By this point, 4K video support has been around for some time, even on computers. YouTube added 4K video support to its famous online video website in July 2010. Few people know the company added 8K video resolution support earlier this year, and now it seems the first 8K video has appeared. Good luck trying to play it in its native resolution on something, though. (We embedded it here in case you’re feeling adventurous.)
The video, called Ghost Towns, produced by YouTube member Neumannfilms, shows some town units (homes, wagons, etc.) that have been abandoned. While these places and items remain, the people who once inhabited them are gone. Yes, a deserted town is indeed a ghost town.
Neumannfilms shot the Ghost Towns clip using Red EPIC Dragon 6K cameras. The company then “stitched together” some clips using Adobe’s After Effects suite to bump up the viewing resolution. Neumannfilms says in the video’s description that “some shots [were] simply scaled up by 125% from 6.1K to meet the 7.6K standard.”
Let’s step back a moment and look at 4K again. 4K resolution is a cinematic camera standard dictated by the Digital Cinema Initiatives (or DCI). The original Red One was one of the first cinematic cameras to utilize 4K video recording, allowing users to shoot video resolution in a 2-4.5K range. Conversely, 8K, or Full Ultra HD (FUHD) resolution, comes out to a minimum of 7680 x 4320 (4320p, 33.2 megapixels), four times that of Full HD resolution (1920 x 1080), and can go as high as 8192 x 8192 (67 megapixels).
Currently, there are only a handful of cinematic cameras that have full 8K video support, such as the Astro Design AH-4800, a camera announced at NAB2013 in April 2013, the RED 8K Weapon Vista Vision, a RAW model announced in April 2015 that features a 35MP sensor, the Ikegami SHK-810, a camera announced in April 2015 (NAB) that features a 35MP sensor, and the Hitachi SK-UHD8060, also revealed this year.
If the Ghost Towns video and its 8K video resolution mean anything, it may be that 1080p, and even 4K video recording and playback, could soon be “ghost town” standards of their own. One day, some tech enthusiast may submit his own YouTube video: walking down an aisle in a store full of 8MP and 16MP cameras that equal the price of a DVD rental. Ghost town standards, like ghost towns, are the price we all pay for chasing the next big thing.
