2013 is proving to be the year of 4K. Manufacturers have begun to release the hardware which we saw being demonstrated at NAB Show where it was one the main topics of conversation.
Sony is one company that is massively behind it. As an article on TechRadar commented:
Sony are the only company that can tell an on-brand end-to-end 4K story. It makes the movies and TV shows, it produces the cameras to shoot the content, it makes the projectors to display it in cinemas, it publishes the movies on disc, and it delivers it to the home in the form of TVs, games consoles and media servers .
This week, it was revealed that Sony and the BBC will be trialling 4K at this year's Wimbledon tennis tournament.
It's clear that 4K Ultra HD is here to stay, so what does this mean for video producers?
Well, the biggest issue is size. 4K is bigger, much bigger, making it harder to store and harder to move.
The term 4K is based on the horizontal resolution of the format which is approximately 4,000 pixels. This is around 4 times the resolution of standard HD and results in a total resolution of around 8 megapixels per frame as opposed to 2 megapixels for HD.
Uncompressed, this means massive files. Just 2-3 minutes of 4k film the length of a movie trailer can be up to 500GB alone and, while standards were being settled, there were fears that the media would be simply too big to distribute. Its great to make good looking films, but kind of pointless if no-one can see them! However, recent tests using the newly ratified H.265 codec have produced impressive results; creating much smaller files requiring much less bandwidth to stream than expected. It means a 4K film could still fit on a BluRay disc or could be easily streamed through a standard cable connection.
So the issues with distribution appear to have been dealt with, however, the problems storing the original, uncompressed footage will remain.
This article from ZDNet gives some idea of the scale of the problem:
If we want to use the digital workprint of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo as a benchmark, every single frame of the film is 45 Megabytes in size, and has an approximate resolution of 4352x2176.
The two hour and thirty-eight minute film has approximately 230,000 frames at 24 frames per second. If we do the somewhat inexact back of the envelope math, 45 megabytes per frame X 230,000 frames equals 10,350,000 Megabytes, or 10,107 Gigabytes, or just under 10TB.
Thats what is needed to store a single 4K feature film shot at 24 frames per second, at full uncompressed workprint quality.
That's a lot of storage and that's just the final, edited film. Considering shoot ratios for feature films are traditionally around 5 or 10:1 and that for documentaries or multi-cam reality shows, it can be as high as 500:1, that's a serious amount of storage space needed for original footage. Its more than most companies can afford to buy and maintain and where cloud services, with scalable capacity, will really come into their own.
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2013 is proving to be the year of 4K. Manufacturers have begun to release the hardware which we saw being demonstrated at NAB Show where it was one the main topics of conversation.
