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Comment by metta2uall | Hacker News Reader

"8K video recording" - does anyone really need this? Seems like for negligible gain in quality people are pushed to sacrifice their storage & battery, and so upgrade their hardware sooner...

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Yes, they record with higher resolutions and then the director and the operateur has greater flexibility later when they realize they need a different framing - or just fixing the cameraman's errors cutting parts of the picture out. They need the extra pixels/captured area to be able to do this.

I think the studios and anyone doing video production probably would use a 8k toolchain if possible. As others have pointed out, this lets you crop and modify video while still being able to output 4k without having to upscale.

Well for starters 8k video lets you zoom in and crop and still get 4k in the end.

I think 4k is also too much in the vast majority of cases..

It's insufficient for large theaters and barely sufficient for medium theaters. 1080p is plenty for most home theaters (though with the so-so quality of streaming, I wonder to what degree macroblocks are the new pixels)

1080p looks different to 4k. Just because its 'plenty' doesn't mean 4k doesn't matter.

And we are at 2024, i own a 4k lg oled display now for years. Why not leverage it? Just because 1080p is 'plenty'?

The problem with 4k, which 99% of people only experience as a stream, is that it's over-compressed. A 1080p BluRay is 36 Mbit.

Netflix 4k is 15 Mbit.

So unless I see people mentioning the media, I am always weary of the comparison.

Why stream when you can play files from a local media server? Cheaper and I'm sure the Mbit rate is better.

Because the majority of people don't do that.

Because you have to maintain that local media server and go through the process of adding in the media you want to see and removing media you are done with if the disk is full.

As opposed to Netflix where you press a button and you're watching something.

People out there aren't much like the people who post here - when they get home from their crappy job they hate, finally make dinner because they can't afford food delivery, kick off their shoes on the old couch they bought at a yard sale and turn on their 15 year old TV they want it to just work. They don't have the interest or energy to fuck around with things that many here find fun and interesting and exciting.

This post is giving me major "why would you need Dropbox when you can rsync?" vibes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18255896

I have watched plenty of movies from a bluray.

Nonetheless, i do think that compression from a high res source looks different / sharper.

With approximately 90% of the HT setups[1] I have seen, I can downscale a 4k video to 1080p and have the owner of the HT setup not be able to successfully ABX the difference.

1: I'm using the term "HT setup" rather broadly, as the primary location in a residence for watching movies as a group; it includes e.g. people who don't own a TV and watch movies on their laptop sitting on a coffee table. Setups where the display covers over 40% of the FOV (where 4k definitely makes a difference) are somewhere in the top 5%.

Then that's even more crop & zoom headroom for 1080.

You are thinking from a consumer point of view, consumer as in Jane taking videos of her cats which 8K, even 4K would be overkill. You can set your recording device to record in 720p or 1080p and so on to suit the purpose.

For commercial purposes it's another story and it makes sense to consider shooting in 8K if possible, thus the option should exist.

Yes why not?

Different use cases exist:

Record 8k text and you could zoom in and read things. Record 8k and crop withot quality loss or 'zoom' in

Does everyone need this? Probably not but we are on hn not at a coffee party

I need more than 8K. I'm working at microscopic levels when I study minerals, I need as much resolution as I can possibly get, to the limit of optical diffraction.

Are you actually recording movies of them though?

Honest question. I hope I learn something about studying minerals!

Yes. I do record videos for research purposes. Watching how a crystal reacts to various forms of radiation (primarily various bands of UV) gives me an idea of what impurities it might contain, or clues to composition from known emission spectra. That's recorded simultaneously through OBS with my voice doing a voiceover as I perform irradiation of the sample. Mineral goes into modified integrated sphere, sphere gets sealed, sample is illuminated, study begins.

Huh! That sounds fascinating. I'd love to see something like that.

Some times I do live broadcasts for a group of hobbyists and degree-holding geologists. the bandwidth to do compressed 16K already exists for me, just not the tooling at the moment.

Trying to show something that is literally one pixel at 400x magnification at 1080p is no fun. Even a few more pixels helps.

8K is important for VR video; otherwise, not so much. There's a really noticeable step up from 4K in that area.

On a large TV though , it's probably an improvement over 4K for sports where you need to track a small item moving fast.

Yes, it makes post-production SO MUCH EASIER

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