HD For Indies

4K Delivery... - Reduser.net

"We are very happy to hear Panasonic and Sony announce their 4K displays at CES today. That allows us to finally announce that RED has been developing for release a 4K delivery system.

We have been committed to 4K from day one. It has always been our vision to see 4K in the home as well as on the big screen. We always believed that 1080P was a stop-gap along the way to 4K.

We will be announcing details of the RED 4K Delivery system at NAB in April.

Jim"


So that's more details on both the 4K delivery system and the Scarlet camera at NAB. Gonna be busy at their booth again this year I'll bet....

-mike

WEDNESDAY UPDATE

I was thinking some more about 4K. Red announced at NAB last year what we already knew - that a smaller camera (Scarlet) was under development ("handheld professional camera"), and 4K displays (yes plural) and projectors (yes plural) were under way. Now Red is announcing a 4K delivery system. Well, if you've got a screen, you need a delivery system to watch it. That's some means of delivering 4K, which I'm guessing would require a physical connection interface, a storage medium, encoder and a decoder, etc. Ponder on that as you will.

BUT....back to 4K displays. This all reminds me of the article I ran last year before buying my own HDTV (which I still like), HD For Indies: "When does 1080p make a difference?". That article included links to someone else's chart. Extrapolating from that chart, it seems clear that a display would make sense for those authoring content who can sit pretty close to it. 4K is 2304p by Red's standards for 16:9. Guesstimating that into their charts, that means that with a 60" screen (what I currently have), if it were 2304p you'd need to be 4 feet or less from it to see all the detail. To sit 10 feet back, typical living room distance, you'd need a screen of 140 or 150 or more inches (I'm mentally guessing looking at the graph). That isn't realistic for a display - you'd need a projector for that.

Which gets us back to the 4K display and content stuff - if you're 10 feet back, you'd need a screen in the ballpark of 15 feet (give or take feet) measured diagonally. That's roughly 13 feet by 7 1/2 feet - I don't have a wall that size available where I'd want to watch it. The biggest wallspace I have is about 9 feet wide.

The market for true home theaters (dedicated rooms) is growing. But that's a many-tens-of-thousands of dollars investment (unless you have a basement to convert). Is there enough market to support a 4K display/projector to get the costs down, Red volume style?

Of course, marketing trumpets reality - and Red certainly knows how to do that (and without buying a single ad, either - I've never seen a Red print ad, have you?).

As a market, 4K is a welcome option, but there is LOTS of progress to be made in optimizing the 1080p we've got now - even shooting on Red ones to make the 1080p BE 1080 pixels worth of resolution. Considering how much of the Planet Earth stuff was shot on Varicam (which only records 960x720 and gets uprezzed to 1920x1080....think how much BETTER it could look if it really WERE 1920X1080 worth of detail. And that takes good sensors, but REALLY takes quality glass.

And to view it, we need truly 1080p, not 1080i, presentation, especially for 24p. Triple, quadruple, or even quintuple flashing makes for a rock solid 24p with no cadence issues. 2:3:3:2, 2:3:2:3 is good but not perfect for 1080p sets running at 60Hz progressively.

I recall someone talking about 4K DI work - and saying that even with optimal projection, if you're not sitting in the first X # of rows of a theater (I think it was like 8 or 15), you're not seeing the difference between 2K and 4K. Similar arguments apply here.

I love that Red pushes the envelope on everything. But is 4K really the place to go? If they did it, I'm sure it would make for a lovely HD presentation as well.

Those are my immediate thoughts, more, of course, to follow later.

-mike

Labels: 4K, Red, Scarlet