Television has changed more in the past fifteen years than its previous seventy years of existence. Between 1927 and 1997, our monumental breakthrough was going from black and white to color and the emergence of cable television. From 1997 to today, we have gone from cable to on-demand/DVR, bypassing cable altogether for services like Hulu and Netflix, moved from SD to HD, have had a re-emergence of 3D, gone from VHS to DVD to Blu-Ray, eliminated tape for file-based acquisition and now just a few years after we all bought HD televisionsºhere comes the 4K televisions.
All in all, it’s been a pretty busy decade. 4K (also known as Ultra HD or UHDTV) is double the pixel size of standard 1080HD. Where HD has a pixel ratio of 1920 x 1080, 4K has a pixel ratio of 3840 x 2160. With the numbers being exactly double of what today’s HD, you would that think that makes the screen to play it back in will have to be twice as many pixels, but it actually is four times the pixel count of HD. This will create much richer, accurate images for modest size screens and also the ability to have even larger screens with no pixelization of images.
The UHDTV standard supports both 3840 x 2160 (4K) and 7680 x 4320 (8K). The way the pixels are ordered is from left to right in each row, with rows ordered from top to bottom, and the pixel aspect ratio is 1:1 using square pixels. The standard includes progressive scan only and supports 120p, 60p, 59.94p, 50p, 30p, 29.97p, 25p, 24p, and 23.976p frame rates.
Everyone in the television industry from content creators to viewers is asking about 4K and what it is. The biggest concern is the forced obsolescence of HD cameras, monitors and televisions. Although the HD televisions aren’t in any means obsolete, 4K has certainly made us aware of HD being obsolete much sooner than we expected.
Many of the movie studios are shooting 4K now, but then they are transcoding down to 1080P HD. They are keeping the 4K files for archival purposes to re-release features at a later date. You will once again be able to buy a ™new∫ version of your favorite movie.
4K in the Editing Bay
Editors are also very affected by the emergence of 4K. The fact that the image size is going to multiply by four means any storage you currently use to store your video will be divided by at least four. Where you used to be able to store twenty hours of 1080P HD video, you will only be able to store five hours of 4K. There are also concerns about bandwidth of moving the video. It’s a concern that starts in the editing bay and ripples all the way down to the family TV room.
You will need to consider the following when taking on 4K. Can the processors in your editing system support such big video files? Do you have enough storage to support it? Does the path from your storage to your editing computer have enough bandwidth to move 4K? Does your editing software even support 4K? Do you have the means to transcode the video from 4K down to HD? Does your video IO hardware support 4K? Does your editing client/reference monitor support 4K? There really is a lot to consider before making the jump. Most manufacturers in the industry are supporting 4K now, but you will likely need to upgrade some components to shoot, edit and deliver it.
The file sizes of 4K can be downright huge. A full length feature film can take up to 10TB of storage of store. This does not include handles, unused footage or anything supplemental. This is great news for storage companies who feel threatened by the cloud.
4K in the home
Televisions, recently announced next generation home gaming systems, and most receivers are all supporting 4K now. But as of today, no one is really using it. The only place that takes 4K in a deliverable format is IMAX. Hollywood has yet to start releasing DVDs that are 4K. It is speculated that 4K DVDs will start hitting the market in 2014. As for broadcasting, there isn’t much going on in the United States right now. South Korea is currently the 4K leader, but Europe is currently broadcasting a channel in 4K as well. The U.S. will test a 4K broadcast this year at WNUV-TC in Baltimore (a Sinclair CW affiliate).
The biggest concern of getting 4K into the home is the United States does not have the infrastructure to do it well today. Google Fiber could correct this problem, but it’s not widely available yet. For now, any hope of 4K coming from the cable companies will be after the video is compressed down to the newly ratified H265 codec. The H265 codec (also known as HEVC ±High Efficiency Video Codec) is speculated to take the bandwidth required for 4K and will cut it in half. The other bonus of H265 is it promises to make better lossless compression of today’s HD formats. But even with these enhancements, home internet bandwidth is still currently lacking.
The speculation is that 4K will be hitting the Blu-Ray market first, and then trickle down to the other deliverable formats. Will this create a temporary re-emergence of the disk based delivery? Quite possibly. The video-phile and image purists will jump all over the 4K re-releases of films. But it could be some time before we see 4K hitting our cable boxes.
YouTube added support for 4K video in 2010 and they provided an outlet where you can download some test video and see the difference for yourself: http://www.4kdownload.com/howto/howto-download-4k-video
Steve McGrath is a Broadcast Sales Engineer for HB Communications. He has worked with NBC, ABC, CBS, NESN, NECN, Fox, ESPN, Pentagon, Powderhouse and many others. You can reach him at
Steve.McGrath@HBCommunications.com