IBC 2014 product launches place 4K in the mainstream

A round-up of 4K items of interest from IBC 2014 in Amsterdam.

Those of use who use DSLRs like the Canon 5D to shoot time lapses have been aware of the 4K phenomenon longer than most. The detail it produces and the ability to move the video around within an HD raster without quality loss are just two of the benefits of shooting in 4K. The football World Cup in Brazil was a testing bed for broadcast 4K and many high-end TV series have been shot in 4K - some have even been transmitted (on Netflix) in 4K.

The biggest drawback with 4K is its size. File sizes are huge and because it is such high quality you don't want to compress it too much. Most versions of HD codecs such as ProRes and H264 have been beefed up to handle 4K images but the obvious omission was a new DNx codec from Avid. Most people expected Avid to enhance their AMA system which uses plug-ins to handle other codecs within Media Composer. Most of the time I get to a point in the edit where I transcode the AMA material to DNxHD which Avid handles beautifully and is compatible through the Avid/EVS system. 

Yesterday at IBC in Amsterdam Avid announced they have developed DNxHR a 4K (strictly a UHD) version of their codec which will be available in Q4 of this year. They have called it "4K beauty without the bandwidth" and are releasing a new version of Media Composer to cope with it. Hopefully this will be a universal codec that once added to a PC or Mac can be used in Adobe, DaVinci Resolve and other edit systems. I have yet to discover the all important MB/sec size of this codec but it could be a good alternative to H.265 for distribution of 4K material.

Blackmagic Design has been an early advocate of 4K and is now producing very usable firmware for its 4K Production Camera. In the older HD Cinema Camera DNxHD was one of the recording options so I hope the Production Camera will gain DNxHR recording when it is released.

Blackmagic also added a new monitor to its line-up today with the SmartView 4K, a 15 inch rack mount (or VESA mount) LCD monitor for under $2,000.

Blackmagic Design SmartView 4K

Not sure how good it will be for grading (no gamut information), but it has built-in LUTs so it is intended to be used by creatives and not just engineers. It is due out in December 2014 and hopefully won't experience the delays of other Blackmagic products.

One monitor that you can definitely grade on is Sony's new BVM-X300 4K OLED Master Monitor. I am sitting in front of its HD cousin and it is the best monitor I have ever seen, I cannot wait to see the 4K version but unfortunately I'm not in Amsterdam this week but an edit suite near Heathrow.

Sony BVM-X300 4K OLED master monitor

Unlike the Blackmagic Design monitor this 30 inch monster is true 4K (4096x2160) with an extra wide gamut range, although Sony must be gutted that is doesn't cover the full ITU-R BT2020 wide colour spaces and have to admit it in their documentation. Of course this will probably cost more than a small car, even if that small car is a mini with all the extras on. Canon's competing monitor, the DP-V3010 is currently £29,000 at CVP.

One day my 4K BM Production camera will come - please

There is a bit of a lull in the world of 4K it seems. Sony has established a bit of an unexpected niche in the high end with their F-55; Arri is getting a big boost from its Alexa being used to great affect on Game of Thrones and Canon's much admired C300 has a 4K big brother in the C500. I haven't used any of them, partly because I don't want to spend the price of a convertible Mini on a camera, but mainly because I don't have a crew of 6 six to carry all the peripheral kit that these cameras require.

Of all the specs of all the cameras in all the world this is the one of most interest to me at the moment:

I put my name down for one of these mythical creatures the day after it was announced with CVP in London who don't exactly want to get my hopes up for an early delivery with these words on their website: 

At the moment we're not sure when it is scheduled to ship or will actually ship but based on our experience with the existing 2.5K model we expect long delays.

Our pricing is tentative, so may be adjusted upwards / downwards if the camera price is varied between order placement and shipping date.

Hopefully the price will come down because with exchange rates at the moment the UK price should be £2566 not the £3210 CVP are pricing it at - the difference would pay for quite a few SSD drives I'm going to need.

But the big question has to be the shipping date - what does it mean? The first one, the first 1000, a couple to a shop in downtown Melbourne? Black Magic is one of the most innovative companies in  the camera world but it still relies on component suppliers, one of whom screwed up with the sensors of the first Cinema Camera and rather too many people are still waiting for their cameras who ordered it in the early days.

I have faith though - mainly because I believe Grant Perry would physically drive the white van to deliver the camera because he comes from a post production background, and we post productioners do anything to deliver on time. I mainly shoot stock and I shoot a lot in London and I can't wait to suck the colour out of London and put it onto the screen, even if I will only see a quarter of the picture initially.

I have been promised that within a month I will get my hands on a pre-production model and run a couple of tests. It will probably be raining. This is London after all. At least the lull will be filled.

4K at BVE in London and future proofing

It's been a week since BVE was held at it's new location at Excel in East London and I really enjoyed my two days there, partly for the old colleagues I kept bumping in to, partly because of the new kit I could actually see and touch and partly because of the 4K Cinema presentations. The 3D & 4K Cinema seminars were held in a room about 5 minutes away from the main exhibition so I felt like an orienteerer (or whatever someone who participates in orienteering is called) getting my badge scanned each time I moved between the two locations.

Philip Bloom's excellent presentation "The DSLR journey: from the 5D mkII to the 4K 1DC" was so popular that over 150 people were turned away each day, including me on Tuesday. Philip has not been too positive in the past about 4K's future but one of the reasons I follow him on twitter (@PhilipBloom) is because he is prepared to have his mind changed. He had shot a pop video with Olly Knights on the Canon EOS-1D C the previous week, quickly edited it in Adobe Premiere and Dissolve and produced a 4K ProRes 422 file which the venue guys converted to a DCP to show on the 4K projector at BVE.

The first time he had seen the video in 4K was at rehearsals the previous day, because he, like 99.9% of us working in 4K, doesn't have a 4K monitor (Sony had one on their stand). The only way he could check his pictures at 4K resolution was blowing them up into quarters on his retina screen. I have to say the pictures looked very good and Philip didn't have a massive rig like Canon used on "The Ticket", he just added a TV Logic field monitor:

Canon EOS-1D C on the Ticket (from Canon website)

Philip Bloom (with bag) shooting the Olly Knight video with EOS-1D C
(from Philip Bloom's blog)

The video had been shot very quickly and on the hoof, in Philip's words - guerilla filming - which is pretty incredible at 4K, and he managed to turn it around in about 5 days, which makes a nonsense of anyone claiming that shooting 4K at the moment is impractical.

Of course when you are on an island in the Pacific you might need a bit of backup and Sky's Galapagos series was certainly ambitious. 3D on a volcano - tick, and 4K? Why not. The first episode was shown in 4K 3D (or is it 3D 4K) at BVE and we were suitably furnished with dark glasses, which was a little disappointing. But the effect was not. Once you have seen a marine iguana snort out salt in 3D4K there is little that can impress you. I was in row 6 but wanted to be in row minus 3 to really see the crispness of the image but it was still pretty good from 12 metres away.

In an interview with tech radar this week John Cassy, the head of 3D at Sky TV reaffirmed the company's commitment to 3D and claimed that 4K would not be the innovation that replaces 3D but the technology that enhances the format, "There are very clear benefits that 4K gives 3D. The resolution is better and also it could help in glasses-free 3D because it enables that whole resolution and picture quality." He also claims to have seen a glasses free version of 3D but like a News of the World journalist failed to reveal the source.

Canon's 4K camera the C500 is dropping in price but is still at almost £19,000 so it is a hire only beast for now,but the EOS-1D C £10k less than that but still some way off my Christmas list. To me the cameras that will change the broadcast world though are the Sony PMW-F5 and F55 with the AXS-F5 4K recorder (about £16k and £24k respectively) which get round the rolling shutter problem and are "proper cameras" provided you have perfectly flat shoulders. 

There was a lot of talk about how much storage all this 4K material is going to take up but now I wouldn't consider buying less than 3 terabyte external drives (4 TB are out there), 6 times larger than I was buying 2 years ago. With the amount of storage looking like it will shortly double on a hard drive platter I am looking forward to shooting RAW 4K at a price point close to shooting HD now in about 2 years. 

To conclude I will quote John Cassy of Sky again who sums up my opinion on 4K, "We have a watching brief on Ultra HD and 4K. Actually what we have been doing, the Attenborough shows have all been filmed in 4K - and in some cases 5K - so they have been captured and future-proofed in a sense, as far as we can." 

Future proofing avoids obsolescence, if you get it right.

GoPro 4K and Twixtor - not a viable solution

The most cost effective way of shooting 4K footage today is with a GoPro Hero3 Black edition. With a name like that it should be shaped like a Stealth bomber or Darth Vader's helmet but in fact it looks like this.

The GoPro Hero3 Black

So not much to look at but it does record 4K footage. Actually not quite as the resolution is 3840x2160 not the 4096x2160 (or 4096x2304) generally accepted as 4K, but close enough. Not quite close enough either is the frame rate it records at, which in PAL setting is 12.5 frames per second, half of what is generally accepted and the result is (if the footage is played at normal speed) a pretty jumpy video. But a San Francisco company called Re:Vision Effects Inc. has produced a piece of software called Twixtor which can re-time your video and insert the missing frame through very clever interpolation. It is designed to allow normal speed footage to be slowed down but I thought I would shoot a 4K clip on my GoPro Hero3 Black and see whether Twixtor could make a nice smooth 25fps real speed version of it.

The test footage was shot on a tripod so most of the image was not changing from frame to frame. The girl on the swing is passing across a complex background of leafy trees and a solid tree trunk. The rope tied to the tire is quite thin and had a tendency to warp with some settings. I experimented with a number of settings using Twixtor in After Effects (this is the trial Twixtor software hence the red cross) and this is the best solution I could come up with frame interpolation set to nearest.

Twixtor settings

Here is the treated footage and a link to the 1080p YouTube version.

So to me it is quite smooth and at first look, fairly acceptable, but looking at it more carefully the girl looks like she has been rotoscoped into the video and around her border there is a lot of blurry and incorrect pixels. Here are two screen grabs of an original frame followed by an interpolated Twixtor frame. 

Original frame

Twixtor interpolated frame

And here are crops of the above images

Original frame cropped

Twixtor processed frame cropped

So unfortunately using Twixtor to interpolate the 12.5 frames per second of the GoPro Hero3 in 4K is not going to be the solution to videographers dreams. But all is not lost, because the Sony sensor within the GoPro Hero3 is capable of proper full frame (4096x2160) 4K recording at frame rates of up to 60fps in 10 bit mode and 48fps in 12 bit mode. So GoPro may just be teasing us with the current "gelded" version and the next release may make the Canon 1DX C look like an over priced paper weight. Well a man can dream can't he?

Sony IMX117CQT sensor details

The evangelists and agnostics of 4K video

One of the best things about editing TV programmes is that you get to see them in the best quality possible straight out of the edit suite. With a broadcaster approved monitor and a fast computer the pictures often look great - the only thing that would make them better is watching them from a comfy sofa - perks of an executive producer, not a humble editor.

At home I have Sky HD which is pretty good and Freeview which isn't. I also have a powerful computer which plays out my 4K timelapses in Cineform QuickTime and suddenly everything before looks inadequate. I don't have a 4K monitor but the detail on a decent HD TV is amazing - you can almost smell the congestion zone in some of my London shots.

But not everybody thinks 4K is a necessary step for the future. Philip Bloom has this to say:

"8K is the future. Not 4k. Now don’t get me wrong – 4k is smashing, but the difference between 2K (essentially full HD) and 4k is not the leaps and bounds that we had from SD to HD. Not to my old eyes, and by the time we all have 8K, won’t see a bloody thing but THIS is the progress leap that will make the difference."

But for Jim Jannard the founder of Red the release of new 4K Sony cameras is confirmation that 4K will be as big as HD:

"Sony has come to the party. God love them. The F65 is a true 4K camera (although not 8K as it is advertised). The F5 and F55 are 4K cameras soon to be released. There are 4K display panels being released. 4K projectors. The world is finally coming to its senses. We predicted this 6 years ago. Now it is here" 

Now Philip Bloom and Jim Jannard have rarely sung from the same hymn sheet but I expected cordiality over this one. I have seen material projected in 4K from the Canon 1D C and the Canon C500 and it looks pretty fantastic but then it had the best post production money can buy so it should. 

It is over 6 years since Sky launched HD transmission in the UK so I feel we are due an upgrade and 8K is just too far removed from practicality, but material is being filmed, edited and shown in 4K right now. It is the near future and I feel every TV production company should start to look to that future.

To 4K and beyond... to Ultra HD

This week the Consumer Electronics Association (the CEA) made an announcement that the next jump in TV resolution will not be called 4K (as it has be called for the last four years) but Ultra HD or UHDTV (according to the ITU). Now before I get swallowed up by TLA's or even FLA's (five letter acronyms) I tried to work out what format I will be working with for the next eight years before 8K is expected to arrive.

With the help of my rusty calculator I did a few divisions and multiplications and worked out that the minimum resolution of 3840x2160 is indeed 16:9 but is a bit smaller than the 4096x2304 that is "real 4K". However it is both double the 1920x1080 we know and love and the format specified by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE for FLA lovers) in 2007.

But the CEA press release reads as follows:

Minimum performance attributes include display resolution of at least eight million active pixels, with at least 3,840 horizontally and at least 2,160 vertically. Displays will have an aspect ratio with width to height of at least 16 X 9. To use the Ultra HD label, display products will require at least one digital input capable of carrying and presenting native 4K format video from this input at full 3,840 X 2,160 resolution without relying solely on up-converting.

So that's a minimum resolution. Sony have declared that they will retain the 4K description and call their products 4K UHD, which presumably means their TVs will be 4096 pixels wide and 2304 pixels high. So what will broadcasters choose? My money is on 3480x2160 which reduces an image by nearly 2 million pixels a frame, quite a saving. Sony will just have to upscale, which is never a pretty job.

All of this makes producing stock material for the future no easier than it is now with 1080p, 1080i and 720p all being used in the real world. Currently Red camera operators can chose to shoot both Ultra HD formats so they may have to make a decision at the time of shooting. Even the (not so) humble GoPro3 can now shoot 4K either in 3480x2160 or the cinemascope (17:9) 4096x2160.  

Choices, choices, choices. 

But 4K or thereabout videos are BIG and you don't want to upload more versions than is necessary, so I will stick with 4096 x 2304 for now because shrinking will always look better than stretching. Won't it?

Please note: 4K footage is not currently available to download from the London Photography And Video web-site, but can be supplied on request if available.

What will we be watching in 10 years?

I was sorting out a load of surplus electronic gear that has not been switched on for over 3 years and among it are three perfectly working TVs that I can no longer use, because the TV signal transmitted in the UK is now digital only and these only have analogue tuners. 

About 90% of the material I edit is now originated in high definition and as every UK broadcaster demands that all new programmes are supplied in 1080i I find it hard to watch anything that is not transmitted in HD any more.

I have now started to produce 4K (4096x2304 pixel) video from time lapses shot on a Canon 5D MKII (which are available through the London Photo and Video time lapse gallery). I have nothing to watch them back on yet but 4K TVs are becoming available and PC monitors have been close to this resolution for a while; I expect Apple retina displays will soon reach this level. With the 4K shooting Red Epic and Scarlet cameras becoming widely available more 4K material will be originated and the demand will increase.

The format is likely to remain 16:9 so my LCD and LED 1920p TVs will still be able to show downsized 4K material so hopefully they won't be redundant to quickly. But I doubt they will last as long as one of the TVs I need to get rid of - a Sony Trinitron bought in Hong Kong over 25 years ago and still giving a great picture. 

Maybe I will just keep hold of this one a little longer. 

The future of Sony - a suggestion

On second February 2012 two very large numbers presented themselves in articles online. The first, on Reuters, was that Sony are predicting that they are expecting to make a $2.9 billion LOSS this financial year, that's four years of continual losses.This is one of the biggest electrical company in the world who invented the Walkman, Trinitron TVs, the Playstation and er Betamax.

But in the last decade they really haven't been beating competitors to market with anything amazing. Blu-ray is a collaboration of companies and they have released nothing to compete with the iPad/Pod/Touch/Mac products. They hope to finally start making profit on their TVs in 2013, but that will partly be by selling off their LCD screen production facilities to Samsung for £600 million - hardly innovative.

It's hard to think of an electronic section Sony do not produce products for; VAIO laptops, stills cameras, broadcast cameras, TVs, mobile phones (just), etc. but I can't think of any product that is the market leader - they are no longer a Brand Leader. They are missing a fantastic opportunity to lead the way in DSLR video technology. They have a pretty good series of DSLR and extensive knowledge of video and broadcast requirements, so why haven't they produced a product like the Canon C300 or Panasonic AF101. Oh, sorry, they have. The Sony NEX-FS100E. Sorry again, but it isn't exactly the piece of equipment every cameraman want to get his hands on - unlike the Canon C300.

So Sony have making products but can't really work out what product everyone really wants. One person who was (and is) rather good at working this out is Mark Zuckerberg who had the other outstanding number on the 2nd February. He is set to earn $28 billion when Facebook is publically offered and I have been debating what a person could actually do with that amount of money. My suggestion would be for him to buy Sony, rename it Sony Inc. and start producing the products that some people pay Apple type premiums for at the moment.