What do you do when you want to show off a 4K TV? What about 8K? You use a $50,000-plus specialised digital still camera, find yourself a beautiful setting, and spend hours upon hours capturing a time-lapse video in 10K. Then you spend just as much time editing it, to show off the full extent of the detail hidden within those images. This is possibly the most detailed and most fascinating video that has been captured by a digital sensor up until now.
Rio di Janeiro image via Shutterstock
Spotted by Quartz, the video was shot by Joe Capra of Scientifantastic, on a job to create high quality footage for a “major electronics manufacturer”. The smart money says that’s Samsung, LG or Sony, all of whom have displayed incredibly detailed footage to showcase their 4K and 8K TVs at trade shows like CES and IFA.
The 80-megapixel Phase One IQ180 digital camera back used by Capra outputs 10328x7760pixel images, more than 10 times the resolution of your common or garden variety Full HD TV. That’s a huge amount of room to work with in the editing studio — so to actually show off the capabilities of the camera and all those pixels within a single frame, the video starts out with the entire picture captured and scaled to fit the standard 16:9 aspect ratio, then slowly digitally zooms in to 50 per cent and then 100 per cent to show the sheer number of pixels on offer.
Of course, you’re not getting anywhere near the full resolution of 10K when you view this video through Vimeo — it’s probably the best video player on the ‘net in terms of its overall output quality, but even then, any kind of video compression takes away fine image detail in the first place and then the final film is output in 1080p Full HD rather than any higher-res option like 4K or 8K. Maybe we’re just being picky.
Over five and a half minutes, you’ll see some of the most beautiful and detailed images that have ever been captured, with five different scenes from the city of Rio Di Janeiro. It actually reminds me of Baraka and Samsara, two incredibly visually arresting films that were shot on 70mm film — still considered one of the most cinematic and high quality image capture formats, despite not exactly being as high tech as this next clip.
But anyway, here it is.