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by chavesn 3284 days ago
Yeah, but what about "zoom and enhance"? :)

Seriously, sure, 4K is enough for output but who says it's enough for input? As long as sensors keep getting better, the industry will keep finding ways to take advantage of it until it's essentially required.

Imagine a future where you can zoom in on any detail as well as you could with a high-res sensor at capture time?

It's not necessary for today's viewing experiences, but we know little enough about what is going to become popular that I wouldn't put ANY bets on "4K" being enough forever.

3 comments

I sometimes help film live events for a friend when he needs extra hands. Getting the framing perfect is really hard unless you're very good with the camera. Panning to follow a moving subject while simultaneously making sure everything else in the shot is desired is... really hard. Imagine being able to simple film a "general area" in 8K and the post-production team could handle all the framing/panning and still get 1080 output. That would be an amazing feature of filming in higher resolution. So the higher the better... let's get there, and make everyone's life easier.
>So the higher the better... let's get there, and make everyone's life easier.

Not really. For one, 4K already makes life more difficult, adding huge trnascoded files, slow renders, proxy workflows, etc. That's on a pure technical level.

On an aesthetic level, it's a bad habbit too and cropping in post is a lazy copout or an emergency kludge. Setting your frame is more than just "getting what you want in the final output", it affects parallax, compression, etc. Croping from 2x the frame is not the same optically. And deciding in post means a less well thought out frame in the first place. So, it's nice as a emergency kludge to save ones ass, for documentary, ad work or news, but not so good for movies.

You are correct it would not work for movies. For my use case, it sure would!
"zoom and enhance" is one of the ways 4K is used today in Sports replay to see details that might not be visible in a 1080p recording.
Enhance!