4K

Michal of motionVFX Team writes: We all know that 4K is the future and while Full HD is still the king, in a few years we will all have to shoot in ultra high resolution. This is why 4K is such an interesting topic and at this year's NAB many filmmakers talked about it, there was also a lot of 4K hardware displayed on the fair. It is hard to say if you should already start to change your equipment and shift to the new resolution standard, maybe you should wait a little bit for the prices of the cameras to drop, but the clock is ticking. Fresh DV talked to many filmmakers at NAB and they did a lot of great videos - here's one of them. The website took the camera to the floor and they interviewed several filmmakers and creatives on the new standard. You can watch this video here:

READ THE FULL STORY HERE.

Phil Rhodes of Red Shark News writes: All this talk of 4K, high frame rate, 3D, and ever more precision and information in video signals is a good thing, right? Well, yes, but at some point, an engineering solution has to be designed to let it happen, and there's reason to believe we might be getting a bit ahead of ourselves

Ryan E. Walters of Cinematographer writes: After many years of owning a wide range of camera systems, including a Red One and an Epic, I decided to sell it all and rent. So for the past three years I have been exclusively renting cameras on a per project basis, that is until recently when I made the plunge and bought the Canon C100. Little did I know how many eyebrows and questions it would raise when I posted a picture on Facebook.

Cinescopophilia writes: Peter Crithary Sony’s Marketing Manager large sensor acquisition, fronted the cameras at NAB and caught up with 3rd party providers offering 2K and 4K workflow solutions for Sony. The Sony workflow alliance partners such as DaVinci Resolve, Baselight, Avid, and Autodesk Flame Premium, quickly run through what their systems do and offer the F65, F55, and F5 cameras by way of workflow solutions.

READ THE FULL STORY HERE.

Andrew Reid of EOSHD.com writes: I shot with the Canon 1D C and Canon C100 Cinema EOS cameras recently with SlashCam in Berlin. The 1D C is the most Jekyll and Hyde camera I’ve ever used and a difficult camera to review. The 1D C is a marriage of beautiful 4K images and an unwilling partner who hasn’t shifted an inch to accommodate it.

High end DSLR stills are ahead of even the best digital cinema cameras for image quality on a per-frame basis. The Nikon D800 does 7K raw images with 14.5 stops of dynamic range. If ever there was an opportunity to marry Canon’s expertise in high speed stills shooting to a moving image, the 1D C is it, but what a shame it makes no concessions at all to video ergonomics.

READ THE FULL STORY HERE.

Still from After Earth shot in 4K on the Sony F65.

David Shapton of RedShark News writes: One of the advantages of getting older is that you gain a sense of perspective. You remember what things were like decades ago, and with today’s rate of change, that means they were nothing nothing like what we have today.

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes of ZDNet writes: Intel has announced that it plans to release an updated Thunderbolt controller which will double the transfer rate to 20Gbps, giving it a clear advantage over the upcoming USB 3.0 standard.

In the below short video from NAB, Sony's Rob Willox explains the company's 4K line-up and recent projects that have used them. Watch below.

Oliver Peters of digitalfilms writes: Another year – another NAB exhibition. A lot of fun stuff to see. Plenty of innovation and advances, but no single “shocker” like last year’s introduction of the Blackmagic Cinema Camera.

Here are some observations based on this past week in Las Vegas.

4K

Yes, 4K was all over. I was a bit surprised that many of the pieces for a complete end-to-end solution are in place. The term 4K refers to the horizontal pixel width of the image, but two common specs are used – the DCI (film) standard of 4096 and the UltraHD (aka QuadHD) standard of 3840. Both are “4K”. Forgotten in the discussion is frame rate. Many displays were showing higher frame rates, such as 4K at 60fps. 120fps is also being discussed.

Sony's Keith Vidger shows how to configure the Sony F55 to become a 4K studio camera via a CA-4000 camera adapter. Watch below. (via Cinescopophilia)

Adrian Pennington of The Hollywood Reporter writes: LAS VEGAS — Sony previewed a prototype camera that is intended to marry high-end motion picture requirements with the design of a handheld DSLR on Sunday at an NAB press conference that was also highlighted by a visit from the Oscar-winning cinematographer Claudio Miranda (Life of Pi), who recently lensed Universal’s Oblivion with Sony’s F65 4K camera.

Described as “the embodiment of Sony’s future development,” the prototype camera and complementary lenses will not be previewed on the NAB show floor, and no other details were given, not even what resolution it would capture.

READ THE FULL STORY HERE.

EOSHD writes: Sony have revealed two very early prototype cameras at NAB. They are hybrid stills / video cameras from the pro A/V division in Japan. One is a DSLR style camera with what looks like a PL mount. Sony is also committed to developing a range of full frame cinema prime lenses.

Very few details were given about the products.

READ THE FULL STORY HERE.

RedShark News writes: For-A have just released a new camera capable of shooting a rather amazing 900fps in 12bit 4K RAW! It’s called the FT-ONE and looks set to really shake things up in the high speed capture world!

David Leitner of Filmmaker Magazine writes: A motion picture camera used to be a light-sealed box with a strip of film running through it. Was it easy to thread? Did it run quiet? How bright was the viewfinder?

Today’s cameras are exponentially more complex. They are literal bundles of separate technologies, each lurching forward at a different rate. To understand today’s cameras, you must understand the parts to understand the whole.

READ THE FULL STORY HERE.

Cinescopophilia reports on Sony's ramped up 4K efforts, writing, "The successful sale of almost 2000 Professional CineAlta 4K cameras such as the F5, F55 and F65 models as of April 2013; the XAVC format has been considered to be widely adopted in the marketplace. The XAVC format holds various advantages for high quality image reproduction including 4K pixel resolution, 10 bit colour depth, wide colour space (S-Gamut) and refined gamma (S-log)."

Read the full story here.

EOSHD forum user Javier Sobremazas made an interesting discovery recently: he could shoot 4K video in 1-second snippets with his $220 Nikon V1. Explains PetaPixel, "It can only shoot 4K for one second at a time; and secondly, it’s actually an extension of the camera’s burst mode Sobremazas discovered the feature when he realized that the V1 — by using some special Aptina sensor magic — uses a fully electronic shutter in burst mode, shifting all of its up to 60fps 4K output to a small buffer."

Watch a 4K compilation Sobremazas made below and read more here.

Logan Kelsey shot and edited the below short documentary in 4K with the RED Scarlet and Final Cut Pro X. Explains Kelsey, "My RED workflow for short-form projects (in the up to 5min range) is a direct shoot-to-edit workflow using the native RED media. I don't have a RED Rocket card and I've already completed about six 4k projects using this method - the results are brilliant. For long-form pieces, or when you are not connect to an external Raid, I would recommend using proxy media. I'm using an UltraStudio Mini Monitor and I get a nice 4k to 1920×1080 down-convert to my Panasonic HD broadcast monitor."

In this presentation that Larry Jordan gave at Broadcast Video Expo 2013, Jordan talks about the hype vs. reality of 4K. He says, "There's really four questions this boils down to. First, in production, why are you shooting 4K? The ancillary question is what version of 4K do you want to shoot because there's a lot of options. In post-production, how are you going to edit 4K? Can your storage system even handle 4K data files? When it comes to output, how are you going to output 4K? What format should you master in? And when it comes to distribution, how are you going to distribute 4K? I mean is it even worth shooting 4K if no one can see it?"

Watch below.

AJA will be presenting a free webinar on April 30th at 12PM ET entitled "AJA and 4K Workflow." Join AJA Product Marketing Manager Bryce Button to learn the basics of 4K image acquisition, simple ProRes workflows with the Ki Pro Quad as well as raw support and how to configure your KONA 3G correctly to edit and monitor 4K.

The Economist ponders the fate of 4K TV, writing, "Will 4K follow 3D’s fate? It is far too early to say. But 4K television—far more than 4K cinema—faces some formidable obstacles...who actually needs a super-sharp 4K television? The resolution of even an HDTV set with 1,080 progressively scanned lines (ie, continuously from top to bottom) is wasted on the vast majority of viewers. Most people sit too far from the screen to be able to see the detail it offers."

Read the full piece here.

Red Shark News has a rundown of the 4K cameras that are available for purchase right now, writing, "Ultimately, we really should be originating at a resolution higher than we distribute, if only to make our own lives easier by providing a little wiggle room for focus, framing, stabilisation and visual effects. Happily, that's rarely been easier. So here’s a quick rundown on what's actually available. This is, as far as I'm aware, a complete list of the people who currently offer cameras with sensors at or approaching 4000 photosites wide, capable of shooting at sync-sound rates."

Read it here.

Blender Foundation is releasing the 4K version of "Tears of Steel" in April: a short film that was created with Blender 3D creation software and free and opensource software. "Tears of Steel" will be made available as free content for anyone to use under the Creative Commons license, which means it'll likely be used for Ultra HD and H.265 encoding demos.

Watch the sci-fi film below. (via Multichannel News)

In the below segment from Fox News, Alec Shapiro, president of Sony's Professional Solutions of America, discusses 4K and the upcoming films which will be presented in the new format along with some of the home entertainment 4K options that are rolling out. Watch below.