Introducing 4K Hub

[Rocket]

Hi, I would like to invite anyone who is interested to take a look at our new 4K community resource at www.4khub.com. I'm not trying to pull anyone away from RedUser as our focus is far more general and not at all specific to a particular manufacturer or product.

As Red is at the core of the current 4K digital cinema movement we will also be putting together content of interest to anyone working with 4K media aquired with the Red One but we will feature practical articles and information pertaining to the following subjects:

2K/4K Aquisition (Genesis, Viper, D20, Red One etc...) as well as scanners (Northlight, Cintel Ditto, Spirit etc...)
Storage and Networking (Specifically to high bandwidth data-centric workflow in uncompressed formats)
Color Grading Systems
Editing / Conform / Finishing Systems
Compositing and Effects
Hardware Platforms
4K Delivery and Display / Projection

The site is community driven as is RedUser.net and so we would encourage anyone interested to register and get involved in discussions and even in writing and submitting articles.

We will be documenting a scratch-build of a commercial real-time 4K post facility from the ground up over the coming year, as well as side by side reviews of competing technologies.

The site is very bare at the moment, having only been live for a week, but new content is on its way, and the forums are waiting to be used.

We have tried to contact Red corporately about this as we want to see Red take a centre stage on 4khub.com as far as news and marketing is concerned along with Assimilate Inc who are getting involved with us from the start but cannot seem to get a reply from anyone. If anyone from Red actually reads this post and wants to respond or at least copy us in on press releases and news that we can publish, please PM me.

Rich

[Tom Lowe]

Best of luck. The more 4K the better.

[Graeme Nattress]

4k is no longer the future - it's the present :-)

[Mark L. Pederson]

4k is no longer the future - it's the present :-)


so true.

The FUTURE is actually 4K 3D -

[Jason Murphy]

The FUTURE is actually 4K 3D -

Why not 6K or 8K 3D? Or holographic projection a la Star Trek? :whistling:

Regardless, the future will be interesting.

[Tom Lowe]

IMO, it will soon probably be 6K acquisition, finishing at 4K.

[Rocket]

I can definitely see 6K aquisition, but anything higher than that would far surpass the average resolving power of the 35mm theatrical print we are used to on the big screen, 4K already does that by a long way.

We're looking at getting a Northlight2 data scanner, it would be the first in S.A., although Filmlight UK are looking at putting one in Jo'burg themselves also. The Northlight will scan negative to 8K natively, but I have no idea what we would do commercially with 8K scans (print massive billboard posters maybe?)

Does anyone know about NHK's UHD camera, they had something like 7680 x 4320, and as far as I am aware they had a working prototype.

[Tom Lowe]

The reason to shoot 6K of course is to downsample it, which will result in a more pristine 4K finished product. Maybe with a 70mm-sized 6K sensor you could also gain more dynamic range?

[Jochen Schmidt-Hambrock]

Lets see when we hear "Had to downsample to 4K because the studio would not spend the money for a decent copy."

I never understood why "May you live in interesting times" is ment as a curse.

Jochen

[Steven Parker]

Does anyone know about NHK's UHD camera, they had something like 7680 x 4320, and as far as I am aware they had a working prototype.


Check out a short article at Film&Video:

http://www.studiodaily.com/filmandvideo/currentissue/8276.html

[Rocket]

The last paragraph in that article states:

"The project is part of a next-generation HDTV system that’s targeted for sale in 2009. To accompany the SHV video system, NHK is also working on a 22.2 channel surround sound system."

An 8K x 4K sensor is extreme enough and I know this isn't an audio forum but seriously 22.2 channel? When is bigger no longer better?

[Bruce Allen]

The last paragraph in that article states:

"The project is part of a next-generation HDTV system that’s targeted for sale in 2009. To accompany the SHV video system, NHK is also working on a 22.2 channel surround sound system."

An 8K x 4K sensor is extreme enough and I know this isn't an audio forum but seriously 22.2 channel? When is bigger no longer better?

Because humans constantly move their heads to localize sound, you really can't fake it - chances are 22.2 does sound better. A few years ago I was chatting to Tom Holman about his 10.2 or something setup and he sounded honestly convinced that it made a big difference. I trust him and believe him.

Of course, the problem is that I can barely afford good Genelecs for stereo!

On the other hand they don't go out of date as quickly as cameras / monitors / projectors / computers / hard drives...

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com

[JohnF]

I heard that some guy's were still pulling detail out of 35mm on 8k scans!

As for 22.2 sound I don't see how you can bend the laws of physics to make this work and be heard properly - just like 5.1 phasing from all those speakers just means the sweet spot will be very much smaller than the space between ones ears - meaning you can never hear surround sound properly!

3D surround sound is perfectly possible (and easy to mix) using 2 speakers. What's more by using only 2 speakers the sweet-spot is big enough to be heard correctly.


Anyway good luck on the 4K Hub. I'll pop in and have a look.

JohnF

[Rocket]

I heard that some guy's were still pulling detail out of 35mm on 8k scans!
JohnF

That's was Filmlight's sales pitch to us for the Northlight2 scanner, that even though the rest of the post pipeline is 4K, we would have a much better image scanning negative at 8K and downsampling to 4K.

Still, Scratch is resolution independent, and while it is limited in real-time cabability to 4K by the processing horsepower of the host workstation, and by the bandwidth of the storage, 8K can theoretically be graded and finished on the system. What to do with it at the other end is another question.

In all of this it seems we are held back by those two things, processing power and storage. It was a major mission just to find a storage and networking solution that would guarantee us 1.4GB/sec throughput for 4K.

Still, processing power is something else, a friend and colleague down in Cape Town who owns and runs DI Film Co builds monster 16 processor AMD Opteron powerhouses with 128GB RAM, your jaw will drop to the ground at what that machine is capable of.

Rendering a highly complex, high polygon 3D animation frame on one of his dual processor Opteron workstations took 3 hrs 23 minutes (for a single frame), on the 16 processor machine it was done in just over 2 minutes.

The thing is, technology will always progress, and we will always find ways of keeping one step ahead of it.

[Rocket]

Anyway good luck on the 4K Hub. I'll pop in and have a look.

JohnF

Thanks, I would appreciate that. As I said, it's bare, but has only been up for a week. I am busy with a few more technical articles that should be up soon, and we will be documenting our own 4K studio build from the ground up (literally from bricks and mortar) as well as all the planning that has gone into it, even compiling the business plan, raising capital, and the kind of factors that affect making a production / post facility viable and profitable.

So if anyone is thinking of starting thier own DI or post facility, stay tuned because we will be sharing everything, open source style, so there will no doubt be a lot of mistakes to learn from us too.

If anyone has any suggestions for articles or content, burning 4K post workflow questions that no one seems to answer, we will dig up the answers one way or another. Or if anyone would like to write and submit something of thier own, you are welcome!

I really want the forums to take off, but that will take a lot of work on my part in getting the word out, and a lot more time than just a week. Plus having really good articles will be a crucial factor in keeping people interested. I posted a similar thread to this on DVXuser, but they didn't even give it a chance and deleted it. Oh well, you guys over here at Red seem a bit more open minded.