Can We See The Difference in 8k Televisions Compared To 4k and Bit-rates Needed To Transmit

[bhobba]

I have an 65 inch 8k television and love it. But that may be because of other factors that SAMSUNG puts in their flagship TV rather than the resolution eg their new AI up-scaling.

 

You will see all sorts of arguments one way or the other if 8k is worth it, but really you need to hear from those organisations that have done the experiments:

 

 

Also read the following:

8K Live Encoding at IBC 2019

 

Please read the link and watch the video, but I will summarize the findings, and they are very surprising. First despite what others will tell you, you can see a difference in 8k TV’s compared to 4k. The question is why - and that’s where its surprising. What Harmonic found from 8k and 4k sources into 8k TV’s is 8K looked substantially better. But then they applied (hopefully high quality) down-scaling on the the 8k to make it 4k and compared that to the 4k direct. Surprisingly the down-scaled 8K looked substantially better on the 4k or 8k TV. Now it was very close to the 8K direct into both TV’s. In fact people then found it very difficult to tell the difference between the two on normal size screens of say 65 inchs (the one I have). Conclusion - Harmonic believes we will switch to production in 8K but watch it in 4k - at least initially until screen sizes increase substantially.

 

Just goes to show fact is stranger than fiction.

 

Another interesting finding by another company, ISIZE, is the down-scaling used, by the use of AI, can achieve better quality pictures at substantially lower bit rates:

https://www.isize.co/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/IBC2019_iSIZE_v81.pdf

 

They found by transmitting, using AI to lower the resolution to 2/5 or 1/2 the resolution of 4K, depending on the content of each group of frames, then using a simple bi-cubic up-scaler, you can increase the 4K quality for about 60% the bit rate. Of course the source they apply the AI down-scaling to can be 8K instead of 4K. In this way you can greatly reduce the transmission bit-rate of 8K material to values of about 2.5 to 10 mps. But using whats called Adaptive Bit-rate Streaming - also called Dynamic Optimization by Netflix, this would equate to something like 5–6 mbs:

Optimized shot-based encodes: Now Streaming!

 

At the moment you need about 20 mbs (sometimes a bit less - say 15 mbs).

Because of this I think 8k will be with us quite quickly and not at very high bit-rates so that only those with ultra-fast connections can watch it.

 

Thanks

Bill

Edited December 8, 2019 by bhobba

[davewantsmoore]

18 minutes ago, bhobba said:

Harmonic believes we will switch to production in 8K

There was never any question about this....  4k and 8k being two pea in the same UDH pod.... like 720 and 1080 being the formats of HD....  There was a long-ish period where 720 set were common and 1080 were not yet to market or expensive/rare.   Little production moved to 720p format, as they were all planning the "move to HD standard" which would be equipment capable of all resolution in the standard.

 

ie.  Nobody is going head first into UHD until equipment capable of the full standard (ie. incl 8k) is here.

23 minutes ago, bhobba said:

Just goes to show fact is stranger than fiction.

There is a lot (!!!) of various parallels to audio in what you have posted.