SMPTE: “Optimism for 8K despite no Olympics”
July 29, 2020
By Chris Forrester
A report from standards body SMPTE quotes Chris Chinnock, president of Insight Media and the executive director of the 8K Association, as saying that 2020 was going to be the big year for 8K transmission because of the Tokyo Olympic Games.
“That was going to be the premier event, all kinds of new equipment was going to be announced, and there was going to be some hype and pomp and circumstance around 8K, certainly in Japan. Now, all that is postponed at least a year, so we will have to wait and see what happens,” says Chinnock in a report from Michael Goldman.
Chinnock, however, remains optimistic about 8K: “Although [the virus] took a lot of wind out of the balloon, in talking to a number of vendors who were at NAB last year, and folks who were planning to go to IBC this year, I’m being told that many of the [8K-related] products they were planning to release are pretty much going to come out as scheduled,”
“But that said, whenever you are doing production, 8K capture continues to make sense in many areas. The phenomenon of over-sampling—capturing in 8K and delivering in 4K or 2K or some other lower resolution—offers the same benefits that we got when 4K cameras came out several years ago. There remains a great benefit in terms of capturing at higher resolution, even if delivery will be lower resolution. If you capture at the higher resolution and downscale the whole image, you create a better fidelity image than you would have captured at a native lower resolution. This also allows you to do panning-and-scanning and cropping, meaning you can manipulate the image in more flexible ways,” adds Chinnock.
He says that sports producers are looking at interesting production techniques for 8K by using two or three 8K cameras to view the complete field of play and then cropping/zooming into the action. “One 8K camera can potentially do the job of two to four standalone cameras. That is pretty powerful stuff.”
Chinnock stresses that 8K now have all the equipment need for live and file-based images capture. He also believes that higher-quality video has never been so important and certainly in this age of streaming.
He also states that 8K displays sit at the top of the TV pyramid in terms of quality, complete with Wide Colour Gamut, higher dynamic range and luminance levels.