love the new 2X zoom

[GadgetGuy]

If we are talking about photography, it is always better to have as much pixels as you can. You can hardly crop the 1080p image because the quality goes very low, while at 4K you can easily afford yourself that. The quality of 4K image is good, almost the same as if captured with a quality DSLR. And even the picture quality of 4K video snapshots is acceptable.

At video 4K and 2K makes almost no noticable difference on 17 or 19i monitors. And almost all of the people watch HD size video. andy if you don't have a 4K monitor you can not see the 4K quality at all !
I have 24i monitor and it is completely the same if I play 1080 or 4K video when the monitor is set to HD res. If I switch to 4K res. than the difference is quite obvious.
Maybe it is wise to capture video in 4K and then render it in 1080 res, and have 4K version saved if you might use it some day.

+1!

 

[Bad Andy]

Interesting how the topic of what resolution to shoot gets almost religious.

If y'all wanna get all persnickety about resolution and quality, all the video shooting on these consumer drones is sub-optimal because it's recorded with lossy compression, which is going to get crippled even more after editing and exporting. Yech. All that dynamic range and detail lost forever.

With my handheld cameras I shoot everything in raw. But that's now. I didn't always do things that way. What changed? Part of it was obsession. Part of it was education. Part of it was just a change in priorities. If I really wanted to beat myself up I could say that I wasn't sufficiently forward thinking before. Then I could go crazy and start beating myself up for not shooting in slide films before that. It could easily get really stupid.

You might find yourselves sorry later for not shooting in the best possible resolution. But it's hardly TEOTWAWKI.

 

[GadgetGuy]

You might find yourselves sorry later for not shooting in the best possible resolution. But it's hardly TEOTWAWKI.

It could be! Remember Blow Up, the movie? It was the end of the world for the victim!

 

[Bad Andy]

I have not seen that movie.

 

[GadgetGuy]

I have not seen that movie.

Blowup - Wikipedia
It's a classic! A fashion photographer discovers he has captured a murder ocurring in the background of his fashion shoot in the park, when he blows up his images in the darkroom. Had he been shooting in 1080p, he never would have seen the detail! Details hidden in 4K can matter!

 

[Bad Andy]

Gonna ruin your joke...

Choosing the wrong ISO could also be deadly.

 

[GadgetGuy]

Gonna ruin your joke...

Choosing the wrong ISO could also be deadly.

Or create another one! When you are In Search Of (ISO), be careful what you are searching for! Let sleeping dogs and especially dead bodies lie! Don't get involved! It could be deadly for you, too!

 

[Bad Andy]

...not to mention the gifts that keep on giving!

 

[David_Cambridge]

I have a hybrid view of this. I routinely shoot in 4k, and view 4k without optimization or proxies on a new Retina iMac Retina display. What is incredibly useful in this environment is doing the zoom in post, with key frames. That allows you to time the zoom exactly to what you are looking at. You can zoom in 400% area wise and still have a native 1080 image. Going farther in also works, but the point of interest must be interesting enough so that the viewer doesn’t notice the unsharp image.

 

[David_Cambridge]

You can easily see the difference between 1080 and 4k on a good 4k tv. The issue is only how close to the screen you sit. Your eye can only resolve 1 minute of visual arc. Once you are inside that angle (closer to the screen) the difference is quite noticible, the closer you get. Large screens with a close viewing distance are quite spectacular

 

[skyeboysteve]

Has anyone noticed though that when "digitally zooming" from 4K to 1080, that the quality seems very degraded even when viewing on a 1080P screen and a 1080 output file? I normally render all my edited videos in 4K; and occasionally crop down to 1080 for a few seconds of effect where detail isn't important--and have noticed the image quality goes to hell--which I figured is understandable since I'm rendering out to 4K--so I'm 'stretching' out the cropped at 1080 pixels.

However, I'm currently working on a video where I'm including some drone footage shot by my brother who shot in 1080; so I resolved to render the final video in 1080 to avoid the loss of quality from blowing his footage up to 4K scale. However, when doing "digital zooms" in post; where I'm cropping down from 4K to 1080 (with my footage), it looks horrible! It doesn't matter the bit-rate (I tried CBR of 60Mbps for 1080 which is overkill); as you can also see the difference when pulling up the orignial 4K file in Photoshop and zooming in to 100%--it looks horrible.

I noticed this in the past with my P3P, and P4, but also currently with my P4P. However, seeing how many people are singing the praises of lossless "digital zoom" from 4K to a 1080 output, I'm wondering if perhaps I've ended up with lemons with bad encoders?... or has anyone else noticed this too?

 

[Bad Andy]

I'm a bit lost. Are you cropping from 4K to 1080 or are you scaling/zooming? Or both? Cropping out (or "zooming into") a 1080 section of 4K video is not the same as scaling the 4K frame to 1080.

Not entirely in love with so-called "lossless digital zoom", if that's what's really in discussion. It's achieved by using higher-resolution sensors which unless you're simultaneously throwing metric crap-tons of money at it, wind up being more noisy. YMMV.

Maybe the encoder is partially at fault - I don't see you mention which software - but also bear in mind that you're not handling raw video. The video has already been subjected to lossy compression and the output compression will just make it worse. The only question is how much, depending on the software settings.

 

[skyeboysteve]

I'm a bit lost. Are you cropping from 4K to 1080 or are you scaling/zooming? Or both? Cropping out (or "zooming into") a 1080 section of 4K video is not the same as scaling the 4K frame to 1080.

Not entirely in love with so-called "lossless digital zoom", if that's what's really in discussion. It's achieved by using higher-resolution sensors which unless you're simultaneously throwing metric crap-tons of money at it, wind up being more noisy. YMMV.

Maybe the encoder is partially at fault - I don't see you mention which software - but also bear in mind that you're not handling raw video. The video has already been subjected to lossy compression and the output compression will just make it worse. The only question is how much, depending on the software settings.

I'm referring to both; as digital zooming is nothing more than cropping an image and then scaling that cropped area to fit the frame. In theory of course is if you crop to the same size as the frame you plan to render at; you don't loose any pixels--thus "lossless"--a term some people in this thread have used....

But you're right, any compression used at higher resolution is going to become blown up at lower resolution even if final resolution is the same and end up with more noise. Like I said, I don't think it matters what codec settings I'm using in final render as it's noticeable when you zoom in with any software to show pixels at 100% on a 1080 monitor. But, I get the same results using h264 encoding at 60Mbps CBR on Sony Movie Vegas 13 or Premiere Pro. My original footage of course is 100Mbps at 4K, but I figure at 1080p, you can drop that bit rate to 25Mbps CBR as it has the quarter the number of pixels. I used 60 just to rule out compression issues---but bottom line is that the lowered quality is evident before rendering anyway.

 

[Bad Andy]

Dunno, you could simply crop to 1920x1080 without scaling at all, I'm not there. But scaling can introduce artifacts too, even if just scaling down.

I'm under the impression that when folks talk about lossless digital zoom that refers to using a smaller portion of a higher-density sensor versus throwing away sensor pixels outside the zoomed area of a normal size sensor.

As for codecs, you still haven't mentioned software but in my experience with stills, there is a HUGE difference between JPEGs produced by Photoshop and JPEGs produced by GIMP. Startling, really.

 

[Andy9]

I'm filming in 4K res and then I'm making the movie in 1080 res (no cropping at all).The quality on usually 1080 screens is almost the same. There is not a very big difference on 4K 140mm TV screen either. Of course 4K looks better at bigger screen but I don't want to spend all that amount of money for top class hardware which is able to normally process those huge files of 4K video.