Daniel J SaitTechnology never sleeps and just as the industry is getting used to the idea of 4K and the first announcements of viable content are coming through, the spectre of 8K begins to rise sometime off in the future. With help from Martin Ellis MD of matrix maker Pulse Eight and member of the HDMI forum, CE Pro Europe takes a look at where 8K is at.
Martin asks: “Are you ready for the Olympics? No? Don’t worry, neither is Rio. However, NHK (Japan’s national broadcaster) and OBS (the Olympic Broadcast Service) seem to be and they are ready to film 130 hours of content in 8K and this is newsworthy because so far OBS has not bothered with 4K.
“Despite the huge proliferation of 4K TVs and the reliable methods of transmission, the take-up of capturing live content has been weak at best and virtually non-existent at the Olympics. Take up of 4K production is very weak, with many content producers simply avoiding the format or waiting to see what the rest of the market does.”
Martin says: “Looking back, in 2005 Sky HD launched with 8 HD channels, while that might seem tiny, let’s compare that with the Ultra HD roll out, so far only BT has a single channel and this broadcasts roughly one program a week in the format.
“8K is starting to gain traction within the industry, it’s not ready for the CI or consumer market, let’s make that clear now. But from the content producers (those who will truly drive the adoption) it is gaining followers.
“The practical sides are quite evident. If 8K won’t be ready for the mass market until the mid-2020’s why not start capturing and down, downscale for 4K adoption now, but give ourselves a 8-10 year head start in perfecting the content capture and processing rather than playing catch up with 4K or having to do two rounds of investment over such a short period of time.”
Home Delivery
Just capturing the content is of course only half the story, installers need to be able to manipulate the signal and get it where it needs to be.
Martin explains: “4K was a lot of work to make it fit within the current HDMI cable. The category 2 cable specification hasn’t changed since it was defined and it can handle uncompressed 4K video just fine. But I will be honest here, it’s at the edge of what it can do, so the reality is any future upgrade to the HDMI specification is going to need some changes.
“The most practical way to do this is with a sidecar style configuration (a bit like USB 3), but the exact change hasn’t been defined or announced yet, but perhaps if you’re looking to future proof an installation don’t bury current generation HDMI cables or if this is the sort of thing you do, perhaps leave space for a different cable also in the not too distant future.”
Martin adds: “In reality however, most installers should be fitting some form of structured cabling, there is often a debate about Cat5e vs Cat6A vs Cat7, but I think probably now would be a good time to begin ditching Cat5e if you are looking for that long term upgrade path. “Cat6A should be enough for 8K using future HDBaseT standards, but nothing is set in stone at this point and there is no guarantee that HDBaseT will be the dominant high quality transmission format (although I believe it will be).
8K refers to the horizontal resolution in the order of 8,000 pixels, forming the total image dimensions of (7680×4320). 8K UHD has two times the horizontal and vertical resolution of 4K UHD with four times as many pixels overall, or sixteen times as many pixels as full HD.
In 2007, the original 65 mm negative of the 1992 film Baraka was re-scanned at 8K with a film scanner built specifically for the job at FotoKem Laboratories.
A similar 8K scan/4K intermediate digital restoration of Lawrence of Arabia was made for Blu-ray and theatrical re-release during 2012 by Sony Pictures to celebrate the film’s 50th anniversary
On April 6, 2013, Astro Design announced the AH-4800, capable of recording 8K resolution.
Public viewings of the February 2014 Sochi Olympics Games held in 8K
8K Super Hi-Vision transmission test using the Japan’s largest cable TV facility succeeded.
June 2014, 8K public viewings of the FIFA World Cup Brazil held
Video shot using an 8K Super Hi-Vision camera with a frame frequency of 120Hz shown for the first time in the world at IBC2014 trade event, Amsterdam.
In April 2015 it was announced by Red that their newly unveiled Red Weapon is also capable of recording 8K footage.
January 6, 2016, director James Gunn announces that Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 will be the first major feature film to be shot in 8K.
Rio 2016 Olympics will be partially shot in 8K
Plans are in place to broadcast the Tokyo 2020 Olympics in 8K within Japan
Bandwidth and Compression
So what impact will 8K have on the TV/screen sector?
Martin explains: “8K is going to have a massive increase in pixel count and while the panels will be able to display this much data, the human eye won’t see it all. The huge bandwidth increase needed to support lossless transmission is a major hurdle for manufacturers, the chip designs will be far more complex and expensive to create, so ways to avoid this and cheat are exciting options for them.
“The first idea that is being looked at is ‘visually lossless compression’ what this means is simply how much transmission data can be avoided, but still create an appealing picture that looks perfect to the eye.
“We already see a form of this going on now with Chroma sub-sampling, it’s been in Blu-ray movies from day one and no-one has noticed. It’s now the defined format for Ultra HD Blu-Ray content also, so I expect to see this continue into the 8K domain also. But this won’t be enough so true compression of the data is going to take place. “This will have practical benefits to our installs as the increase in bandwidth won’t be as great, this means that the current cabling infrastructures in place now should be enough.”
Martin adds: “The real future technical innovation isn’t 8K (adding more pixels is theoretically easy) it’s reducing the bandwidth required to carry all this extra data. I expect to see new ways of moving large amounts of data quickly and cheaply. This is what is going to drive the future of display technology not resolution.”