As my good friend Mark Schubin once said, just because you CAN do something doesn’t mean you SHOULD.

The RED 4k camera is neat. Low price point, large sensor for shallow depth of field, neat packaging and outstanding marketing. But who needs 4k?

Years ago, Kodak showed a demo of different electronic resolutions to detemine what should be used in film digital intermediate post-production (DI). Too little and the image is soft, too much and you waste bandwidth and storage, not to mention cutting processing speed in half.

They took some film footage and digitized it at 1k, 2k and 4k and went back to film. They then projected the result, along with the orginial footage.

1k was too soft. Not bad but kind of the image you might see at a poor movie theatre. 2k was good. Little difference between it and the orginial. Then they showed 4k. It looked just like the 2k but with more grain.

Similar results were obtained with the higher sampling that Panasonic once had with their D-5 VTR for standard definition recording. They increased the sampling rate in order to make 16×9 anamorphic have the same horzontial resolution as standard component digital. As you know, 16×9 streches the image 30% horizontally on a wide screen display. The thought was to increase the resolution so the image stays as sharp. Well, in the demo, the only apparant change was an increase in film grain!

You have to think about what is past 2k. How much is the lens going to pass, how much is the display device going to show, how much the screen’s surface will blur fine detail and how good are your eyes? You have never seen past 2k in a movie theatre.

You can only perceive certain sharpness. If the image adds more detail, you won’t see it. Similar to high sampling rates for audio, if the mic can’t pick it up, the speaker can’t reproduce it and your ears can’t hear it, why record it?

As you know, the Sony Cine Alta HDCAM that was used the Star Wars and other productions didn’t have 2k. In fact, it didn’t even have full raster high-definition. The tape horizontal resolution is only 1440. I didn’t hear anyone complaining about a lack of resolution.

Tests examined by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers have shown that an average commercial film will project on screen around 1k in resolution. This is because of the generational loss that occurs when the film is copied or duped. Also, it was discovered the film instability when projected will blur fine details. An increase in grain will also make the image appear less sharp.

We can improve the projected display by removing the photochemical film process and replacing it with an electronic one. Oversampling the image is a good thing since it reduces anti-alaising artifacts. The large sensor is great since it reduces depth of field and lets me use selective focus to the best advantage. But don’t tell me I have to shoot everything at 4k. I could even make some camera adjustments and fool you into thinking 2k looks better.

I see only large budget productions using 4k. For television, “regular” hi-def is fine. And it is great that the camera can downsample in the head and output a manageable file size. You really don’t want to deal with 27 MB/sec. video!

The footage I saw from the RED looked great. So did stuff from other electronic cinematography cameras. Research into these high-end cameras will tricke down to less expensive cameras and everything will look better.

Ever see the image from a 1950’s black and white image-orthicon camera? We have come a long way. I can’t wait for BLUE at 8k!