Four Terms You’ll Need To Know To Keep Up With The Digital Elite
Submitted by Peter Cioni on Wed, 01/11/2012 - 14:13
Deadline posted four popular terms at this year's CES and it's exciting that "4K" is one of them. Also awesome that the 2 "example" movies were both mastered by Light Iron.
4K: This video technology is still ahead of its time for consumers, but won’t be for long. The hype is that 4K images are spectacular because they have four times the digital information that you’d find in a good HD TV set – about 8.8M pixels vs 2.2M. Until 4K discs or channels arrive, the technology is being touted as the best way to watch Blu-ray discs, especially those offering 3D video. You’ll need a projector if you want 4K now, although some manufacturers including LG and Sharp say that they’ll soon sell TV screens that can display 4K. It won’t be long before there’s content available to take advantage of the extra pixels. Recent films including The Social Network and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo were shot in 4K.
It's pretty safe to say that the most likely way to watch 4K content is via the internet (YouTube anyone?), and not via traditional television stations or blu-ray discs. To effectively provide 8.8M pixels of information, content providers will need to rely on a very efficient compression codec (wavelet?), which is probably not something they're currently prepared to put on physical discs / transmit over the air waves. The internet--as a distribution device--is codec-agnostic, while a blu-ray is not. Also, it's much easier to expand the "pipe" of an internet connection (Light Iron has a 100Mb connection, expandable to 1,000Mb+) to accommodate these larger files, but other transmission pipes are relatively fixed.
Some rough bit rates:
2K DCP - 250Mb/s
HD Blu-ray - 25Mb/s
4K DPX - 1080MB/s (bytes, not bits)
2K DPX - 240MB/s (bytes, not bits)
