8K and Beyond is Coming
Whether You Like it or Not.
The HD revolution was swift. DVDs gave way to Bluray and the consumer was better for it. Improved technology made it cheaper and easier to capture and distribute video that looked sharp. Or so we thought, until manufacturers tried to sell us 4K TVs.
The rapid adoption of 4K and higher resolution cameras actually makes sense for content creators. Capturing more detail gives the editor room to make adjustments without impacting the final quality. We can zoom in, rotate a bit, take some shakiness out of a handheld shot, and have enough information left that the finished video looks as good as if we shot it that way in the first place.
The general consensus around the video production water cooler is this: consumers aren’t pushing for 4K the way they were for 1080p, and 8K is a standard for acquisition only (and maybe an occasional video wall). The benefits of 8 million pixels in your living room is worth spending a few extra bucks. 33 million pixels, however, isn’t even noticeable. The human eye reaches the limit of perception, and unless you’re within a few feet of the screen, there’s absolutely no way to tell.
However, the general consensus is shortsighted. The drive for resolutions over 4K to the living room might stop, but new technologies will push acquisition and post production to at least 16K before the resolution wars really start to slow down.
The technologies driving higher resolutions won’t be traditional TV or movies. The innovation (and the money) will follow the consumer where they consume more and more video: mobile. Mobile viewing takes the experience out of a 2D box and opens up 360 video and VR. 1080p has become the minimum standard we’re comfortable asking an audience to watch, and immersive video experiences on devices like Samsung Gear and Oculus Rift are already looking soft and low-resolution, by comparison.
Modern smartphones have a two-megapixel display. Viewing video on an Oculus Rift is 1080x 1200 for each eye. This means any 360° video in 4K resolution will still look pixelated. If consumers settle around 1440x1080x2 as an immersive video standard, they will need to download and process 8Kp60 just to get the image quality they are already used to from a 1080p television. That’s 20–30 times more data than the way we watch prime time TV and movies at home now.
Why should 360 video and VR impact the way we deliver “flat” video? Because they will drive the cost and size down for consumers. YouTube didn’t introduce 4K support in 2010 just to say they could. They did it knowing that 360 video would demand that resolution and had the potential to create a market for it. 8K video was quietly rolled out a year ago. Have you ever seen 8K video? HINT: If you spent less than $55,000 on your television, probably not.
Buuuuut, by 2015, 4K video was easy for consumers to shoot, edit, and distribute through YouTube. And in the fight for attention online, any way to get ahead of the competition is quickly adopted. 4K computer monitors are increasingly common, since the cost of developing them was paid for long ago by early adopters with 4K cameras and 360 video rigs. By 2019, the difference between a similar 1080p monitor and 2160p monitor will be just a few bucks, and suddenly, even your mom will buy the 2160p version.
Once we’re capturing 8K 360° video, we’ll want to pull 2160p crops from the source video. Our VR headsets will make the jump to 2160p (an entirely reasonable resolution for the human eye). 8K just isn’t enough resolution to do that, so 360° video will make the leap to 16K. And that will be why YouTube will announce support for 16K resolution (even though when they do, plenty of us will still be watching 1080p TV).
The resolution war isn’t going to end, at least not in the next ten years. When we give engineers and storytellers extra room, they are going to find creative ways to fill the space with compelling content. Look at the way light field photography is emerging, for an example. The Lytro Illum camera is “just” 4 megapixels, but it couldn’t have been created until we were already manufacturing a 40-megapixel sensor. It uses 90% of those 40 megapixels for things other than “traditional print” sharpness. And while it’s very cool, there’s no doubt it would be better with an even higher pixel count.
360 cameras in wide use today (like the GoPro Omni) are already collecting 24 million pixels 30 times a second. Translate that to light field video, and it’s easy to imagine a 360° camera array that captures more than 200 million pixels. We’re going to need new ways to organize and display that much information.
Clever engineers will be pushing our 8K and 16K containers to do things that traditional video was never conceived to do. It seems likely that our classic living room televisions might never need to be more than 4K. But advances in mobile, 360° video, VR, and gaming will drive the adoption of 8K and 16K resolutions, particularly for content creators.
