Using a 80 megapixel PhaseOne IQ180 camera, timelapser and photographer Joe Capra created 10328×7760 — A 10K Timelapse Demo (watch it below) showcasing the very best in 10K resolution with a timelapse video of Brazil constructed out of photographs with a resolution higher than your computer can handle.
“This footage comes from some shots I did while shooting 4K and 8K timelapses in Rio De Janeiro for a major electronics manufacturer,” Capra explains. “Each shot is comprised of hundreds of individual still images, each weighing in at a whopping 80 megapixels.”
Each individual raw frame measures 10,328×7760 pixels and each shot uses minimal processing and includes curves and features input sharpening and saturation adjustments.
“The h264 compression really kills a lot of the fine detail,” says Capra. “No noise reduction was done on any of the shots. I tried to keep the shots as close to raw as possible so you may see some dust spots, noise and manual exposure changes I made while shooting. For a final video edit these adjustments would be smoothed out and fixed. Normally I run shots where I manually change the exposure during the shot through LRTimelapse, but unfortunately the program can’t seem to handle such huge raw files.”
What does Brazil look like in 10K? Watch the video below.
Capra explains that he also had to loop some shots in order to have enough runtime to use zoom, resulting in a jump in the footage here and there. Each shot sequence starts off with the full resolution footage scaled down to fit within a 1920×1080 resolution (14% scale). The next shot in each shot sequence is the full resolution shot scaled to 50%, zooming in quite a bit.
From there we go into the full resolution shot scaled to 100%, which is an extreme zoom/crop.
“As you can see, the quality and detail holds up extremely well; it’s pretty amazing,” Capra enthuses. “I wanted to show a couple things with this demo video: First, the extreme resolution of this camera (and medium format in general). Second, the amazing amount of flexibility this resolution allows for in post production. You can literally get about 8-10 solid 1920×1080 shots out of a single shot. You can also get about 5-6 solid 4K shots out of a single shot.”
He continues, “I don’t expect 10K footage to be consumer-viewable anytime soon. We are just starting to see people adopting 4K, so I think it will be quite a while until we see 10K or even 8K in the home. However 10K does have its uses, mainly for large screen displays that you see in airports, museums, malls, and stadiums.”
