Does resolution matter?
Resolution is a selling point on every camera. You’ll see a camera advertised as shooting in 1080p, 4K or sometimes even as high as 8K. There’s far more to a camera than just the number of pixels it records with though.
DSLRs, mirrorless and cinema cameras are all extremely advanced pieces of technology that have the capability to capture amazing footage. Don’t get me wrong, resolution can be important, and as always it depends on your use case, but there are more important features to look for in a camera.
The number of pixels you have in your footage is extremely useful in post-production and it’s really good at making an image look very sharp.
Pixels are important in post because it gives you the ability to crop and resize footage with a lot more leeway, you have a bit more wiggle room on how clear the image and colors are if you’re down-sampling it to a lower resolution for export and you can have a lot more points to animate and work with when you’re creating special effects.
Those aren’t the only benefits to more resolution, but they cover some of the more important ones. Quality of your footage though can depend on a lot of factors like lighting, lenses, what camera you’re using and what your bitrate is. It can be a common mistake to assume just because your pixel count is higher, your footage will look nicer.
If you’re shooting bad footage in 1080p, you’ll shoot bad footage in 4K too.
Resolution is pretty much only going to effect your work in post in most cases, because a lot of people can’t even see all those extra pixels your putting into your footage. But what will affect your footage more are things like sensor size, which can be useful because as sensors stay the same size but increase the pixel count, each pixel will receive less light as a result, which can increase the amount of noise in your footage.
While resolution can be important, it’s all about how you use those pixels to your advantage to make good looking shots, look even better.
