Panasonic AG-DVX200PJ Tech Brief - Volume 1 - Page 2

Benefits Of Shooting In 4K Originating footage in 4K/UHD brings a host of benefits to the video shooter, not the least of which is that your source footage is literally four times sharper and more detailed than 1080p HD footage would have been, or nine times more detailed than 720p HD footage. It's really rather remarkable; you would need to set up nine 720p HD cameras, each pointing at different sections of the scene, to capture as much image detail as a single 4K camera could! All that additional detail can be used in many different ways and provides many potential benefits to the video shooter. First and foremost, shooting in 4K (or Ultra HD / UHD) means that your footage can be displayed on larger displays or projected on larger screens without losing detail. For movie screens, digital signage, large-screen 4K televisions, or other environments where the largest displays will be used, 4K origination means the sharpest images for those displays. But what if you're not delivering your footage in 4K (or UHD)? What if you're producing footage that's intended to be broadcast in HDTV (in 1080 or even 720 resolution) -- or, perhaps, even in standard definition? What if you're delivering content for web streaming in HD (or lower) resolution? Are there still benefits from, and reasons for, shooting 4K/UHD in the first place? Most definitely! Shooting 4K For 1080 (or 720) HD Delivery When your final delivered footage is going to be mastered in 1080p, 1080i, or 720p, there are still substantial and significant benefits that can be derived from shooting your source footage in 4K/UHD. Some of these may or may not apply to your particular scenarios, but it's still interesting to explore the implications of all of them. Future Proofing: How many times have you seen a good, vintage television series, and bemoaned that it looks lousy on your HDTV because it was shot and mastered in 4:3 standarddefinition television? Many older television series were shot on standard-definition video cameras, but some were shot on film. Those film-shot series are sometimes "remastered" into high-definition versions -- and they look so much better! When the series were produced, standard-definition television broadcast (and perhaps VHS video or maybe, at best, DVD) were the anticipated delivery mediums, so mastering the series and distributing in standarddef were practical decisions at the time. But with the advent of HDTV and Blu-ray discs and