Paint still wet on demos, so need some imagination, but wow-effect is there, for 8K, tiling and VR!
France TV has used the French Open tennis championship to experiment with new TV technology for many years. It was already here, over fifteen years ago, that the first French glass-to-glass live HD TV transmissions happened and then, less than a decade later, the first live sports 4K transmission.
This year, France TV Labs, kindly extended an invitation to me to have a look at their first #8K experimental coverage and many other innovations.
Thierry Fautier has already described the technical setup here, including some of the 5G mobile network aspects so that I won’t go through that again.
In a previous post, I laid out 8 reasons why 8K will have an impact and seeing it in live-action just reinforced my view. The short video I made on my iPhone of an 8K screen and published almost live, with no editing, was an instant hit on Twitter, with over 3k views in just a day. It illustrates the level of detail available in an 8K image. When you are up close to the screen, the experience is like no other. You have to choose which part of the image to look at.
Filmmakers and sports production companies must invent a new way of telling stories and how to show things before we can truly benefit. I suppose viewers might also have to learn to watch differently, too.
Naysayers complain that the colours were mediocre, and they were indeed very washed out, but it’s just a demo. The companies that got together for this only had the setup working just in time for the event. Several years on, there are still issues with colour reproduction for HDR whatever the resolution, but the industry is rightly confident that these are just teething problems. Another issue is that camera movement must be slow, almost languid; otherwise, the background blurs out completely. I understand this to be a combination of the too-low frequency (60fps won’t be enough for all those pixels in motion) and encoding issues. In 2019 it about 65Mbps is required, but for action sports, we’ll either need to go higher or wait for 8K encoding to improve.
I had a great chat with Bernard Fontaine, France TV’s technical innovation manager who was very upbeat on 8K’s prospects. I understood from our chat:
I. 8K film production tools, at least for capture, are now accessible. I saw a Black Magic device that can mix up to forty 4K signals or ten 8K signals and already costs less than 10k USD, which is also the price of a reasonable 8K camera. OK, 8k workflows are still a bit bleeding-edge, but not for long. II· Set-makers are successfully pushing new tech to the market when they need to, and most are already following Samsung’s 8K push III· The cinema industry could benefit from 8K as a differentiator for a while, so could jump aboard. IV· The big OTT players such as Netflix will start with 8K because it is easier for them, and it provides their marketers with more options for creating premium tiers.
The TiledMedia demo was another way of experiencing all the available detail. Tiling is a way of sending only the video that is being watched to the screen and letting the user wander around the video, updating the video to the right “tiles”. I describe Tiling in detail in an eBook here(page 22). The use case of letting users navigate around the tennis court by dragging the video around is very immersive, but it only works as a demo. We’ll have to invent tools to make this useful as well as fun. Keeping track of the ball isn’t easy. Creating any good video experience requires a combination of technical expertise and artistic flair. AI has been harnessing these in other domains, so we can expect it to do so here too.
Another amazingly immersive experience demonstrated at Roland Garros was a marker-less motion capture technology developed by GV CAP. You can play with it here. About a dozen go-pro cameras are used on the court to create the 3D model, and the French startup company needs about 5 hours to put the finished interactive model online. It allows the camera to be placed anywhere on the court. As yet, users must move it around. So as with the TiledMedia demo, I don’t believe most of us are capable of creating an optimal video experience until we are given powerful enough, yet simple enough, tools. Use cases such as having the virtual camera in the ball, are relatively easy to implement.
Both these interactive demos reassure me on a new concern that has been creeping into 8K Luddites’ discourse — beyond the tired arguments of needing too big a screen or the chicken/egg question of content availability. What if video consumption is changing paradigms? Could the not-too-bad TV set sales we are seeing be the last of their kind? Inertia from so many decades of consumption creates habits that take a while to break. Pushed by millennials, video consumption is said by many to be moving to small screens. There is little value in crystal-ball-gazing but lets a avoid a common error. When new ways of doing things appear, be it through social change or disruptive technology, we always assume that they sweep away the old ways. This is only very rarely the case. It is much more likely that new ways of consuming content complement existing ones rather than replace them. So the interactive demos I saw on small screens become part of the overall sports experience that includes 8K on the main screen.
I expect 8K to be a hot topic at IBC this year. Drop me a line if you want to meet up there to discuss.
[Update: I spoke to a film producer that has just finished post-production of his first feature-length 8K movie. He told me the workflow was a breeze — at least from his perspective — , and they did it all using 4K displays. Once editorial decisions are made in realtime on that basis, the 8K content is processed in the backend (i.e. the Cloud). That implies longer waiting times. He assured me the extra cost was not a deal-breaker, but couldn’t yet give me any figure. I’ll update here if I get those costs.]