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Mars images rendered in 4K [video]
- magnetic 6y agoIn my youtube quality menu, it only goes up to 1080p. Is this really 4K?
- sgt 6y agoIn 9/10 cases you don't see the difference anyway unless you are actually on a very large screen and you don't mind wasting the extra computing power.
- crazygringo 6y agoIf you're talking about a beautifully mastered Blu-Ray, then that might be true. But given how aggressively YouTube compresses videos, watching in 4K can provide a huge improvement over 1080p even if your screen only has, say, 1,600 lines like my MBP does, instead of the 2,160 lines that 4K actually produces. It's really about the clarity of textures and how lifelike they are -- it's very noticeable. Of course, this also assumes you have good vision. I also don't think anyone's too worried about "wasting computing power" here for a short video.
- cbsmith 6y agoThat's curious. My observation has been that most of the streaming services have really high compression ratios with 4k streams. With videos like this one, which are built from still images, I imagine you still get significant improvements in quality, but for content that isn't so easily compressible (e.g. action movies), I've seen significant effects from compression in 4k streams as compared to "regular" 4k source material. As far as "wasting computing power"... I hear some people play video games while watching movies... on the same machine. So that's probably what that is about.
- crazygringo 6y agoThat's exactly what I'm saying, though. Because YouTube (like other streaming services) aggressively compresses both 1080p and 4K, but the 4K version still has a much higher bitrate, watching the 4K stream on a 1080p monitor will be significantly better quality than watching a 1080p stream on a 1080p monitor. I'm not saying you won't see any compression artifacts at all, of course if it's an scene you will. But the 4K version is still noticeably way better than the 1080p one, even in an action scene. It's a higher bitrate so there's more detail no matter what.
- cbsmith 6y agoYeah, what I'm saying is that because the 4k streams are trying to convey more entropy than the 1080p streams, I've observed that even though their bitrate is higher, the resultant compression effects are far more severe, to the point where the overall experience is better with 1080p, sometimes even if you have access to the full 4k resolution. I've seen similar effects with audio content (after a certain point, increasing sampling rate significantly more than bitrate has a deleterious effect). From an information theory perspective, you are obviously correct that there is more information in the 4k streams and therefore you will get more detail from them. My observation however has often been the opposite. My attempt to rationalize leans towards notions that the lossy compression techniques we use with video codecs still have significant impedance with the "compression" in our neuro-opthalmologic system.
- crazygringo 6y agoOh now I understand what you're saying -- that makes sense. It's not what I've observed, but I definitely can imagine how settings for the compression, or what the algorithm concentrates on, could make that happen. I'll have to pay close attention now! And your rationalization probably makes sense -- I read the h.266 codec is supposedly focusing specifically on perception improvements in 4K/8K, so it may be addressing what your'e perceiving specifically. Funnily enough, this reminds me of what I did with JPEGs on websites when Retina first became a thing. Instead of serving up different assets depending on resolution, I discovered that serving up a 2x resolution JPEG to everyone, with really crappy quality, was superior to serving up 1x with high quality. For 1x screens, blockiness was inherently shrunken because of JPEG's fixed block sizes, and for 2x screens the low quality was harder to perceive because it was at a small scale anyways. How compression interacts with scale/resolution is not a necessarily intuitive thing.
- chrisseaton 6y agoI believe it's worth watching 4k even on a 1k monitor, because due to chroma sub-sampling there is actually information visible even at the lower resolution.
- cbsmith 6y agoDo the video decoders take advantage of this? I was under the impression they did not.
- Zealotux 6y agoGoes up to 4K for me, are you on mobile?
- magnetic 6y agoMacBookPro with Safari.
- 1_player 6y agoSafari hasn't supported >1080p in years (because it blocks VP9 and Youtube has stopped offering higher resolutions in H264 that Safari supports)
- cbsmith 6y agoYup. Golden rule: don't use Safari for YouTube (or really for video content in general).
- ZeikJT 6y agoBlocks VP9? Maybe it doesn't support it but blocking would imply it is built-in but forcibly disabled. It does look like they're testing it since it's in tech preview [1] so once it's relatively-bug free they'll probably release it. [1] https://developer.apple.com/safari/technology-preview/release-notes/ https://developer.apple.com/safari/technology-preview/releas...
- rav 6y agoFor me, it lets me choose both 2160p(4K), 1440p(HD), and 1080p(HD).
- rwmj 6y agoI downloaded it with youtube-dl because I cannot stand the excessive adverts on Youtube these days. During the download it grabbed this video file: Input #0, matroska,webm, from 'New - Mars In 4K-ZEyAs3NWH4A.f313.webm.part': Metadata: encoder : google/video-file Duration: 00:10:08.41, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 4436 kb/s Stream #0:0(eng): Video: vp9 (Profile 0), yuv420p(tv, bt709), 3840x2160, SAR 1:1 DAR 16:9, 29.97 fps, 29.97 tbr, 1k tbn, 1k tbc (default) So yes it's 4K.
- geophertz 6y ago> I downloaded it with youtube-dl because I cannot stand the excessive adverts on Youtube these days. Can't you use an ad-blocker?
- beastman82 6y agoOr, you know, pay for the premium version
- kristofferR 6y agoYou're not really paying for the ads, you're really paying for an incredibly crappy music streaming service (Youtube Music).
- Thaxll 6y agoThe music service is different from ad-free youtube. As for YT music it's the same as all the other music service, they all have the same catalog.
- soylentcola 6y agoMine goes up to "2160p" but since the source photos are stitched together, I'm not sure what their total resolution would be (probably varies based on what/how many were stitched together). It's basically some pans across high resolution composite images. Quite cool but not captured video. As they mention, there's not much moving there anyway but it will be cool when someday we can look at high def (or even stereoscopic) video from these remote locations.
- nitrogen 6y agoYou can get stereoscopic images from the Curiosity navigation cameras. You could do a much better job of correcting the lens distortion, but I made an example in 2012 (I decided to make the sky blue as a stylistic choice at the time, for which I was rightly criticized as Mars does not have a blue sky and people might think the images were from Earth): https://blog.mikebourgeous.com/2012/08/06/curiositys-view-of-mars-in-pseudocolor-3d/ https://blog.mikebourgeous.com/2012/08/06/curiositys-view-of...
- hellofunk 6y agoI have a 4K option in the youtube menu. At one point in the video, there is a 1.8 million pixel image where they discuss and show zooming into the image while preserving detail.
- zmk_ 6y agoIf you are trying to watch this on a phone then the YouTube app is limiting the maximum resolution to the resolution of your phone.
- lm2s 6y agoI was experiencing that on Safari, then switched to Chrome and it now shows 4K.
- magnetic 6y agoConfirmed. Once I switched to Chrome, I could see the 4K quality option.
- cbsmith 6y ago2160p also shows up for me on Firefox & Brave. Golden rule: don't use Safari for Youtube.
- nitrogen 6y agoIs this about VP9 support?
- cbsmith 6y agoYes.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- developer2 6y agoFrom Wikipedia regarding VP9[1]: "Parts of the format are covered by patents held by Google. The company grants free usage of its own related patents based on reciprocity, i.e. as long as the user does not engage in patent litigations." Of course Apple refuses to add VP9; Google demands that Apple would never sue them over any patent. Any. It looks like Google/YouTube caved in, and has/will start encoding (the most recently uploaded) videos in AV1 codec, which will work on tvOS. Hopefully that will translate to Safari on macOS and iOS for those who use it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VP9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VP9
- cbsmith 6y agoFor me, YouTube is doing 2160p.
- SV_BubbleTime 6y agoI don’t know if it was a specific mission requirement to give the rover a camera that conveniently functions as a selfie stick, it’s pretty damn genius and gives the photos a lot of context and character.
- HorizonXP 6y agoI'm not sure if panning through static photos Ken Burns-style from Mars qualifies as "Mars in 4K [video]". But I appreciate that it makes these stunning images more accessible to more people.
- jeffbee 6y agoDoes this video make them more accessible? It seems to make them less accessible. It's a video composed of readily-available images from https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/images https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/images
- greenhacker 6y agoAt least they're panning at 60fps, decreasing tearing/seizures
- hijp 6y agoThe narrator explains why getting HD video would be impractical, but I disagree that we get the same experience from panning stills. imagine seeing the swirling dust, shifting sands, the bumps and parallax from a moving rover. that would be so cool!
- cpayne624 6y agoParallax, maybe, but no wind = no swirling dust or shifting sands, no?
- pier25 6y agoBut there is wind, and storms.
- jessriedel 6y agoThere is in fact wind. Only ~1% as much air as Earth, but it's sufficient to support phenomena like dust devils. https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2005/14jul_dustdevils https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2005/1... Of course, it's very weak, so it couldn't push over a spacecraft or building like in "The Martian", but I suspect sands shifts on a very slow timescale. I'm not sure.
- DiogenesKynikos 6y agoThere are "dust devils" on Mars: http://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2018/04/Dust_devil_on_Mars http://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2018/04/Dust_devil_....
- jessriedel 6y agoYou just linked to the ESA version of my NASA link :)
- DiogenesKynikos 6y agoI think I meant to reply to the person above you.
- oscarpaz 6y agoMy first video post and didn’t add the required [video] suffix to the title. Just realized about it, apologies.
- scrollaway 6y agoThis is a really cool video and I don't mean to detract from it, but seeing how its 10 minutes and 8 seconds long annoyed me so much (and not for the reason you think). "10 minutes" is an ad milestone for videos on youtube. I systematically click away and hide videos that are between 10:00 and 10:20 minutes long: They'll almost certainly have been artificially slowed down to match the ad requirements. It's infuriating, and once you know about it, you see it everywhere. Anyway, in this instance it matters a lot less as the audio is completely unimportant…
- alex_free 6y agoYouTube just changed the ad milestone to 8 minutes, and this was posted after this change.
- scrollaway 6y agoextremely recently, like a week ago or so, and this video was from 3 days ago; for the next few weeks I'm still going to look at the 10 min timestamp as more telling than an 8 min one (though I'm sure youtubers will "migrate"). Looking at the channel, 3 of its videos are between 10:04 and 10:09 long. Of course, that's nothing compared to a lot of other long-form youtubers I've seen with like 80% of their videos around that timestamp.
- Fiveplus 6y agoOn the same topic, who determines the '10 minute' and '8 minute' time scale perfect for engagement and how did they end up with these numbers?
- scrollaway 6y agoIt's the minimum length of time a video must be in order to enable mid-roll ads. The 10 minutes one seems pretty arbitrary, but to arrive at 8 mins I suspect that Google studies how much time there needs to be so that mid-roll ads don't negatively affect engagement. (Shout-out to all the wonderful, brilliant engineers working on figuring out how to minimize the user's reaction to cramming AS MANY ADS as possible down their brain)
- stephbu 6y agoThey achieved their goal of monetizing public domain images and getting it promoted on a social network.
- dmix 6y agoYou act like they didn't invest time and energy to create interesting content (compilation, editing, professional voiceover, community building, etc)? This isn't public domain pictures reuploaded on a blog spam website with zero effort. Not to mention spreading science wider through promotion is a valuable service to society. Not everyone browses nasa.gov sites. Nor does raw content always hit frontpage of HN.
- majora2007 6y agoA lot of people bashing on this, but I think overall it's pretty impressive just showcasing to more people what Mars looks like. I for one was impressed and enjoyed the panoramic effect. Crazy to think Earth might eventually look like Mars.
- shakezula 6y agoAnyone bashing on this has absolutely no concept of the scales or engineering that went into this. When I look at these images, even though I've known we had them for a long time, I'm filled with a tiny bit of hope for the future, something I haven't had in all of 2020.
- astroflask 6y agoSome of the bashing is because of the over-the-top narration, and the script saying things that are borderline lies. It's not the first time this images have been seen. It's not the first time someone has rendered them in 4K video (I'm pretty sure Astrum and Scott Manley have used some of these images before). When looking at the title at first I thought they had used an SR-GAN (or modern variant) to upscale the images. And no, they just took the images and pan over them. I wouldn't have liked the SR-GAN approach either, I'm not a fan of it (to me it trades accuracy for good looks, and it introduces some artifacts which, while harder to spot on video, are probably not really there). Also others have pointed out that it seems like basically monetizing public domain images without putting some effort into it. Like another crows has pointed out, they do work into writing a script, the narrator, and editing the material, so that's not a take I like (and I'm also "in the same business" as them).
- huhtenberg 6y agoErm... is that a puddle of liquid @ 1:53 or am I seeing things? https://youtu.be/ZEyAs3NWH4A?t=113 https://youtu.be/ZEyAs3NWH4A?t=113
- martin-adams 6y agoIt does look there's ripples in it, but I suspect that it's a pattern made from the winds and the angle of the light causing the smooth effect
- nobrains 6y agoInteresting facts that I didn't know before seeing this video: - The opportunity rover captured a barren scene which was named Rub Al Khali (Yes! On Mars!), named after the Rub Al Khali desert area which touches UAE, Saudi, Oman and Yemen. (1) (2) - The video says that Mars rovers send back images (not videos) and then those images are stitched together to create videos, because "nothing ever moves on Mars". But I wonder how a Mars video will look. Maybe it will surprise us (movements due to winds). - Mars has a lot of clay (i.e. it was once a watery planet) - Some videos took 1,000 images to make - There is a beautiful selfie at timestamp 6:41 - There is dune named "Namib" on Mars, shown at timestamp 9:10, named after Namib desert in Africa. (3) (4)
- nobrains 6y agoReferences: (1) https://mars.nasa.gov/resources/5874/opportunitys-rub-al-khali-panorama/ https://mars.nasa.gov/resources/5874/opportunitys-rub-al-kha... (2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rub%27_al_Khali https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rub%27_al_Khali (3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namib https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namib (4) https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/jpl/slip-face-on-downwind-side-of-namib-sand-dune-on-mars https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/jpl/slip-face-on-downwind...
- jerf 6y ago"There is a beautiful selfie at timestamp 6:41" Where's the camera in that selfie? Perhaps edited out of the mosiac?
- salgernon 6y agoThere's an explanation and video[1]; I remember thinking the same a few years ago. [1] https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/nasas-curiosity-mars-rover-takes-a-new-selfie-before-record-climb https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/nasas-curiosity-mars-rover-...
- jerf 6y agoThank you. That's probably a great example of one of the benefits of these rovers running for so long. They'd never have scheduled something so non-science-oriented if they only got the few weeks they expected, but when your mission exceeds expectations by several thousand percent, you have time for such things.
- throwawaysea 6y agoThe music overlay really gives the video a nostalgic feel...even though I've never been to Mars. For those who had the same question I had about whether these are actual colors, the narrator talks about the change in color between images and the color correction done in post-processing around 5:45.
- kyriakos 6y agowhat impressed me more about this video is how earth like an alien world looks like. it may not have vegetation but there's nothing I wouldn't expect to see somewhere on earth.
- johnyzee 6y agoI believe the images are quite aggressively recolored and cleaned up. The narrator states that the original images would be reddish and hazy.
- rement 6y agoThe cameras on the rovers are not the same as the camera on your phone or a DSLR. Each camera has specific sensors for different wavelengths of light [0]. The images are really just the wavelength reflection intensity measurements (think of it like RAW images on a DSLR but for more than just RGB). The colorization is done by taking several of these images for wavelengths and adding them together. For example blue is in the 450–495 nm wavelength, green 495–570 nm, and red 625–740 nm. The Mastcam on the curiosity rover is actually two cameras with various sensors for different wavelengths (including wavelengths outside the visual range). They can use these images to create color images. You take the 440 nm sensor and give each pixel a value between 0-255 and display that with more/less blue. Take the 525 nm or 550 nm sensor and make them green and the 675 nm sensor and make them red. When you combine these you get an image that looks pretty similar to what it would look if you were really there (It's called true color and false color [1]). This same process is used by satellites as well to measure and classify things on Earth from space. They way different surfaces reflect light in different wavelengths help scientists classify things on Earth and Mars and all over the solar system. (It's Okay to Be Smart on YouTube has a cool video about Infrared [2]) [0] https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/spacecraft/instruments/mastcam/for-scientists/ https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/spacecraft/instruments/mastcam/for... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_color https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_color [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srzniA8EKDk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srzniA8EKDk
- astroflask 6y ago
- ridaj 6y agoLooks like Utah...
- coldcode 6y agoLooks like the Atacama Desert in Chile, which is where NASA tests Mars things.
- coronadisaster 6y agoAre those true colors?
- DanBC 6y agoI think some of them are using the filters to show different minerals. But I'd need to check. Here's an example on the NASA site: https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/revealing-what-lies-beneath/ https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/revealing-what-lies-benea...
- coronadisaster 6y agoI wonder if it would lower the resolution if they would remove fake colors....
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- greenhacker 6y agoI appreciate the accompanying geologic info on various sediment and structural explanations which is too often missing.
- xwdv 6y agoWould like to see this as an Apple TV screensaver on my 4K oled
- gt2 6y agoWould love to see some video from there, even if it's not hd or 4k.
- coldcode 6y agoBeing able to see the geology this way is really interesting. Something made the channels you see, something ground the rocks down to a fine dust and even made that huge sand dune, something tossed all those rocks around. I always wonder if you drilled down 100 meters you'd find life of some kind.
- dopeboy 6y agoFascinating photos. I hope, sometime in my life, humans will be able to go. If the rover can stream to the orbiter at 2mb/s, would it be possible stream video to the orbiter and have it save in its buffer? Then it'd transfer to Earth later on?
- tsak 6y agoBut only for 8 minutes according to the voice over. Which would come down to 960MB in an ideal scenario (2 MB/s * 8 * 60s).
- nitrogen 6y agoIs that megabits or megabytes? Usually lowercase denotes bits, so I think you'd divide that total data size by eight to get 120MB. With a good codec 2mbit/s is probably enough for low-motion SD or 720p video.
- clueless123 6y agoWow! Looks exactly like the desert of Paracas in Peru. Amazing!
- hnarn 6y agoI can't find a comment asking this yet, so I'll do it: where can I get the actual images, not in a video? I'm assuming these images are in the public domain?
- jml7c5 6y agoSpirit and Opportunity: https://mars.nasa.gov/mer/multimedia/images/ https://mars.nasa.gov/mer/multimedia/images/ (raw: https://mars.nasa.gov/mer/multimedia/raw/ https://mars.nasa.gov/mer/multimedia/raw/ ) Curiosity: https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/images https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/images (raw: https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw-images https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw-images )
- vagab0nd 6y agoThere's a bird-shaped rock at 7:57 [0] 0: https://youtu.be/ZEyAs3NWH4A?t=477 https://youtu.be/ZEyAs3NWH4A?t=477
- amelius 6y agoIs there any "360 degrees" content, that can be viewed with VR goggles?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- mrmarrocos 6y agoLooks awesome! I love this images. There is a documentary on NetGeo that narrates this journey to Mars.
- sabujp 6y agocan't wait until they find a trilobyte or horseshoe crab looking fossil
- bawana 6y agoWhat was that blue sand made of? The rover left orange tracks so i guess it was use a dusting of something. Ice?
- MR4D 6y agoMaybe I’m missing something, but isn’t this just the Ken Burns effect? [0] Calling it “video” may be technically true, but lees interesting than Google Street View (which is not video, but more interactive). [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Burns_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Burns_effect
- grugagag 6y agoAnybody else getting 8k?