As we enter 2018, we find a variety of products arriving to market that support 8K imagery. The 2020 Olympics are slated to be broadcast in 8K, and clearly we have a way to go, but innovations are constantly being released that get us closer to making that a reality. The first question that comes up when examining 8K video equipment is: why 8K? Obviously it is more resolution, but that is more of an answer to the how question than the why question. Continue reading
We made a lot of DCPs for my most recent film project 6Below. These included the final ones that were delivered to Deluxe and the theaters at release. Creating DCPs can still be a bit of a workflow challenge, but the options available are much better than they were in the past. Continue reading
Microsoft released their Windows Mixed Reality (WMR) platform as part of the Fall Creator’s Update to Windows 10. There are a variety of WMR headsets available from many familiar names in the hardware business. Lenovo sent me their Explorer WMR headset to test on my Thinkpad P71, providing me with a complete VR experience on their hardware.
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Dell’s UP3218K LCD Display is the first commercially available 8K display. It runs 7680×4320 pixels at 60fps driven by two DisplayPort 1.4 cables. That is over 33 million pixels per frame, and nearly 2 billion per second, which requires a lot of GPU power to generate. Dell first announced the 32″ monitor at CES 2017, and it has been available since March. I was offered one to review as part of a wider exploration of 8K video production workflows, and there will be more articles about that larger story in the near future. For the moment, I will just be focusing on this product and its uses.
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I finally got the opportunity to try out the Fusion camera I have had my eye on since GoPro first revealed it in April. The $700 camera uses two offset fish-eye lenses to shoot 360 video and stills, while recording ambisonic audio from four microphones in the waterproof unit. It can shoot a 5K video sphere at 30fps, or a 3K sphere at 60fps for higher motion content at reduced resolution. It records dual 190 degree fish-eye perspectives encoded in H.264 to separate MicroSD cards, with four tracks of audio. The rest of the magic comes in the form of GoPro’s newest application Fusion Studio.
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Adobe kicked off their Adobe Max conference with the release of their next major update to the video apps available in Creative Cloud. Most of the new features were publicly demonstrated at IBC last month, so this isn’t a surprising development, but there are some pretty significant changes that are worth discussing.
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The movie I have been working on for the last two years, “6Below: Miracle on the Mountain” will be out in theaters this week. Fathom Events is releasing it in hundreds of theaters nationwide for a special one day event on October 12th. It will also be showing in select Barco Escape Theaters for a longer run.
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I had the opportunity to attend GoPro’s launch event in San Francisco on Thursday for their new Hero6 and Fusion cameras. The Hero6 is the next logical step in their iteration of action cameras, increasing the supported frames rates to 4Kp60 and 1080p240, as well as adding integrated image stabilization. The Fusion on the other hand is a totally new product for them, as an action cam for 360 degree video. GoPro has developed a variety of other 360 degree video capture solutions in the past, based on rigs using many of their existing Hero cameras, but Fusion is their first integrated 360 video solution.
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In the previous post we have looked at the process of shooting 360 video, and getting it processed into a single stitched equirectangular file. Now we will look at what we can do with that imagery once it is formatted correctly. Premiere has quite a few options for VR, with even more 360 editing functionality made possible through a variety of plugins that are available.
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The first step in creating 360 videos, is recording with a 360 degree camera systems. These currently range in price from $100 to hundreds of thousands. Most of the basic principles of shooting and editing 360 VR are exactly the same for all of those systems, so it makes sense to start experimenting and learning with something that is not as expensive. The simplest and cheapest 360 camera option I have found is the Samsung Gear 360. There are two totally different models with the same name, usually differentiated by the year of their release. I am using the older 2016 model, which has a higher resolution sensor, but records UHD instead of the slightly larger full 4K video of the newer 2017 Model. Continue reading