Savannah Miller wrote:For CG you don't really need higher voxel counts, higher resolution textures, or higher resolution matte paintings than what is already done. Most matte painting artists work in 4K already, and generally FX work is simmed at the highest acceptable resolution already. If you shade it correctly, you might not have necessarily 4K worth of detail, but it will look smooth and you won't see any blockiness. Plus you can cheat the shading of fluids in many ways or even upres them. Likewise, standard texturing and modeling of TV and Film assets should easily hold 4K worth of detail as well.
On top of that, rendering CG in 4K doesn't exactly take 4x longer anymore. A lot of TV houses are switching to GPU rendering such as redshift and sometimes even octane. Those take barely longer for significant resolution increases. That's at least what we use where I work and it's very good.
I think that the only real difference is a slight increase in render times and the network speed difference when compositing 4K plates vs 1080p. Other than that, it's not that much slower like you would assume. With the difference between 4K and 1080p production, there's very few times where someone is 1:1 inspecting different areas of the 4K image to make sure it has the full 4K worth of detail. If it looks better than 1080p, than that is often good enough.
My estimation from all the 4K vs 1080p shows we do is that it takes about 20-30% longer to do an easier shot (shots that take less than 1 hour), and then the real issues come from very long shots where it sometimes takes twice as long.
Compositing and tracking are probably the areas that seem to be most affected by the 4K switch.
Savannah wins the logic reality award. None of this simplistic quadrupling of numbers. The resolution of a texture only makes an big difference when you are either close enough to see it, or it somehow effects the lighting etc. So, I could have 3D dirt texture (particles prefered) but until you get close enough, it doesn't need too much resolution. However, modern 3D graphics are a bit more sophisticated than that these days. But many things are so far away you could use even gey away with corse texturing.
A lot of you guys are not really contributing much but insisting your perception is it. This is a market. 8k and beyond has real uses, especially in quality. The market depends on new sales to continue. The market realised this, and doesn't agree with you guys, but are pushing to 8k and beyond.
You are also quoting what it looks like on yesteryear equipment, equipment (and yesteryear mistakes) with no vision for tomorrow year. Like those that argued Standard Definition was enough. The equipment planned in the next 10 years, makes handling 8k look like handling 176 phone video in jpeg. We are talking hundred to a million times more computing power.
Should one aregue that we should not have more than Standard Definition, or more than 2k on some me future 120-200 inch+ reality screen? Of course not. 2k with start looking like SD video on a big screen, vhs on your 55 inch. It is about what you can deliver against others
Now, a final point, you guys have not sort of spotted that current favorite delivery camera might still be low resolution, and though short of the 16.5 stop across the board human vision related gold standard (not even Red does that, look at the tests), they have not improved much has not improved much over the years. That they might be on a technology island, land locked. Not the sort of thing to compare against. If you are on a technology island you had better hop to the.next one, before somebody else sales by and gets there first. Now, Red, on-semi, Sony and Canon are. Past reputation is a delusion against future reality of reputation changes.
Having said all this, Red wins in certain aspects, as does BM. But Arii has a track record that makes it a lowering common dominator quality standard, but integrated, durable and reliable, all the things that matter when million of dollar budgets depend on the camera and not going faulty and halting the days timeline, which is the multimillion dollar timeline. Which do you get in, the battle tank that will chug along.all day but still make pretty images.
Now, on image rendering IQ. I forget that Red has there raw bayer? encrypted tied down, restricting options. Frankly, my less than $100 HD camera produced more pleasing pictures than I saw graded from the RedOne when it came out, and this took a while to change. I don't often say anything at all about that, maybe Jim will stop talking to me. It is a matter about who you have to do those things, and if it is about "loyality" they should be loyal enough to step aside and let somebody better than them take the lead, and work with that person. I can tell you, I have conversations with many technical people cutting edge to lower edge, and I can quickly tell how stuffed up they are by the logic of their answers. The cutting edge people are completely different and easier to converse with than others. The few that are reasonable, usually turn out to have big stuff going on behind the scenes. You can actually learn things from them that are not just the trivia of experience. They weigh up things, hopefully reasonably objectively.