How useful is 8K / 12K to you?

[kye]

2 hours ago, Django said:

You are incorrect. Those are giant 8K displays that first appeared in Seoul and are meant to push and advertise high resolution LG TVs. The high resolution is what helps gives the 3D illusion. 

I don't know if you've ever seen a large 8K display with actual 8K content but its pretty bluffing and surreal.

Watching a film in 2K theatres is a very different experience. My local multiplex has 2K, 4K, OLED rooms. You can definitely tell each a part. 2K is soft but that is not a problem and can even seem more enjoyable, more "cinematic". I rarely if ever pay the premium to watch in 4K OLED. I would pay extra for good old 35mm film projection of a classic, or Nolan/Tarantino film. I kind of hate the digital projection transition we're in, especially those cinemas with horrible low budget projectors where you can see pixels and/or low bitrate streams with visible various artefacts. 

Well, we're back to the "what is visible" topic again.  *sigh*

I setup my office (and the display that I'm writing this on) according to the THX and SMPTE standards for cinemas by choosing a screen-size and viewing-distance ratio that falls right in the middle of their recommendations (the two were a bit different so I picked a point between them).  My setup is a 32" UHD display at about 50" viewing distance.  At this distance I cannot reliably differentiate between an 8K RAW video downscaled to UHD and downscaled to 1080p.  At my last eye check I had better than perfect vision.

For 8K to be visibly different to 4K, you'd have to have a viewing angle considerably wider than I have while sitting here, which would (for those billboard screens) make them either incredibly large, or quite close to street level.  Judging from the angle and lack of wide-angle lens distortion from those videos, I'd suggest those signs are too far away from street level and not large enough to compensate, but maybe I mis-judged.  It really is a factor of viewing angle.

I don't doubt that they're effective though.  HDR is hugely impressive and looks incredibly realistic in comparison to lower DR displays.  I'd imagine that they'd have added more than a modicum of sharpening in post to those images, plus they're CGI which will be pixel perfect 4:4:4 to begin with (unlike any image generated by a physical lens and captured 1:1 from a sensor).  

In terms of your cinema comparison, I don't doubt that the images are different, although half of each cinema will be sitting closer than the recommended distance, and the distance that the 4K vs 1080p differences are tested at.  If we assumed that the middle-row is where 4K stops being visibly better than 2K, then I would imagine that the first row is probably more than half that distance to the screen, so it might be past the point where 4K can keep up with 8K.  I remember sitting in the first row of a crowded cinema (the last seats available unfortunately!) and having to turn my head side-to-side during scenes with more than one person - the viewing angle on that must have been absolutely huge!

[Django]

I dunno every cinema room is different. different screen sizes, resolutions, seating arrangements. Since COVID here all seating is booked online (although I've been doing that for years prior) so I always manage to get seats exactly where I feel most comfortable and ideal so viewing angle or distance is never a problem. YMMV.

[kye]

57 minutes ago, Django said:

I dunno every cinema room is different. different screen sizes, resolutions, seating arrangements. Since COVID here all seating is booked online (although I've been doing that for years prior) so I always manage to get seats exactly where I feel most comfortable and ideal so viewing angle or distance is never a problem. YMMV.

I'd be very curious to see the differences.  Having the differences in the same cinema is likely to eliminate a fair few variables from the equation (such as projector calibration, any image processing, etc etc), as opposed to comparing two different cinema screens from two different providers in different locations.

I don't think we have such differences here, although I must admit that I haven't really looked.  One thing I do notice every time I go to the cinema though is how the images don't look 'sharp' and when I imagine the image being sharper it doesn't seem as nice somehow.  Not as 'larger than life' perhaps.

[Django]

4 minutes ago, kye said:

I'd be very curious to see the differences.  Having the differences in the same cinema is likely to eliminate a fair few variables from the equation (such as projector calibration, any image processing, etc etc), as opposed to comparing two different cinema screens from two different providers in different locations.

I don't think we have such differences here, although I must admit that I haven't really looked.  One thing I do notice every time I go to the cinema though is how the images don't look 'sharp' and when I imagine the image being sharper it doesn't seem as nice somehow.  Not as 'larger than life' perhaps.

Well I do live in the city who invented cinema theatres and my multiplex is the most advanced in the country so I guess I have it pretty good (unlimited membership too but unfortunately very little time to actually go as often as I wished). 

The Onyx 4K OLED room is pretty nice I must admit. Haven't seen that many films there (again I don't really feel like paying premium unless its a Star Wars, Batman, Nolan or something really epic) but yeah you can definitely tell its next level. 

[ade towell]

Ah would love to be able to check out an Onyx OLED screen, how big are they, imagine it's a very different experience to say the huge scale of IMAX?

[Django]

4 minutes ago, ade towell said:

Ah would love to be able to check out an Onyx OLED screen, how big are they, imagine it's a very different experience to say the huge scale of IMAX?

My room is a 10 meter screen (400 inches?) so not huge at all compared to IMAX. The aim isn't really immersion but rather the resolution and infinite contrast. Most IMAX theatres use linked 2K projectors for slightly above 2K perception.

I'm usually on the fourth row 🍿

ICE is another fun concept they've got here :

 

[kye]

46 minutes ago, Django said:

Well I do live in the city who invented cinema theatres and my multiplex is the most advanced in the country so I guess I have it pretty good (unlimited membership too but unfortunately very little time to actually go as often as I wished). 

The Onyx 4K OLED room is pretty nice I must admit. Haven't seen that many films there (again I don't really feel like paying premium unless its a Star Wars, Batman, Nolan or something really epic) but yeah you can definitely tell its next level. 

I'm the same although with ticket prices here I only go to the cinema for the "big" films.  We stopped going during COVID and haven't really started back again, but before it hit I did plan to go more often.  Certainly, every time I go I wonder why it took so long to come back - I think we forget between sessions.

Partly returning to the topic of resolution, I wonder how much of the cinematic look is simply the lack of sharpness.  For me, there's this 'larger than life' character that cinema has.  

I've heard people say that it's due to the size of the screen (which can't be emulated at home because when you match the viewing angle your eyes know how far away the screen is and so know it's only a TV instead of a huge wall).  I've also heard it put that it is due to the close-up and the powerful emotion that good acting can express, and doesn't have the same visceral impact when the image isn't so close up.

I think that both of the above are probably contributing factors, but I really think that sharpness has an impact too.  Obviously if you're only delivering in 2K then that will limit the sharpness, and I have noticed that the level of sharpening from feature films is much much less than most YT videos.  If you were shooting on film or with a 2K sensor (no downsampling) then that will also limit the sharpness too.  
But delivering in 4K or 8K or even higher doesn't automatically mean the image will be sharp, it just means the resolution doesn't put a limit on the amount of micro-contrast in the image.  

Maybe higher resolutions are simply a 'new toy' for most who are shooting with them and they can't resist turning up the sharpening to see the extra resolution that they're paying a lot of attention to.  Perhaps professional colourists help to prevent feature films from concentrating too much on this, or perhaps people who are too obsessed with high-resolution simply don't progress to a point where they're being projected in cinemas?

I think that to some extent, the aesthetic of cinema being 'larger than life' is kind of by definition due to the limited extent that it looks like real life, and that anything that makes image quality more realistic (beyond a certain optimum point of course) is going to make it look less cinematic.  I think shooting and watching 60p video is less cinematic because it's more like reality in some way (it definitely doesn't look like reality, but it's closer than 24p).  Computer games that are rendered in 100fps or more are more like real-life again, and definitely don't look cinematic.

To me, the moments of human experience that aren't like real life are dreams or high-emotional situations where the world goes into slow motion.  I wonder how much that the limited sharpness, the 24p motion-blur, and the numerous other techniques involved are targeting that aesthetic of being recognisable as reality but not quite being real, and therefore allow us to perceive them differently - "suspension of disbelief".  To me, some of the best films, games, stories, etc take place in worlds where the nature of reality is somehow altered, it doesn't have to be by a huge amount, but enough to take you to another place.

Resolution and 8K capture doesn't prevent that, but it comes with a cost:

• the equipment has to be much more advanced for other aspects not to suffer (RS, etc)
• the film-maker has to have the creative vision to realise that sharpness and resolution of the image should be adjusted in service of the objective aesthetic of the project, and that the optimum amount isn't the maximum possible

[Kisaha]

https://thenextweb.com/news/the-eus-8k-tv-ban-will-be-a-nightmare-for-startups

[BTM_Pix]

35 minutes ago, Kisaha said:

https://thenextweb.com/news/the-eus-8k-tv-ban-will-be-a-nightmare-for-startups

This is from the original piece cited in the nextweb piece....

"The requirements relate to the default picture mode that a TV ships with. TVs can still offer other picture modes that consume more power as manual selections that must present on-screen a warning notification making the user aware of the increased energy consumption."

I'm guessing that the workaround for this directive will be manufacturers making the default picture profile to be everything set to 0 !

https://www.flatpanelshd.com/focus.php?subaction=showfull&id=1665647227

[kye]

3 hours ago, BTM_Pix said:

I'm guessing that the workaround for this directive will be manufacturers making the default picture profile to be everything set to 0 !

Or on startup it asks "Would you like to get the best image quality?" and yes takes you to 8K, and probably also enables that stupid motion smoothing thing that makes everything look like Days Of Our Lives.