Slashdot Mirror
Ultra High Definition Video
hovermike writes "This story about UHDV (Ultra High Definition Video) comes from the NY Times. Here are a few specs from the article: 'picture size of 7,680 by 4,320 pixels'; 'UHDV's beefed-up refresh rate of 60 frames per second (twice that of conventional video), projected onto a 450-inch diagonal screen with more than 20 channels of audio'; '22.2 sound: 10 speakers at ear level, 9 above and 3 below, with another 2 for low frequency effects'; AND THE KICKER, 'All those sound channels and all those image pixels add up to a lot of data. In test, an 18-minute UHDV video gobbled up 3.5 terabytes of storage (equivalent to about 750 DVD's). The data was transmitted over 16 channels at a total rate of 24 gigabits per second.' Don't think I'll wait to buy regular 'old' HDTV..."
So *that's* what powers the view screen on the Enterprise. Cool! :)
The post-production touch-up jobs on porn acresses is going to have to get a *lot* better at that kind of resolution!
Please note: first thoughts != best thoughts
We're about a decade away from reaching the point where there increasing the resolution of the screen will not be detectable to the human eye, at which point, one could go about collecting a collection of Ultra-High Def DVD's without worrying about a 'better' version coming out soon. So you can get all of your 20th century and early 21st century media and know that your great grandkids will view it exactly the same.
I have to change my underwear now.. and have a smoke...
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
I like the resolution and all, but in all seriousness... with ever decreasing space for our living, this is not exactly customer product. Your 68" tv does not need such high resolution, I hardly have space to put my 5.1 system in the 2 bedroom condo I am staying in...
Even if the price is within our reach, this piece of technology is going to be left to corporations and ultra rich people with lots of real estate. I fail to see point of having this, except for new digital cinemas.
My god, watching the latest holycrud with mind boggling resolution...
-- shortcut - the longest distance between two points.
regfree link here
On the other hand, perhaps this may be better as an educational tool:
"And here you can see the distribution of Influenza cases superimposed across this landsat image lower manhattan... and my apartment. Hey! There's me! And I have the flu."
The power of modern GPU's could be put to use with this resolution, and we could once again have a resolution war between the various chip makers.
Let's learn to "walk" with images of this resolution, before we try and run.
Introducing Microsoft Vacuum 1.0 The first Microsoft product that doesn't suck.
... when the cinemas have this system and the pirates film them with their hidden camcorders.
It looks like movies for this are about as useful as the 35TB RAID-0 array they'll come on
I expect you to give the quote "640k ought to be enough for anyone", and you are right, but by the time anyone can store this much data, we'll probably have holographic projectors, and 3D tv.
And would you like Ultra-High-Mega-Super-Happy-Fun Resolution 2D tv, or SDTV quality 3D.
Why do I bother asking....
Now George Lucas can let us all see, in the most perfect, clear, awe-inspiring beautiful picture imaginable, Greedo shoot first.
Damnit!
...my kids put in the Ultra Hi Def Barney Video.
Serenity NOW!
Tim
"16 terabytes ought to be enough for everyone."
We know that 30/60 Hz from a normal TV causes brain waves that act like a drug. Wouldn't a faster frame rate cause better brain waves; like the ones that actually make us think.
57 channels and nothing on. Bah humbug!
well, that's one way to keep people from sharing the files...
Anybody got a bittorrent link to the 3.5 terabyte file?
What, only 2 dimensions?
Synergy is your friend
are you going to see this in a home theater setup anytime soon? NO! of course not! this seems to me like it would be more practical for use in the movie theaters. it'd be like the DLP theaters, of which there are only a few dozen around the country.
Maybe many years from now we'll see it in a home setup... of course it was about 8 years ago when i bought a 1 gig hdd for 200 or 300 bucks (don't remember specifically now) that someone told me "what are you going to use that for? you'll never be able to use all that space!"
Who's laughing now?
What kind of porn are you watching, anyway, where they bother with post-production touch-up -- or plot, for that matter?
I want to see this applied to OmniMAX and IMAX films.
My biggest problem with [Omni|I]MAX is that at 24fps, scenes with slow pans get very jumpy (fast pans blur enough to not be noticable). However, if you just ran the film at 60fps, the size of the reels would be unmanagiable, and the speed of the film through the transport would be dangerous!
But imagine a [Omni|I]MAX theater with 100TB of storage (not a big deal nowadays) and a DMD/DLV projector at these kinds of resolutions and refresh rates. They could play any movie they have pretty much instantly, they could have longer running movies, and the movies would be absolutely immersive (esp. for OmniMAX movies - on a 120 degree screen pretty much your entire field of view would be the movie.)
Of course, they'd need to make sure people understood the "If you feel yourself getting sick, just CLOSE YOUR EYES AND BREATH!" a bit more.
www.eFax.com are spammers
...When we were doing text, people thought having 100kb pictures would keep them from sharing.
...When we were doing pictures, people thought having 3mb music files would keep them from sharing.
...When we were doing music, people thought having 100mb applications would keep them from sharing.
...When we were doing applications, people thought having 700mb movies would keep them from sharing.
...When we were doing movies, people thought having 12TB/hr HDTV would keep them from sharing.
Information (as in raw bytes/sec) will continue to become cheaper and cheaper. The price of content is quite stable. Add 2+2 and see where it is going. More, faster and more "profitable". I know several people that are probably "millionaires" by now.
At the estimates for piracy, using the full penalty of the law, the total piracy is more than the GNP of the world - not just this year - but (estimating like a geometric sequence) for all eternity since the dawn of time.
How's that possible? Simple. We make "money" out of thin air. You give me a million, I give you a million, and we both keep it as well. At $0/content, we could all have all the content in the world. So the loss = 7 billion people * millions of CDs/DVDs/Apps/Games/whatever * full retail price. Yeah. Right.
Copyright will have to change because pretty soon everyone will have millions in liability - it will simply be common. I've seen it in every age group from 8 to 80, both sexes, all sorts of people. It's bigger than prohibition in the sense that "everybody" is doing it. There's simply no stopping that.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I saw a 60 fps movie at Expo86 in Vancouver, 18 years ago. It had incredible realism.
The high frame rate eliminates the strobing effect that occurs when the camera pans, or an object moves quickly across the screen. I noticed the strobing when watching LOTR in the movie theater, but the effect isn't visible on TV.
NHK of Japan invented an analogue high definition television system called Muse in the 1970s and 1980s, which looked wonderful compared with standard definition at the time, but its bandwidth requirements were much too high, sets were too expensive, and by the time it got into production it was becoming clear that digital technologies using data compression and consequently that would work using much lower bandwidth and would provide much more in the way of interactive services were viable. So Muse was abandoned and digital services were rolled out.
For this new system to work, we need much larger bandwidth and/or much better compression than we have now, which in practice means more powerful CPUs than we have now. This will come, but I think this will be a decade or more off. (At that point, any system invented by the Japanese right now will be superceded by something newer invented in the mean time).
Personally, I like the idea of this new system in principle. It is the first television system I have seen that generates pictures as good or better as conventional film. It will look fabulous if used in a digital cinema. (Current digital cinema technology only uses 1000 lines or so, and this is seriously lacking compared to film)
As for viewing this in your living room, it is probably overkill, unless we have screens covering entire walls of rooms (which of course we may). The 1080 lines max of conventional HDTV probably is good enough for 40 inch screens and the like. Current generation screens do show various digital artifacts, but these are more to do with the inadequacies of the display technologies than the number of pixels on the screen. (Things like LCD and plasma displays are simply not is good as conventional CRTs in terms of picture quality). Increasing the number of lines in such circumstances will certainly improve the picture further and it will probably happen some day, but larger gains in picture quality can probably be more easily gained in other ways for the moment.
As pointed out above, definately some errors in this post.
:)
The NTSC standard is not 60Hz refresh. A NTSC tv draws even lines first, then odd lines. Each one of these is called a 'field'. There are 60 fields per second, but they are put together to make a 'frame' There are 30 frames per second. (when they added in sound/colour in there, it got switched down to 29.997 or somethign stupid...bandwidth issues)
Anyways, this even-odd line drawing is called interlacing. It tricks the eye into aaalmost seeing 60 frames per second.
NTSC TV's, unlike monitors/video games, dont have seperate frame/refresh rates, because inside the TV, its all analog circuitry driving the electron beam which is driven directly off of the RF signal to display what it does on the screen. Not like a video game where the computer might be generating 120fps, but the monitor refreshing at 75Hz. In this case, the monitor redraws itself completely(called progressive scan), 75 times a second. When your video game framerate is higher than your monitor refresh you will certainly experiance 'tearing' This is when the frame changes in the middle of a monitor drawing cycle.
Most people who want a nice looking picture will turn on vertical synchronization . This makes it so that no frame changes in the middle of a monitor drawing by limiting the maximum framerate to the monitor refresh rate, and synchronizing the two. Once this is on, it becomes a lot more like NTSC, except not interlaced. One video game 'frame' is served up every monitor 'frame' and it all looks very nice.
The reason a video games looks so shitty at 30fps and TV doesnt is twofold.
1. What the above poster said, that 30fps is an average, and if you are getting 30 average, you are probably sometimes getting more than 30, sometimes getting less...you will really notice the 'less'
2. Video games dont have motion blur. On video cameras/your eyes, moving objects are automatically blured because your eyes dont 'update' all that fast. On video games a distinct frame without motion blur is drawn..each frame could be removed to make a sharp picture. Not so on tv. (oh and i know about some hardware/software inserting some crappy motion blur routines..the fact that you can plainly see it means it looks nothing like the real thing
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
I can understand the incredibly high resolution, but why so many audio channels?
Two channels does quite a good job of reproducing all the sounds of an environment, assuming the stereo speakers are appropriately far apart.
5.1 channel sound added a sub-woofer, which is a positive development, and then 3 more speakers. Okay, the two rear channels I can understand, because most people don't have their speakers located well, and there's a certain gee-wiz factor in hearing something that is distinctly behind you. However, the center channel still makes little sense to me, since the stereo speakers can handle that area just as well (center channel is usually a crappy little set of treble-only speakers anyhow).
Now, I am really at a loss to understand why you need even more, especially 20+... Put on a pair of stereo headphones and pick any location, 360 degrees, and I'll make it sound like a noise is comming from that exact spot. So what can 20+ channels do for you?
Even if we start getting holograms comming out of the screen, I could still make a sound seem like it's comming from whatever position that object is located with just 4 speakers, and I could do a pretty good job with just 2 if needed.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Pixels and Resolutions
name Herbert
status educator
age 60s
Question - Presently there is quite a bit of talk about pixels. Each
digital camera manufacrer claims there camera has 3 million pixels,
another 3.5 million, on and on. This reminds me of the 50's & 60's when
Hi-Fi audio manufacturers claimed there equipment had a wider bandwidth
than its competitor. So the question is what is the resolution of the
human eye, and can the figure be quoted in pixels?
I will answer as much as I can, but your questions about the limits of the
human eye should really be directed to a specialist in the theoretical
limits of the human eye. Right now that is a question that has been
researched quite well, and there are several formulas to help predict that.
From what I understand, the resolution of the human eye is not measured
directly in pixels, but by the angular difference between two points of
light that can be resolved. Here is a very good article on that:
http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/may9 7/864446241.Ph.r.html
From this article, if I have done the math right, I understand that a
typical person has a maximum resolution of about 17000 point sources per
inch. This doesn't really equate to pixels, but, pixels can be changed into
pixels per inch, and that should be close enough.
Digital cameras do brag about their resolution, because, well, it really
does matter. It matters because their resolution is so poor compared to a
real cameras, or a decent printer that it is pathetic.
For example, a really good digital camera might have a resolution of 2160 x
1440. If you made that into a 4x5 picture, you have a resolution of about
400 pixels per inch. Which isn't bad, but photo quality printers print at
2400 pixels per inch. If you decided to make it into a 8x10 photo, you end
up with about 200 pixels per inch. This was considered excellent quality 10
years ago, but is very poor quality by todays standards.
So, compared to the human eye, a real camera, or good printed material,
digital cameras aren't there yet. They do use a wide variety of software to
try and enhance the quality for printing, but there is still room for
improvement.
That doesn't mean digital cameras don't have a use. If you need pictures in
a digital form to be displayed on computer screens, then you have something.
A computer screen has a resolution of about 72 pixels per inch, and digital
cameras are definitely better than that. Also, since it is basically one
step from taking the picture to downloading it onto your computer, you get
better results than if you took a picture, developed it, and then scanned it
in, not to mention much faster results. With the popularity of the web,
digital cameras are great for creating images to place on a web site.
I hope this helps.
--Eric Tolman
http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/may 97/864446241.Ph.r.html
From this article, if I have done the math right, I understand that a
typical person has a maximum resolution of about 17000 point sources per
inch. This doesn't really equate to pixels, but, pixels can be changed
into pixels per inch, and that should be close enough.
It would seem to me that if the resolution of the human eye is one
arcminute at 10 inches, then the maximum resolution of the human eye is
found as follows:
You find the circumference of a circle of radius 10 inches, which comes to
62.83 inches. One 1/21600th (or 1/60th of a degree) of this is 0.002908
inches, the minimum possible perceptible distance by the human eye at 10
inches.
To get this much resolution, you need 343, not 17,000 pixels per inch.
Of course if you get even closer, the story changes, but what the
resolution of the human eye is at some other point that 10 inches I am not
sure.
Even taking a hypothetical one inch of distance with the exact same eye
resol
My eyes are so sensitive that they can detect half a photon.