I dont have bad eyes, I need glasses but Ive got them checked out recently.
But I keep beign confronted with a lot of people, from agencies to post production professionals that somehow all use “4K” like it means anything for quality of video.
some examples
That stockfootage is great its 4K!
The stream looks ok but its not 4K (reffering to compression)
I feel like marketing has won this round, and somehow 4K = “High quality”, I guess its due to a lack of understanding as to what makes a image look good.
Am I missing something?
also people calling 3840x2160 4K is triggering me hard… thats UHD
“The scene is not sharp”
‘but we shot it in 4K/8K’
“Yes but everything is out of focus”
‘so? It will be sharper as the spot is HD later and we shot it in 4K extra’
You might enjoy (a slightly lengthy) thread over on CML that has gone one the last week about why anyone serious really has to abso-f*-lutely shoot everything in RAW. It started with the Nikon Z8 launch, but also got into details on how the Marvelous Ms. Maisel was content w/o RAW except for one specific scene and why, and small pitch that Flame and connected conforms are a good thing…
4K, 8K, 12K, RAW are all loaded with a bunch of mythological attributes that are not grounded in reason, but in marketing spin, Monday morning quater backing, and other kinds of grand standing.
Yet, even my iPhone 13 can film 4K 30fps in ProRes
You know you’re not. We all know you’re not. Hahaha.
A while ago i supervised a phone commercial where part of the gag was “we shot this whole ad on the phone,” and there was soooo much talk about being able to push in ok 4k.
It cumulated with the agency wanting to shoot a shot in a mirror where the talent was filiming themselves in portrait and we’d do a landscape crop on the shot.
I was so ground down by these people and “4k, 4k, 4k!” I just said, “go for it, it’ll look great.”
I swear 50 percent of any ad pitch at that time was, “the behind the scenes video will be so cool!”
It seems like everyones is blinded by marketing like it just absolutely doesnt look any better but everyone SWEARS it does, it makes me crazy are they all seeign ghosts?! ive done back and forth tests and I just cant see the difference
My favourite nonsense on shoots at the moment is the agency insisting that everything is shot at 4-6K but the director then shooting everything on anamorphic glass with all it’s inherent softness, vignetting, aberration etc. You’re lucky if you get anything looking remotely sharp at 1080p.
Also feel for DoP’s when clients/agency ask for everything to be framed correctly for both 16:9 and 9:16. That’s another story I guess.
I once had someone try to sell me a UHD TV by showing me a trailer. Unbeknownst to them, I was the online editor on trailer and the image looked really soft on their TV. So I asked, “Is this trailer in 4K, looks a little fuzzy”. Somewhat surprisingly, he owned up to the fact that it was an HD uprez, but still tried to expound the merits of UHD.
It’s all marketing to put a sticker something and upsell it.
I used to do spots for Dish Network and at some point they started jamming this line in, “100% Digital Quality.” And I had this discussion with the client about how empty of a claim it was; “What is ‘digital quality?’ A FAX is ‘100% digital quality’ – it’s literally a 1-bit digital image – but it kinda looks like crap, doesn’t it? That light switch over there is ‘100% digital quality.’”
Every camera we use today has a critical component called the ‘Analog / Digital Converter’ which reads an analog signal from every photo site on the sensor and converts it into a digital value, which then gets debayered, processed and eventually stored as an RGB value for the pixel.
So it still all starts analog.
Same for sound. Every spoken word gets recorded through an analog microphone and then eventually goes through an ‘Analog / Digital Converter’ before being saved as a digital audio file.
One can claim a mostly digital processing chain, but it can’t be 100% digital.
What they probably meant, but expressed badly, is that everything was filmed and edited with digital cameras and modern software. There weren’t any tape based media involved anymore, nothing that needed to be re-mastered because it came from past, less capable equipment.
well as soon as a pixel lights on a display up its anloge again too
Same discussion as with “what is processed” when it comes to images, there is a law in norway where i fulencers have to state if their image was altered, i find this very difficult from a engineering standpoint as eveything goes through processing in some form.
that said I can totally do a end-to-end digital chain from source to broadcast where it only gets D/A converted on the display, full cg baby no camera involved
Yes… but the point being that it was just another example of marketing-speak that they thought sounded impressive because the average joe perceives “digital” generically as superior, and the fact that the phrase “digital quality” is completely empty drove me nuts every time I had to animate graphics saying as much The shittiest-looking source can still be “100% digital quality” if you digitize it (or in their case, also compress the f*** out of it)
its like all those vacuous claims made on ads for beauty products “…leaves hair 73% more shiny!”
ehh?
more shiny than what?
“84% of 62 people questioned agreed this is better” really!
Its not just marketing - years ago i was a vt editor in news, and was handed a press release by the news editor - just throw 20s of library stuff together for this. I quickly read the press release which said that today the “grimebuster team” was in a certain area of the city.
"What - you’re going to run a story saying ““today, the street cleaners are out cleaning the street?” Its literally their job.”
“Oh…okay…forget that idea…” and off he walked to find a proper news story.
