4K Opinions & Interviews

“When I demoed the VariCam 35 at AbelCine, I immediately gravitated to the 12-bit 4:4:4 color space. The dual native 800/5000 ISOs were intriguing, and I really liked the option of capturing our 4K master and 1080 proxy files simultaneously in camera. The camera’s selectable LUT capabilities afford a lot of flexibility in sending out different looks. Our DIT only provided minimum correction to achieve a pleasing LUT.”

Pond5 continues to be disruptive in the royalty-free stock footage industry for sellers and buyers and was recently named to be the "shooting star" in this business by a famous european publication. As a true worldwide marketplace for digital content we are also a premier destination for audio clips and offer on top millions of images, illustrations, After-Effect project templates and 3D-models. We constantly innovate and revolutionize our industry, recently with launching our groundbreaking plugin for Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 and CC editing environments, allowing digital content creators to seamlessly make high-quality stock media content an integral part of their overall workflow. Pond5 is leading the way for digital content creators who always receive a 50% commission and have the freedom to set the price for their work themselves. This was the reason that Pond5´s library grew so fast in the past and continues to grow so quickly, becoming the largest royalty-free stock footage provider on the internet with currently 2.5 million video clips. We launched our new special pool of 4k+ UltraHD stock footage and also Redcode RAW (R3D) videos clips - the native format for the popular RED series of ultra-HD cameras - in late 2013. With 36,000 clips in 4k/4+ and in addition 6,000 R3D clips at the time of writing it has become the largest video collection of this kind in the world.

4K is certainly grabbing the headlines at the moment, but in terms of adoption 4K is not yet ready for mass consumption. There are the high end production houses who have the need for 4K and then a steadily growing early adopter group who either love the idea of experimenting with the higher resolution or those who want to future proof themselves for the coming years while they are upgrading now.

In my world, I have been delivering 4K content for Convention Displays and other uses for over 4 years. I think people have been too focused on 4K broadcast, I personally don’t see that streaming live for a few years, even the 4K version of House of Cards on Netflix has only seen a few thousand downloads. I am one of those that thinks I will see 4K movie downloads long before I see a 4K version of the local news. Yet that poses a different issue, if a current HD movie download is about 5GB, what does that mean for the internet providers when we start DL’ing 20-30GB files for a 3 hour feature?

Our media asset management solution, EditShare Flow, will support 4K in the near future. This will let you make proxy files of your 4K footage, and track 4K assets throughout the production process. Our integrated archiving solution, EditShare Ark, is already 4K compatible, and can back up and restore your 4K footage to/from LTO tape or disk. In the near future, once Flow is 4K aware, you’ll also be able to preview and bring specific individual 4K files back from the archive from Flow.

Akamai is preparing for the increase in viewer quality expectations that 4K will bring, which, in our case, means greater capacity and scalability of our network, storage and workflow solutions. Of course, increasing our capacity and scalability to stay ahead of demand is something we have been doing since 1998; 4K just happens to be the latest quality level that is pushing the need for more bits – faster. We’re not just getting ready for 4K, but other things that might come next, such as higher frame rates and high dynamic range (HDR) technologies, which again will drive network capacity and scale requirements. Also, Akamai has begun to track 4K readiness through our quarterly State of the Internet Report. The new metric aims to identify what geographies are most likely to be able to sustain 15 Mbps streams, which we see as the baseline connection speed for supporting online delivery of 4K content.

Legend3D started out as a colorization studio in 2000. We colorized feature films for most of the major studios as well as CBS and HBO. We also colorized about 100 public domain films for our own library. In 2007 I saw digital 3D for the first time and honestly saw the future of entertainment. Almost immediately, I turned all of my R&D toward 2D-to-3D conversion and targeted the summer of 2009 to have a working process, so I could be ready for Avatar. It was clear Avatar was going to be a game changer and I wanted to be ready for it. Immediately after the release of Avatar, Legend3D was awarded the 3D conversion of Alice in Wonderland. We then won the conversion of Shrek, Shrek 2 and Shrek the 3rd. Transformers followed that and the rest is history. We’ve been converting many of the biggest tentpole films that have been released since Avatar.

As part of our continual commitment to innovation, we’ll be announcing significant new updates to Media Composer for our subscription and annual support plan customers in the coming weeks. We’ll also be announcing the next phase in bringing the Avid Everywhere vision to life at IBC in September.