4K resolution in cartoons

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Markster
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4K resolution in cartoons

Post by Markster »

4K may not be mainstream yet, but it's coming closer every day, back a while ago I rendered a 4K Anime Studio animation, the animation was terrible but it had a 4K resolution, unless you actually have a 4K monitor or TV you will not be able to see the difference, and I imagine most people who were viewing the animation had a 1080p or smaller monitor or TV.

AS Pro already supports 4K, that's how I rendered in 4K, the best way to encode 4K is to render it in MOV, if you have the HDD space then render it in raw instead of H.264 MP4 if you're going to edit it up in a video editing software.



I'm probably not going to render in 4K much, maybe sometimes.
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AmigaMan
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Re: 4K resolution in cartoons

Post by AmigaMan »

A friend of mine sells Film, DVD and BluRay etc. He tells me he still sells 30 times as many DVD's as BluRays. The market for BluRay is fairly small still so I doubt rushing to embrace 4K is high on many people's priorities. You would need a huge TV to see any difference between BluRay and 4K. 2D animation, because of the area's of flat colour (like you've demonstrated here) is unlikely to show much improvement in quality at all.
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DK
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Re: 4K resolution in cartoons

Post by DK »

Got to agree wih AmigaMan on AS 2D animation in 4K. Just scale up a Blue ray version and see who complains about edge sharpness.

D.K
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funksmaname
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Re: 4K resolution in cartoons

Post by funksmaname »

I agree there's very little point in rendering at 4k - especially with vector/block colour style, there's nothing more to see at higher resolutions! if it's a film of a forest, yeah, there's more definition on the leaves, but for animation I think the cons hugely outweigh the pros for working in 4k.
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heyvern
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Re: 4K resolution in cartoons

Post by heyvern »

I am actually questioning the delivery mechanism of any of these so called "high quality" formats.

For example, I get "HD" quality programming with my television/internet combo through Verizon.

The problem is, the promised quality is totally bogus. Depending on the compression and streaming settings of the content of these so called "HD" programs, the quality is... well... it can look like absolute crap. Anything with complex detail and fast movement like an action film can degrade very badly. I also still see very poor dynamic ranges with "dark" content. Even though on a blue ray disk of the same content it looks fantastic.

So even though they haven't resolved an efficient method of delivering EXISTING HD quality, now there is talk of 4k quality which is even better. How the heck do you deliver 4k reliably if we can't even deliver HD with consistent high quality? They keep talking about bottlenecks in streaming bandwidth... and they want to clog it up even more with 4K?

I will admit that HD is WAY better than DVD. However streaming HD just isn't there yet, and I have the fastest internet available. Fiber all the way... fastest speed available. I get mind blowing download speeds. It isn't the speed of the internet, it's the "compression" of the HD quality streaming. Even with high speed download, the compression of formatting of the content can reduce that high quality to crap. Some broadcasters tune their programming to save on space or bandwidth or whatever.

So... my question is this... 4k? Why bother? Is there an accepted standard for delivery? No, not yet. 4k movies take up TRUCK LOADS of space and you have to sell a kidney or part of your liver to buy a TV to play it back.

I also agree with the fact that animation doesn't require 4K. Maybe really really... high end realistic 3D animation could justify the quality, but most animation will be totally and completely fraked by 4K.

Think about how "bad" animation looks at low resolution. Now make all that super high resolution and it shows all the mistakes and problems. Then there is render time. So now you have to spend ten times the effort on minute details and also increase the render times to get a final product.

I think 4k is waaaaaaay ahead of its time. I don't think the average consumer needs or wants it really. Not at the current expense and total lack of content.
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DK
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Re: 4K resolution in cartoons

Post by DK »

Ditto on that Vern.
I just finished a job for a client who is pitching to a large US network at HD 1920x1080.
The artwork was supplied to me as black and white hand sketched drawings rough as guts
and i delivered the final 10 animated shots as High Quality wmv files. Each shot duration
was 5-10 seconds and the files were only around 9 MB each and played back smooth as
silk. They then asked me to supply High Quality MOV files as well. Each file just blew out
to 50-100 MB????? I can tell you now that you could not see the difference because the
style was grubby to start with but I had a hell of a time getting the MOV files to the client
even with fibre.

DK
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slowtiger
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Re: 4K resolution in cartoons

Post by slowtiger »

IMO 4K is only for cinema content, and only for certain visual styles or topics: lots of fine lines, or crosshatchings, or starry space shots. For any TV HD is more than good enough, as Vern correctly points out they still struggle to deliver that adequately.
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Markster
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Re: 4K resolution in cartoons

Post by Markster »

AmigaMan wrote:A friend of mine sells Film, DVD and BluRay etc. He tells me he still sells 30 times as many DVD's as BluRays. The market for BluRay is fairly small still so I doubt rushing to embrace 4K is high on many people's priorities. You would need a huge TV to see any difference between BluRay and 4K. 2D animation, because of the area's of flat colour (like you've demonstrated here) is unlikely to show much improvement in quality at all.
Most people are not worried about quality AmigaMan, most people want a cheaper more supported solution when they buy movies or TV shows on optical media.

The most common resolution for any kind of video (including animation, film, etc.) today is 1080p, but 4K is growing, most of the time I render in 720p simply because my PC is only dual-core, 4K looks great on really large displays such as 65' or bigger televisions and in cinema.

My current video editing software doesn't even support resolutions higher than 1080p, if I want to create a 4K animation I have to edit it all in AS unless I upgrade to Vegas MS 13 from 11 or get another video editing software that supports 4K, like I said, I will sometimes edit in 4K.
o0Ampy0o
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Re: 4K resolution in cartoons

Post by o0Ampy0o »

Markster wrote: I imagine most people who were viewing the animation had a 1080p or smaller monitor or TV.
Were they relying on an uploaded Youtube video? Or, did you have it placed where they could see it without being compressed?
Markster
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Re: 4K resolution in cartoons

Post by Markster »

It's unfortunately compressed, but you can render in 4K yourself in AS Pro.
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