4K Video: Everything Corporates Need to Know 4K Video: Everything Corporations Need to Know
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4K Video: Everything Corporates Need to Know 4K Video: Everything Corporations Need to Know 1 4K Video: Everything Corporates Need to Know Overview Whether it’s for external use – advertising, branded content, corporate communications, sales presentations, customer service – or internal – training, communications, presentations – the use of corporate video is on the rise. It’s social, interactive, mobile, profitable, trackable and brandable. In the wake of 3D’s disappointing demise, 4K resolution has become the hottest buzzword amongst tech aficionado. The promise of 4K is attractive - more pixels to work with, higher quality VFX, future proofing and a marketer’s favorite, more options for storytelling. As with all disruptive innovation, early adopters face a number of challenges. The 4K system design currently presents many obstacles, including capture, distribution, storage and infrastructure. But how will these pain points change how we work and do business, and is there a way to overcome them? And whilst 4K is a hot topic, how do you navigate true value beyond industry hype? Educating yourself on this maturing technology and understanding product capabilities will help you achieve best practice and meet the rigorous demands of a 4K workflow. While presenting the practicality of its capabilities, the paper will discuss it’s impact on communications and explain how corporations can best harness the benefits of 4K today. As you’ll see, there are many different ways to look at 4K technology and at what it can and can’t do for content creators and for their audiences. 4K Video: Everything Corporates Need to Know What is 4K? 4K – also branded as Ultra HD (UHD) is a picture technology that delivers four times the number of pixels found in a 1080p Full HD. These pixels are usually arranged in a 3840 x 2160 configuration, compared with the 1920 x 1080 you get in a Full HD TV. What is the difference between 4K and Ultra HD? 4K is a cinema standard, while UHD is a broadcast standard. As you can probably guess, it all comes down to pixels. Technically, UHD is actually a derivation of the 4K cinema standard. That’s because it provides a way of distinguishing between the 3840 x 2160 resolution adopted by 16:9-ratio TVs and the slightly larger 4096 x 2160 resolution first introduced by Sony in their digital cinemas. Since all types of 4K entail roughly the same capture, delivery and storage challenges, for the purposes of this paper we will use the term 4K and UHD interchangeably. Ultra HD (UHD) • 3840 pixels wide x 2160 pixels high (3840 x 2160) • 4 times the resolution of Full HD (1920 x 1080) • Standard for 16:9 content and displays • At 18 to 36 inches away - a typical range for desktop users, one can see incredible detail, sharpness and contrast. Cinema 4K • 4096 pixels wide x 2160 pixels high (4096 x 2160) • Cinema standard developed by Digital Cinema Initiatives (DCI) for the movie projection industry 3 4K Video: Everything Corporates Need to Know 63% believe 4K UHDTV 4K-display market—which will be mainstream in includes televisions, as well as five to seven years. smartphones, PC monitors, and other components—will hit $52 85% expect 4K billion by 2020. That’s up from UHDTV programming $9.2 billion last year. to become the de facto norm for media IHS viewing in 10 years’ time. Intelsat Prices for 4K TVs are falling fast, dropping by 85% worldwide in just two years. PCs are the most Business Insider common way to drive a 4K display. A market-leading 65-inch 4K TV like the The two most Sony KD-65X9005B popular graphics will cost $3,500. cards for 4K are Existing Adoption from NVIDIA and Techradar AMD. Runco Sony is one of the biggest supporters of 4K so far, with an available library of a Cameras capable of capturing content couple of hundred 4K in 4K are becoming more widespread films. ranging from smartphones to production cameras/camcorders. Trusted Reviews BT became the first A GoPro HERO4 Black will set broadcaster to have a 4K you back $620 SRP. channel - BT Sport Ultra HD. Gopro.com • It’s no longer just a technology for the tech-minded early adopter market. Content providers and distributors are slowly leaning toward the idea to adopt 4K to improve viewing experience • Once a feature mainly found in next-generation TVs, 4K resolution displays are now being adopted by manufacturers in smartphones, PC monitors, OLED displays and notebook PCs • With the average retail price of 4K monitors tumbling, it’s becoming far more affordable for businesses in multiple industries to upgrade their current systems and integrate 4K into communications • Currently all available 4K Ultra HD TVs are in excess of 50-inches - perfect for connecting your team members together while watching training videos or participating in web conferencing • Consumers will need a minimum of 15 Mbps to stream 4K content from sources such as Sony, Vimeo and YouTube • With viewers’ appetite for original content increasing, so is the need for devices and infrastructure capable of handling and storing these large file sizes 4 4K Video: Everything Corporates Need to Know The Immediate Challenges of 4K With 4x the amount of data, all other areas of the workflow need to be able to scale up and handle that data - which is going to impact the bottom line. Challenge #1: Infrastructure Bottlenecks will completely derail the project if anywhere between a 4K source and a 4K display is not capable of handling 4K resolution (4K ready). It could be something as simple as an archaic graphic card or HDMI cable. Your system designer will have to ensure that each component is capable of handling 4K - be prepared for some ancillary costs. A common missing prerequisite for corporations are powerful monitors capable of playing back 4K video. Even if your computer meets the requirements, you may find that 4K video playback is choppy – a frustrating experience during critical editing or approval sessions. Each 4K image has double the amount of pixels when compared with HD - or more than 8 million individual pixels on average. But the impact is far greater than just the pixel count. To handle this additional load, 4K workflows require roughly 4x the amount of processing power and storage capacity of standard HD, along with much more time-consuming back-ups. Can your internal computer systems chomp through all that? Due to the high bandwidth requirements of 4K signals, the interfaces providing the signals must support very high data rates. HDMI and DisplayPort are currently the most popular interfaces capable of delivering 4K content on a single cable. With the introduction of HDMI 2.0 and DisplayPort 1.2, 4K video can now be supported at up to 60 frames per second. Note that you will be able to use HDMI 1.4 to drive 4K content although that will be limited to 30Hz and 8-bit. Challenge #2: Bandwidth One of the largest stumbling blocks to 4K adoption is the extensive amount of internet bandwidth needed to support its streaming. 4K video is delivered uncompressed to ensure high picture quality with low latency. While Full HD demands about 6-7 Mbps, requirements jump to a minimum of 15-20 Mbps for a stable 4K experience. This places unprecedented demands on infrastructure and in a world of compressed schedules and budgets, it’s important that teams have access to all the media wherever they may be located. While these levels of bandwidth are rarely a problem within corporations, it will have an equivocal impact on review and approval from some remote locations. 5 4K Video: Everything Corporates Need to Know Challenge #3: Digital Distribution Just 2-3 minutes of 4k – the length of a short testimonial or product demo – can be up to 500GB alone and so the immediate challenge for in-house production units is how to store, move and manage the large files. For core storytelling functions such as logging, editing, and review/approval, high-res files are too large and slow down productivity when transferring files between teams members, and places an extra burden on workstation and storage facilities. The amount of data you have to take through post production is therefore much greater, which again has cost implications. It’s also quite challenging for post houses to quickly move 4K data around and speedily edit, online and grade 4K content. High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), also known as H.265 may ease the strain on your networks. After all, shooting in 4K doesn’t mean you have to deliver in 4K. This relatively new compression software can send similar quality video to current H.264, but without degradation and at half the bitrate, making 4K content just as deployable as Full HD. In addition to lessening the impact of 4K video on bandwidth and storage, H.265 also promises the ability to enable transcoding to make higher-resolution images available for viewing on tablets or smartphones. Challenge #4: Storage Capacity Scalability will be an important consideration as storage requirements are not going to decrease either. While shooting ratios are less of a concern for corporations who work with short form content, exponential growth in 4K file sizes will be. Where is all of that video content going to be stored? And how will you maintain or gain access to all of it? Equally as important in corporate PC equipment is RAM, but how much is enough? A minimum of 16GB of RAM for HD is fine, but with 4K editing, that minimum rises to 32GB or more.