How much resolution for YT? Contemplating going back to 1080p

[aaa123jc]

I am pretty much jobless due to covid so I have stopped following the camera industry since Jan this year, but recently I got a chance to test out the Canon R5 at their center. I was like "8K WTF" and "8K RAW WTF" at first. No word can describe my amazement. 

But after playing it in the 8K mode for a few minutes, for some reasons, the overheat warning popped up. This is totally understandable though. After all we are talking about 8K here. I will say the price of the camera is very competitive, very not Canon. And finally a Canon camera with IBIS! If I'm not next to broke right now, I will probably buy it.

Then the store clerk came and I asked her what was the bitrate of 8K. It was like 1300Mbps. 

I wonder how much I will be benefitted by this 8K technology, when most my clients only ever want 1080P. And how am I going to deal with the file size? 

Last year, I did most of my event video work with a Sony FS700 because it was cheap to rent and looked huge and impressive. Not a single client complained about the lack of resolution or sharpness. I found even the AVCHD codec was more than enough to work with. I even think the codec on the original C300 (50Mbps XF) and C100 (24Mbps AVCHD) are still perfectly fine for event videos, given you kind of nail the exposure when shooting and don't have to push very hard in grading.

For me, I shoot 4K with cameras like A7S2 not because I need 4K, but because the 1080P is just not as good. If the 1080P is good enough, I am more than happy to shoot it in Full HD. But I do see there are many situations where 4K or more is required. So I guess having more options is always better.  

[kye]

1 hour ago, aaa123jc said:

I am pretty much jobless due to covid so I have stopped following the camera industry since Jan this year, but recently I got a chance to test out the Canon R5 at their center. I was like "8K WTF" and "8K RAW WTF" at first. No word can describe my amazement. 

But after playing it in the 8K mode for a few minutes, for some reasons, the overheat warning popped up. This is totally understandable though. After all we are talking about 8K here. I will say the price of the camera is very competitive, very not Canon. And finally a Canon camera with IBIS! If I'm not next to broke right now, I will probably buy it.

Then the store clerk came and I asked her what was the bitrate of 8K. It was like 1300Mbps. 

I wonder how much I will be benefitted by this 8K technology, when most my clients only ever want 1080P. And how am I going to deal with the file size? 

Last year, I did most of my event video work with a Sony FS700 because it was cheap to rent and looked huge and impressive. Not a single client complained about the lack of resolution or sharpness. I found even the AVCHD codec was more than enough to work with. I even think the codec on the original C300 (50Mbps XF) and C100 (24Mbps AVCHD) are still perfectly fine for event videos, given you kind of nail the exposure when shooting and don't have to push very hard in grading.

For me, I shoot 4K with cameras like A7S2 not because I need 4K, but because the 1080P is just not as good. If the 1080P is good enough, I am more than happy to shoot it in Full HD. But I do see there are many situations where 4K or more is required. So I guess having more options is always better.  

One of the things I've realised is that 1080p is enough and it's the bit-rate and bit-depth that really matters, rather than the resolution.

I am probably standardising on a 4K or 3.3K mode on my GH5, but not because I need the resolution, but because the bitrate is higher.  Most consumer cameras have very poor bitrates for lower resolutions.  We've spoken elsewhere in this thread about it, but long story short, when people talk about "only shooting 1080p" they're often talking about shooting with higher bitrates than most modern cameras do in any mode at all.

Take the A7s2 for example - a very popular "professional" camera for events and the like.  How does the image stack up?  It shoots 4K!! but here's the thing - it only shoots at 100Mbps, whereas Prores HQ is almost double that for 1080p.  Additionally, people often buy the A7s2 for low-light and difficult situations, but those people "only" shooting at the 176Mbps Prores typically light their scenes well as they're on a controlled set.  What happens if there is a difficult shot?  Well, a camera that shoots Prores is often capable of shootings RAW, so they swap over to RAW for the difficult shots.  So now it's the 100Mbps A7s2 vs ~800Mbps for RAW 1080p.

The resolution doesn't matter so much considering that the final image is resized to the same screen area, so in essence, a professional camera "only shooting 1080p" Prores is likely to dedicate between 2x and 8x the data to describing every eyelash, every dimple, every lip curl, every subtle skin texture, etc.

Imagine how different the conversation would be if we spoke about bitrate instead of resolution......  "I'm not interested in these new modern cameras, I prefer the older less fancy modes, so because of that I'm shooting my latest feature film at only 800Mbps!".  Where's the A7s2 now?

I haven't yet done the comparison of h264 vs Prores in terms of image quality, but it's on my list to do soon.

But the more I think about resolution, the more I think that people like the resolutions of the newer 4K cameras simply because they give you more bitrate, rather than more pixels.

[aaa123jc]

1 minute ago, kye said:

One of the things I've realised is that 1080p is enough and it's the bit-rate and bit-depth that really matters, rather than the resolution.

I am probably standardising on a 4K or 3.3K mode on my GH5, but not because I need the resolution, but because the bitrate is higher.  Most consumer cameras have very poor bitrates for lower resolutions.  We've spoken elsewhere in this thread about it, but long story short, when people talk about "only shooting 1080p" they're often talking about shooting with higher bitrates than most modern cameras do in any mode at all.

Take the A7s2 for example - a very popular "professional" camera for events and the like.  How does the image stack up?  It shoots 4K!! but here's the thing - it only shoots at 100Mbps, whereas Prores HQ is almost double that for 1080p.  Additionally, people often buy the A7s2 for low-light and difficult situations, but those people "only" shooting at the 176Mbps Prores typically light their scenes well as they're on a controlled set.  What happens if there is a difficult shot?  Well, a camera that shoots Prores is often capable of shootings RAW, so they swap over to RAW for the difficult shots.  So now it's the 100Mbps A7s2 vs ~800Mbps for RAW 1080p.

The resolution doesn't matter so much considering that the final image is resized to the same screen area, so in essence, a camera shooting 1080p is likely to dedicate between 2x and 8x the data to describing every eyelash, every dimple, every lip curl, every subtle skin texture, etc.

I haven't yet done the comparison of h264 vs Prores in terms of image quality, but it's on my list to do soon.

But the more I think about resolution, the more I think that people like the resolutions of the newer 4K cameras simply because they give you more bitrate, rather than more pixels.

Yeah, bitrate and bit depth are no doubt more important than resolution in most cases. I think the reason I like the GH5 much more than the A7S2 is the bitrate. However, I think there is more to this issue than simply bitrate and bit depth because I do find the cinema cameras, even if the bitrate is lower than the A7S2, they still look better and take grading better. Could be because the cinema cameras are usually shooting 422 other than 420. Or maybe there is some secret algorithm? I don't know. I could be very wrong though. 😆

I think Prores is a very good codec and in a perfect world every cameras should have it as an option, at least up to Prores 422. Much better performance and better image quality than H264. It is weird that most cameras which can do Prores internally can also do RAW and in the case of BRAW the file size is very comparable.

The only issue I can think of for Prores is storage, but this is not a problem for everyone. It is for me only because I often have to film very long takes. 

[kye]

6 hours ago, aaa123jc said:

Yeah, bitrate and bit depth are no doubt more important than resolution in most cases. I think the reason I like the GH5 much more than the A7S2 is the bitrate. However, I think there is more to this issue than simply bitrate and bit depth because I do find the cinema cameras, even if the bitrate is lower than the A7S2, they still look better and take grading better. Could be because the cinema cameras are usually shooting 422 other than 420. Or maybe there is some secret algorithm? I don't know. I could be very wrong though. 😆

I think Prores is a very good codec and in a perfect world every cameras should have it as an option, at least up to Prores 422. Much better performance and better image quality than H264. It is weird that most cameras which can do Prores internally can also do RAW and in the case of BRAW the file size is very comparable.

The only issue I can think of for Prores is storage, but this is not a problem for everyone. It is for me only because I often have to film very long takes. 

Agreed, there is something better about the image from cine cameras.  

We know that different compression algorithms have different levels of quality even for the same bitrate, and this is where I think that the cine cameras shine.  They're bigger so can chew more power for processing and can manage the associated heat, they're more expensive so can pay for more expensive / faster / less efficient chips to encode the image, and they have an army of techs behind them tweaking things millions of times to wring every morsel of quality out of their flagship products.

However there are limits and while cine cameras make a better quality image for the same bitrate, extra bitrate sure helps.  

[kye]

 

[kye]

Screw it.  Goodbye 4K, hello 1080p.

Why?

I can either:

• Spend hundreds of dollars replacing my 2x256Gb SD cards with 2x512Gb UHS-II SD cards (to retain similar recording times)
• Shoot 400Mbps 4K 16:9 or 3.3K 4:3 10-bit 422 ALL-I

Or:

• Spend that money instead on upgrading the SSD in my MBP upgrade I'm about to do so I can edit files SOOC
• Shoot 200Mbps 1080p 10-bit 422 ALL-I
• Completely eliminate the proxy workflow I've had to use, with all the rendering and re-conforming timelines between proxy and original SOOC footage
• Colour grade on 25% as many pixels as UHD, giving me either 4X fps in playback, or 4X processing ability for the same performance
• Use Resolves Super Scale feature when rendering for 4K YT uploads (this looks pretty good after all......)
• Use the digital zoom function of the GH5 instead of cropping in post (this is for when I don't have a long enough lens on the camera - the digital zoom looks like it applies to the 5K sensor readout, so isn't a crop into the 1080p downscaled image, but an adjustment of the downscale that is already occurring)

All else being equal, h264 ALL-I codecs are slightly better than Prores.  Prores HQ for 1080p is 176Mbps and the best 1080p mode on the GH5 is 200Mbps.  Both are 10-bit, 422, and ALL-I, so all else is equal.
So, if 1080p Prores HQ is good enough for feature films then that mode should be good enough for me, where I'm only publishing to YT or watching locally on TVs.  The last footage I was involved with shooting that got projected came from a PD150, so the big screen doesn't factor in my world that much lol.