Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: What is it with Sony and 4k media?

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Posted by Jim Henk (Member # 3628) on 10-28-2013, 01:37 AM:

I visited a Magnolia inside a Best Buy and asked when 4k media might be available for sale. You'll never guess what they said... I was shown a Blu-Ray disk that said on the cover that it was mastered in 4k, and therefore, it was a 4k media BluRay disk.

WHAT???

So I asked what gave them the idea that BluRay could produce true 4k output. You'd better hang onto something for this one. Their Sony rep told them this, and to say this to customers.

WTF? Oh, I almost forgot. I was told that you could get this 4k output from any BluRay player.

Posted by Marcel Birgelen (Member # 6801) on 10-28-2013, 04:23 AM:

Without H.265 support, no 4K movie will ever fit on any Blu-Ray. AFAIK, there is not even a standard for that delivery format yet.

So, for now, you're stuck with stuff like Sony's own FMP-X1 player, which comes preloaded with a few 4K movies.

Physical media is dead, the next thing you will buy, will download your movies and put it into a DRM vault you're not supposed to touch.

Posted by Jim Henk (Member # 3628) on 10-28-2013, 10:41 AM:

I'm sure the format doesn't exist yet, though I'm not at all convinced that it won't.

What actually got me was the open bald-faced lie. Not even a half truth. No, you can't fly up to the third floor just by flapping your arms real hard, and no, BluRay cannot contain or produce 4K. If Sony actually did say that to this guy, and instructed him to repeat it to his customers... And yes, he was the senior guy on the floor.

Posted by Brad Miller (Member # 2) on 10-28-2013, 12:52 PM:

Remember when the salesmen told customers that "this new dvd/bluray player will upconvert to make all of your DVDs 1080P!"

Well in one way technically it is outputting 1080P, but the way they presented it was that you could buy this player and have no need to re-purchase your library in the bluray format.

Posted by Marcel Birgelen (Member # 6801) on 10-28-2013, 01:14 PM:

After they sold everybody a HD flatscreen and the 3D stuff failed to gain much traction, I hoped they would move forward with making OLED affordable...

But it seems the content industry is in control of technical innovations, so they're now trying to push 4K instead. Obviously that would require you to buy everything yet again in that format to get any benefits from it.

I recently read an article that gives the impression that 4K broadcasting isn't to be expected in the near future, because of the monumental costs associated to it...

Posted by Steve Guttag (Member # 268) on 10-28-2013, 01:47 PM:

With broadcast...it is all about bandwidth. It is quite limited and one is always trading quality for quantity to use it. Just what percentage of people will either want, or benefit from 4K in the home environment? Given that 4K inherently consumes 4x more space...what is the sense of giving is such a premium amount of bandwidth to satisfy .0000000000000000000000000001% of the technogeeks that have to have it over broadcast...and will still bitch about the compression artifacts.

Now for BluRay (or media in general, including download), that may be another story however, in the home market, 4K and above is going to be a thing of diminishing returns given present technology. How small are the pixels in a 4K display in the typical home environment on say a 60" and smaller screen? How does that compare to HDTV?

Now I wish theatres would adopt 4K a bit more...at least then we would be at 35mm resolution...but so many are tapped out $$$ and saw such an improvement in just having 2K that I don't think that is going to happen in any great speed. The cost of 4K seems to be coming down, a little. At least on the server/IMB end of things.

Posted by Scott Jentsch (Member # 1681) on 10-28-2013, 04:53 PM:

Congratulations on being on the receiving end of a knowledgeable Best Buy sales clerk!

That pretty much exemplifies my experience with any blue-shirt I've run into. They will flat-out tell you information that conflicts even with the little white cards they have, much less actual facts and specifications that are publicly available.

While it's entirely possible that a disreputable and/or clueless manufacturer's rep said such stupidity, I'd put money on the fact that it's just the latest non-information pulled from a blue-shirt's derriere.

Posted by Marcel Birgelen (Member # 6801) on 10-28-2013, 05:12 PM:

quote: Steve Guttag
With broadcast...it is all about bandwidth. It is quite limited and one is always trading quality for quantity to use it. Just what percentage of people will either want, or benefit from 4K in the home environment? Given that 4K inherently consumes 4x more space...what is the sense of giving is such a premium amount of bandwidth to satisfy .0000000000000000000000000001% of the technogeeks that have to have it over broadcast...and will still bitch about the compression artifacts.

With H.265 4K actually becomes "manageable", with about 20~30 Mbps per stream. That's not something you'll see rolled out as a real-time streaming service over IP the next few years. But for satellite broadcasts, that's not entirely shocking, since many full HD streams using DVB-S2 already clock in at about 20 Mbps.

quote: Steve Guttag
Now I wish theatres would adopt 4K a bit more...at least then we would be at 35mm resolution..

I couldn't agree more. But it's not only the theaters, it's also the studios. The number of 4K v.s. 2K releases is still really disappointing.

Posted by Mark Lensenmayer (Member # 134) on 10-28-2013, 05:55 PM:

Best Ad Yet for Sony 4K

Posted by Matthew McBride (Member # 6598) on 10-28-2013, 08:39 PM:

quote: Jim Henk
You'll never guess what they said... I was shown a Blu-Ray disk that said on the cover that it was mastered in 4k, and therefore, it was a 4k media BluRay disk.

I think this just amplifies the fact that most of the workers, if not all, at Best Buy know nothing about media equipment, even though they try to sell it. [Roll Eyes]

That ad is hilarious Mark.

Posted by Monte L Fullmer (Member # 2797) on 11-28-2013, 12:26 PM:

quote: Scott Jentsch
That pretty much exemplifies my experience with any blue-shirt I've run into. They will flat-out tell you information that conflicts even with the little white cards they have, much less actual facts and specifications that are publicly available

Try Radio Shack salesmen for they fit this category also. They're paid to sell, but know squat about the product they sell.

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 12-03-2013, 02:40 PM:

quote: Sony 4K Ad
"It makes everything you watch look better."

Uh.....no. No it doesn't. Not unless the TV is fed a video signal with 4K native resolution.

A 4K resolution TV set might make a lot of content look worse. 1080p might blow up to 4K and look passable, the same way 720p looks when blown up to 1080p. 720p & 480i/p content on a 4K TV might look really terrible unless the TV set has some active, intelligent image resampling functions (something better than bicubic smoothing) to hide an otherwise very obvious, sharply defined pixel grid.

quote:
Remember when the salesmen told customers that "this new dvd/bluray player will upconvert to make all of your DVDs 1080P!"

It reminds me of so many people who tinker around with Photoshop, taking low resolution images and "uprezzing" them to what they think is high resolution but is really blurry bull crap pock-marked with rounded jaggies. It's really funny when they do it to severely compressed images grabbed off the Internet.

quote: Marcel Birgelen
I recently read an article that gives the impression that 4K broadcasting isn't to be expected in the near future, because of the monumental costs associated to it...

4K for broadcast is impractical. Unless some tremendous break-throughs are made in compression technology I don't see 4K being squeezed into a 6MHz over the air broadcast channel. Bandwidth for cable and satellite delivery is pretty finite, even moreso than OTA HD. Aside from the technological challenges a bunch of other changes would have to be made to many pieces of equipment in video production and broadcast transmission -not to mention a lot of changes in home gear too. I remember all the hoops Dish Network had customers jumping through to switch out MPEG-2 based receivers for new models capable of handling MPEG-4. That process would have to be repeated with a jump from MPEG-4 AVC to H.265 HEVC.

Funny thing: that transition from H.264 to H.265 could still happen yet not deliver 4K to customers. Cable/satellite companies could make the jump to squeeze more channels of 1080i HD Lite or 720p content into the same space (like a satellite) using H.265, just like what they did with abandoning MPEG-2 for MPEG-4.

The Blu-ray Disc Association is working on new 4K standards for Blu-ray. This will probably require a new player and maybe even a different kind of 4K TV set. They're hoping to maintain backward compatibility with existing 1080p BD movies. With what they're wanting to do, my guess is they'll need a significantly higher capacity optical disc. In addition to upping the resolution to 4K, they want to increase color depth -which would also increase file sizes and bandwidth demands. The BDA would like to go from REC709 to REC2020, going from 4:2:0 chroma subsampling to 4:4:4. From what I've heard, current 4K TV sets don't support REC2020.

As far as movie streaming goes, I think it's a pain in the ass enough as it is just getting a heavily compressed 720p stream to come through without a lot of fits and starts. I think residential Internet connections need a great deal of improvement before streaming 4K video can become practical.

quote: Steve Guttag
Now for BluRay (or media in general, including download), that may be another story however, in the home market, 4K and above is going to be a thing of diminishing returns given present technology. How small are the pixels in a 4K display in the typical home environment on say a 60" and smaller screen? How does that compare to HDTV?

Going by some standard TV monitor sizes, 4K (3840 X 2160) would come out to the following:
65" = 68 pixels per inch
55" = 80 pixels per inch
46" = 96 pixels per inch
40" = 110 pixels per inch
70' wide cinema screen = 4.57 pixels per inch

Divide those ppi levels in half for 1080p resolution. A 70' wide movie screen showing 2K material (2048 X 852) is showing imagery with only 2.43 pixels per inch resolution.

If those TV screen resolutions sound like overkill, consider the following ppi stats:
iPad Air = 264ppi (2048 x 1536)
Google Nexus 10 = 300ppi (2560 x 1600)
iPad Mini Retina Display = 326ppi (2048 x 1536)
Galaxy S4 phone = 441ppi (1080p)

Naturally, I'd like to see movie theaters leading the way in transitioning from 2K to 4K. Maybe we'll start seeing a bigger shift in that direction once IMAX starts installing its laser-based 4K projectors. We'll see competing big screen theaters put in their own dual 4K laser systems. Perhaps some theaters will advertise: "we've already had 4K for quite some time."

Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 12-03-2013, 02:54 PM:

quote: Bobby Henderson
A 4K resolution TV set might make a lot of content look worse. 1080p might blow up to 4K and look passable, the same way 720p looks when blown up to 1080p. 720p & 480i/p content on a 4K TV might look really terrible unless the TV set has some active, intelligent image resampling functions (something better than bicubic smoothing) to hide an otherwise very obvious, sharply defined pixel grid.

I'd like to see how they handle a 240p signal. 240p signals on HDTVs, even CRTs, tend to look like ass. They look fine on SD CRTs, though. Actually they probably don't even have any analog inputs whatsoever which REALLY sucks! I was PISSED to find out that s-video has now been completely abandoned everywhere. In order to input composite or component on most TVs these days you need a dongle which converts the RCA jacks to a headphone style jack and JUST HANGS THERE. This is because there is apparently no room at all for RCA jacks on a TV that is only 65 inches big.

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 12-03-2013, 03:35 PM:

A 240p image would probably look fine on a flat panel screen if its pixel grid was shown at 100% on the display. Unfortunately the image would be a mere postage stamp with a whole lot of space around it.
[Razz]

CRTs had an advantage of not having a mechanically fixed pixel grid. I have an old Viewsonic P815 21" computer monitor at home. The picture looked natural at any setting from 640x480 to 1600x1200. If you change a flat panel computer monitor or television monitor out of its native setting the picture instantly looks terrible. The pixels being shown don't map evenly with the monitor's fixed pixel grid.

A 3840 X 2160 TV monitor could show 1080p content without the pixel grid getting jumbled all to hell since it's an even 200% size increase. However, the blown up image could look jaggy with 4 pixels on the 4K monitor sharply defining each pixel in a 1080p image. That's where the intelligent image resampling must come into play. Viewers wouldn't like a "nearest neighbor" style blow up of the image.

Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 12-04-2013, 12:03 AM:

For those of you who don't know what the hell Bobby's talking about with all of his "bicubic" and "nearest neighbor" nonsense, here is an explanation of the scaling methods:

Consider yourself learned.

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 12-04-2013, 09:28 AM:

But I thought everyone and his brother had a copy of Photoshop and fully understood those image resampling terms.
[Confused]

BTW, kudos for using Trajan, Papyrus and Arial all in the same graphic. At least you did use the better looking ITC/Letraset "cut" of Papyrus rather than the horrible abomination of it bundled into most copies of MS Office. That version makes me feel like washing out my eyes with Ajax when I see it.
[puke]

Posted by Mark Gulbrandsen (Member # 72) on 12-06-2013, 12:31 PM:

quote: Steve Guttag
With broadcast...it is all about bandwidth.

With the current data compression scheme the current ATSC transmitters can barely put out the 2K signal they do. A whole new encoding-compression scheme will have to be worked out to transmit 4K. If you all knew how much of the HD image you watch that have redundant parts in them from the previous frame (s) you'd be shocked. The only data that's transmitted is that which changes.