Managing and manipulating 4K and 8K content

Perhaps the best encapsulation of the state of the art in Ultra HD came from Lewis Kirkaldie of Cinegy. “We needed an 8K screen for demonstrations at NAB,” he said. “So, we went to Best Buy and bought a television.”

Yes, not just 4K Ultra HD but 8K screens are now readily available from consumer electronics vendors. 4K content is available, albeit primarily from streaming services like Netflix. Next year sees the Olympic Games in Tokyo, which will be extensively covered in 8K using the NHK Super Hi-Vision system.

SGO has delivered an 8K-capable Mistika post production system to NHK. It has a storage network of one petabyte. On the NAB booth, SGO was demonstrating 8K/60p finishing on a standard workstation with a single GPU.

Will they become consumer successes? The gains over HD at domestic screen sizes are small: in general, to see 8K – and even 4K – you need a bigger screen, which changes…