Is 4K Worth The Tradeoff?

[andrgl]

42 minutes ago, Kisaha said:

Also, have you people noticed how bad the 80s and 90s and even early 00s, series look right now?

Seinfeld was shot on film and looks awesome remastered.

 

FUN FACT:

If you're watching a 16:9 HD version, you're actually seeing parts of the frame that were originally matted out!

NSFW example.

[deezid]

Well, shooting "4K" on a EOS R and assuming there's no advantage shooting 4K over 1080p doesn't make me wonder at all.
Shoot 4K on a Pocket 4K in cDNG, A73 externally, C200 RAW, Red Gemini with downsample from 5K etc. and it's a huge difference.

[Django]

FWIW pretty much all classic American TV shows were shot on film during the 80s/90s. Problem is the footage back then was immediately re-scanned into NTSC (480p) for cheaper/faster digital editing, fx, scoring & network distribution. Today only major blockbuster shows (like Seinfeld etc) can afford the complex job of getting "remastered" to HD/UHD. 

[kaylee]

@Django so true. im a big x-files fan, and the show looks freakin awesome in HD, i LOVE the color, everything, but a lot of the establishing shots are in crap-o-vision, and its really jarring~! like yes, its that bad lol

found this on reddit

Quote

I worked on the remaster. We did the best we could and did manage to get a lot of the stock footage in HD, but unfortunately we couldn't find it all. In the 90's during the show production they used many sources for stock shots. The whole two years we were working on the remaster we had a person at Fox trying to track down all that stuff. We honestly thought we wouldn't get any of it, but did manage to find maybe 25% of it. It would come from tons of random sources, sometimes we would get a random 16mm roll of film with a shot of LAX on it, or sometimes it was a clip from a Fox movie. There's one episode with an elevator crash in season 6 that uses shots from "Speed." The rest is an uprezzed version from the SD show master tapes.

 

[webrunner5]

There was a Western here called Gunsmoke that ran for years and years. And it was all shot on film. The early stuff was in B&W and it is just jaw dropping beautiful even on re runs. No clue the resolution, but man it was, and is special. That picture does not do it any justice.

https://www.gettyimages.com/photos/tv-show-gunsmoke?mediatype=photography&page=2&phrase=tv show gunsmoke&sort=mostpopular&license=rf,rm&recency=anydate&suppressfamilycorrection=true

[kye]

4 hours ago, Kisaha said:

Our monitors literally are inches away from us though..

True.

When I was buying a 4K display I couldn't decide between 32" and 42" and as I planned on watching TV/Movies on it I looked up the THX and Dolby(?) specs on viewing angle for cinema screens.  IIRC each gave a viewing angle range (which obviously varies depending on how far you sit from the screen) and I picked a monitor size appropriate to those viewing angles.

That calculation resulted in me getting a 32" display, which fit both specifications for viewing angle when viewed at my viewing distance, which was defined by me reclining back on my chair and putting my feet up on a footrest such that my feet were almost under the display.  

I haven't done a test, but at that distance you probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference between 4K 4:4:4 and 1080 4:4:4, but you sure can tell the difference between a YT clip in 4K vs the same clip in 1080!

The fact that we shoot 4K25 at 400Mbps is 1.3 bits-per-pixel and 1080p120 at 100Mbps is 0.4 bits-per-pixel just further exaggerates the issue.