leonmoomin said: This year's are all actually shot in 4K (future proofing), but at the moment we don't have the means to reliably deliver them in a format higher than 720p.

Our videos are still of fairly good quality, same as most producers here.

Thanks for the feedback and yes, she will get the full treatment this year.

Lizzie Claymore said: Just putting my engineering hat on for a moment, unless you could shoot in 1080p/50 (which, until recently, was prohibitively expensive), you'd actually have been better off shooting in 720p/50 than in 1080i/25 or 1080p/25 so it was a good choice. The snag is that consumers don't always have their equipment set up to provide the optimum experience.

The perception of *dynamic* resolution is a function not only of the *static* resolution (720 vs 1080) but also of the frame rate (25fps vs 50fps).

Increasing the resolution without increasing the frame rate merely reveals more of the unwanted artefacts, so is an inevitable compromise. Since (until recently), emission of 1080 images was limited to only i/25 or p/25 then you were stuck with the problem of trying to represent motion captured at two different instants in time (interlaced) in the same frame but then viewed on a native progressively scanned device (i.e. anything other than old glass CRT) or you were stuck with the jerkiness of slow frame rates. Either compromises the "optical flow", as it's known in the trade.

Until 4k cameras became more affordable and enabled 1080p/50 shooting at sensible costs, the best bet was to achieve the highest frame rate possible on a progressively-scanned image (hence 720p/50). With H265 (HEVC) bit-rate reduction now becoming more widely available, that can now be increased to 1080p/50, which is an improvement.

Having said all that, BBC White paper WHP092 (which contributed to EBU recommendation R112) back in 2004 proved that the visual acuity of the eye is such that, unless the viewer is sitting artificially close to the screen then we are actually unable to resolve an increase in static resolution from 720 to 1080 lines in an average size room (since we're unable to get far enough away from it to enable the increase in screen size that would be necessary to see the difference ... or to put it another way, if you can see the difference then you're sitting too close).

Bearing in mind that 4k is, strictly speaking, 2160p (the 4k is merely 'marketing bollocks' as they've substituted pixels down the screen with those across the screen, the former having always been the previous measure) the move to 4k is, frankly, an exercise in screen manufacturers finding another excuse to con the public into buying the latest fad. It actually offers no visible improvement, especially if the frame rate is not increased to at least 100fps, for the same reasons as mentioned previously.

The snag with it, however, is that not only do you have many more pixels to record and transmit but you need to do so several times faster as well to accommodate the increased frame rate = massive increase in data rate / storage size. (So you're probably better off just shooting in 1080p/50.)

The only time that 4k will really 'come into its own' is for 'immersive environments' where you want to feel as though you're part of the action - though the filming has to be designed to enable that, as does the viewing environment.

I think, when it comes to sploshing and wam, the best way to be in an immersive environment is to join the girls in a bath of chocolate!

noelelliv said:

I'd disagree actually about 1080i50/60 vs 720p50/60 although interlacing is admittedly an absolute menace that should be abandoned asap. Especially in Static scenes, even on a small laptop screen you really can tell the difference between 1080p and 720p.

I think researchers under-estimate the capabilities of the human eye, they used to say you couldn't tell 720p apart from 1080p on a 42 inch screen, now that all tv's sold at that size are at least 1080p, I think most people will doubt its true.

You mentioned about a White paper proving visual acuity, I wanted to point out that in science, there is no proof, there is theory backed by evidence.

Modern de-interlacers are highly impressive although it'll never be as good as progressive, nonetheless Leon's videos are all shot progressively, probably in 25p.

Doubling the frame rate or the resolution doesn't necessarily result in double the bit-rate required for either case because of the way video compression works. x265 is actually offers little to no improvement over x264 at hd resolutions.

I accept 4k is still a luxury at this point in time, although I argue that even at 24p, the difference is still perceivable at reasonable viewing differences, and for 8 bit video without the "wcg" and "hdr" marketing terms.

I just think much higher quality 1080p can be delivered in smaller file sizes thats easier to distribute that can be easily decoded by all modern hardware.