals over SDI and IP.
IntoPix has
already been selected by NHK as the compression technology for broadcast of
Super Hi-Vision. Using a TICO 8K codec the bitrate of an uncompressed 8K stream
is reduced to 48 Gb/s (60hz, 10 bit, 4:2:2) making it possible to squeeze a 8K
signal down a single 12G SDI cable with a claimed latency of less than 0.2
milliseconds.
German
developer Cinegy has also been teasing audiences at tradeshows with 8K
recording and playback demos, highlighting the performance advantages of its
NVIDIA GPU accelerated video codec, Daniel2. Cinegy is now in public beta with
Daniel2 codec-based applications.
Company CTO
Jan Weigner has claimed that Daniel2 can decode up to 1100 frames per second at
8K translating into more than 17000 frames of full HD decoded per second. “It
is the world fastest professional video codec, leaving any other codec light
years behind.”
Cinegy is
already touting the performance at 16K of this technology.
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