Justin Jackson wrote:The other thing that has my panties in a bunch is all these youtubers that are shooting 8K RED RAW.. WTF? So I am wondering with that going on now, if BM might consider an 8K sensor in the next year or so.. which I suspect might drive the cost of a 4K to 4.6K down.
More K won't make you a better cinematographer, and it won't make your footage look any better.
I highly doubt that BMD will be releasing an 8K sensor that soon; in addition to there being very few of them out there, most of them made for computer vision rather than for film, it's also a HUGE data rate which requires custom image processing and recording hardware presently. BMD's not going to launch an 8K camera until it can do so at an indie friendly price, so it might be a while.
Not that it should matter, since nearly every major film today is still being finished in 2K and up-rezzed for 4K releases, and still the number one camera in Hollywood is the 3.2K Super 35 Alexa line. Red's 8K is mostly a big-budget extravaganza thing, while most of the Hollywood folks who are using Red cameras are using 6K cameras. 8K nearly doubles the data rate from 6K... it's a BIG jump.
Plus, the cameras that are encroaching on the Arri/Red dominance are also 4K -- Varicams. I expect to see C700s in the Netflix arena also (I believe that they've been approved, as have the UM 4.6K cameras).
8K sounds nice and all, but keep in mind that the current "cheap" 8K option is a Red Epic-W, whose body costs $30,000. And that doesn't even include lens mount, monitor, or any kind of port (e.g. power, video, audio, etc).