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> Also it looks like 4K is their minimum standard now. I bet the higher resolution makes it easier, with big*ss GPUs to clean up the raw footage. Resolution is

> Also it looks like 4K is their minimum standard now. I bet the higher resolution makes it easier, with big*ss GPUs to clean up the raw footage. Resolution is far less important than bit color depth. We barely need 4K(Alexa used to be 2K) much less 8K footage for something to look good on a tv.

shiftpgdn 5y ago
Sure is nice to crop in though.
- nopenopenopeno 5y ago
  If you’re shooting 4K, you have to be calculated with your lens configuration to actually get that resolution at the sensor. After that kind of effort, cropping your shot in post is going to be a silly step to take.
  - shiftpgdn 5y ago
    You don’t have to crop in significantly, but just trim edges/etc.
rectang 5y ago
I would think that capturing at higher resolutions makes it feasible to crop and zoom? In digital production, you always want to work at high resolution for all intermediate stages, then reduce bit depth only during the final output stage. When I worked in music production a while back, we often had the problem of source material recorded at low amplitude to 16-bit media (e.g. DAT, CDDA, ADAT). While 16-bit is theoretically sufficient, in the real world you need headroom while recording in order to avoid clipping. So we'd often wind up with grungy sound from inadequate bit-depth during capture and intermediate production.
- ace2358 5y ago
  I know recording live music can get hairy, but yikes! How was 16bits not enough? Were all the preamps set to max? Who records at -12db - -6db? Record at a way lower level and boost at the amp stage?
  - rectang 5y ago
    Imagine you're recording highly dynamic music, like Jazz. Clipping is absolutely never OK. You have to leave tons of headroom, there's no other way. So 16 bits is not enough for live capture — especially when the source is dynamic or the recording conditions are chaotic. The studio I used to work at was one of the first ADAT studios back in the 90s, and they did a lot of rock. One of the ways they got past the limitations of the medium was to compress and limit to tape. You generally don't want to do that unless you have tons of time to set up and get it right (a la Rudy Van Gelder), which was not in most budgets. But it worked well enough and the ADAT recordings out of this studio sounded way better than most. Mercifully storage has gotten cheaper in the decades since and you really shouldn't capture to 16 bits any more.
    - m-ee 5y ago
      I had the privilege of visiting the van Gelder studio in high school. I asked him about analog vs digital and surprisingly he said he was all in on digital and spending his days remastering his old work with modern tools.
    - tshaddox 5y ago
      How much post-production dynamic range do you really need/want for live jazz recordings? Surely 50 dB would be plenty, and even that would be pretty impractical to listen to except in very quiet environments. Wouldn’t 16 bit digital audio easily give you 50 dB of usable dynamic range and still have like another 50 dB of headroom?
      - rectang 5y ago
        Say that I need a 300x400 image for a webpage. Does it make sense to set my camera to take 300x400 pictures? What happens when we crop and postprocess? If we want the best quality end product, free from low-res artifacting, we need to preserve an excess of resolution all the way through production until the final export. Exactly how headroom much is enough? Enough that artifacts arising from insufficient resolution are not perceivable in the end product.
- rbanffy 5y ago
  > capturing at higher resolutions makes it feasible to crop and zoom? The more you capture, the more you have to play with at later production stages.
  - germinalphrase 5y ago
    And pay for. Larger data size across the chain isn’t costless.
    - rbanffy 5y ago
      Overall, data storage is not a large fraction of the cost of a TV series or movie production. If your assets grow too big and you don't plan on accessing them, you can store them in cold cloud, or archive-grade BD and tapes.
WalterBright 5y ago
> Resolution is far less important than bit color depth. I discovered this playing with my scanner, looking for the best settings. It surprised me.
Pulcinella 5y ago
I wish we would move to higher bit color for playback as well. Dark scenes very easily result in banding (especially with streaming compression). With video shot with cameras there is usually noise and grain (real or artificial) to help break it up some, but dark scenes in video games almost always look like garbage to me. Some games, like Playdead’s Inside get around this by, again, add a ton of noise to the image, but that doesn’t always work stylistically.
ollifi 5y ago
Also compression. ARRI 2.5k cameras made decent images as they were lot less compressed as some 4K cameras at the time. Netflix streams 4K but often doesn’t look so great over internet compared to any cinema in my area which projects only 2K on a huge screen but from bigger files.

shiftpgdn 5y ago

Sure is nice to crop in though.

nopenopenopeno 5y ago
If you’re shooting 4K, you have to be calculated with your lens configuration to actually get that resolution at the sensor. After that kind of effort, cropping your shot in post is going to be a silly step to take.
- shiftpgdn 5y ago
  You don’t have to crop in significantly, but just trim edges/etc.

rectang 5y ago

I would think that capturing at higher resolutions makes it feasible to crop and zoom? In digital production, you always want to work at high resolution for all intermediate stages, then reduce bit depth only during the final output stage. When I worked in music production a while back, we often had the problem of source material recorded at low amplitude to 16-bit media (e.g. DAT, CDDA, ADAT). While 16-bit is theoretically sufficient, in the real world you need headroom while recording in order to avoid clipping. So we'd often wind up with grungy sound from inadequate bit-depth during capture and intermediate production.

ace2358 5y ago
I know recording live music can get hairy, but yikes! How was 16bits not enough? Were all the preamps set to max? Who records at -12db - -6db? Record at a way lower level and boost at the amp stage?
- rectang 5y ago
  Imagine you're recording highly dynamic music, like Jazz. Clipping is absolutely never OK. You have to leave tons of headroom, there's no other way. So 16 bits is not enough for live capture — especially when the source is dynamic or the recording conditions are chaotic. The studio I used to work at was one of the first ADAT studios back in the 90s, and they did a lot of rock. One of the ways they got past the limitations of the medium was to compress and limit to tape. You generally don't want to do that unless you have tons of time to set up and get it right (a la Rudy Van Gelder), which was not in most budgets. But it worked well enough and the ADAT recordings out of this studio sounded way better than most. Mercifully storage has gotten cheaper in the decades since and you really shouldn't capture to 16 bits any more.
  - m-ee 5y ago
    I had the privilege of visiting the van Gelder studio in high school. I asked him about analog vs digital and surprisingly he said he was all in on digital and spending his days remastering his old work with modern tools.
  - tshaddox 5y ago
    How much post-production dynamic range do you really need/want for live jazz recordings? Surely 50 dB would be plenty, and even that would be pretty impractical to listen to except in very quiet environments. Wouldn’t 16 bit digital audio easily give you 50 dB of usable dynamic range and still have like another 50 dB of headroom?
    - rectang 5y ago
      Say that I need a 300x400 image for a webpage. Does it make sense to set my camera to take 300x400 pictures? What happens when we crop and postprocess? If we want the best quality end product, free from low-res artifacting, we need to preserve an excess of resolution all the way through production until the final export. Exactly how headroom much is enough? Enough that artifacts arising from insufficient resolution are not perceivable in the end product.
rbanffy 5y ago
> capturing at higher resolutions makes it feasible to crop and zoom? The more you capture, the more you have to play with at later production stages.
- germinalphrase 5y ago
  And pay for. Larger data size across the chain isn’t costless.
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    Overall, data storage is not a large fraction of the cost of a TV series or movie production. If your assets grow too big and you don't plan on accessing them, you can store them in cold cloud, or archive-grade BD and tapes.

WalterBright 5y ago

> Resolution is far less important than bit color depth. I discovered this playing with my scanner, looking for the best settings. It surprised me.

Pulcinella 5y ago

I wish we would move to higher bit color for playback as well. Dark scenes very easily result in banding (especially with streaming compression). With video shot with cameras there is usually noise and grain (real or artificial) to help break it up some, but dark scenes in video games almost always look like garbage to me. Some games, like Playdead’s Inside get around this by, again, add a ton of noise to the image, but that doesn’t always work stylistically.

ollifi 5y ago

Also compression. ARRI 2.5k cameras made decent images as they were lot less compressed as some 4K cameras at the time. Netflix streams 4K but often doesn’t look so great over internet compared to any cinema in my area which projects only 2K on a huge screen but from bigger files.