If not to Infinity, at least to 4K and beyond. 4K? You can see that in your local multiplex, if they have Sony Cinema projectors or one of the new 4K DLP projectors. 5K? Piece of cake. Just buy a new Epic or Scarlett camera from Red with the 5K Mysterium-X sensor. 8K? NHK has discussed their new UHDTV sensor at the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference, (ISSCC2012 ) with 8K resolution. The Sony F65 camera also uses a sensor with pixels on an 8K pitch, although the the goal was to over-sample in order to produce better 4K images for the cinema. Better 4K images than regular 4K images? They should be pretty good.

High resolution displays are here in the form of 4K projectors and QFHD LCD panels. These high-resolution displays can provide better images than “low resolution” 2K or 1080p displays, even when the input is 2K or FHD and the content needs to be up-scaled. The content creators are not lagging behind, however, and they are beginning to make moving images with resolution of 4K and other properties such as higher bit depth and faster frame rates that are higher than any current standard, including DCI.

I recently attended a SMPTE New York section meeting titled “4K and Beyond: Developments in Cameras and Workflow.” The main emphasis was on producing the best possible movies (I can’t call them films — no film involved!) to be shown on 4K projectors in the cinema.

There were four speakers at the meeting, including David Leitner, an independent filmmaker and director of photography with experience in making movies with digital cinema cameras, Hugo Gaggioni from Sony Electronics, Larry Thorpe from Canon USA and Stuart English from Red Inc. The meeting was held at the AbelCine space in Manhattan and drew a standing-room only crowd of about 100 people. With four speakers and such a compelling topic, the meeting lasted longer than most such meetings, almost three hours. Thank goodness there was beer, soda and snacks available — most attendees including me, missed dinner.

David Leitner’s and Larry Thorpe’s talks were mostly tutorial. Leitner talked about the requirements for 4K and beyond from the filmmakers point of view. Leitner believes 4K is required to take viewers beyond historical quality levels. According to him, 4K is really a legacy format — it is the quality of the camera negatives generated by silent movie producers over a century ago. He added that even 2K cinema is an improvement in the viewer’s experience who never saw the 4K camera negatives. After multiple copy steps, the Multiplex movie viewer rarely sees more than about 1.3K pixels if he is watching a film. Leitner added 4K was the “harbinger of the Retinal Display.” There have been several births in his clan recently and he speculated that as these children grow up they will never see a pixel — every display they will ever see in their lifetime may have higher resolution than the limiting resolution of the human eye. This may even be possible — the current younger generation has probably never seen the artifacts introduced by NTSC or VHS tape, nor have they seen a CRT scan line.

Larry Thorpe discussed how a 4K or 8K camera alone wasn’t enough: the lens had to have a high enough MTF for the filmmaker to actually benefit from a high pixel count camera. This MTF, he says, corresponds to roughly 80LP/mm in the image plane, when the camera sensor was the same size of Super-35 film. This sized sensor is the preferred size by moviemakers because it preserves the relationship between aperture and depth of focus they are accustomed to.

Hugo Gaggioni and Stuart English discussed how the Sony and Red cameras respectively met these needs of the moviemakers. Both Gaggioni and English provided as much of a tutorial as a sales pitch and emphasized many of the same points:

1. The importance of oversampling in generating high resolution images in a single-chip camera with a Bayer filter array.
2. The color gamut of a cinema camera should be at least as good as and preferably better than the DCI P3 requirements. In the end, however, the colors seen on the Multiplex screens are determined in post-production, not by the camera.
3. The camera must have all the accessories required by filmmakers, including lenses, storage, power supplies, monitors, digital interfaces, etc.
4. The output of the camera must fit into the workflow of the post-production house. Both companies offered stand-alone software for processing their RAW video and plug-ins to standard video/cinema editing software to simplify the editing of their camera outputs.
5. In 2012, going beyond 4K doesn’t really mean showing content at higher resolution than 4K. From the content creator’s point of view, going beyond 4K means making the best possible 2K or 4K content for display to viewers in the cinema or the home. Insight Media is glad to see the industry isn’t getting stuck in a century-old paradigm — create the content at 4K and then show it to viewers at 1.3K.

Matt Brennesholtz is an analyst for Insight Media. Reach him at matt@insightmedia.info