Classic Automobiles in 4K (video)

Mark (Basspig) Weiss

Well-Known Member
Aug 3, 2010
678
31
940
New Milford, CT
www.basspig.com
I shot some 4K video last weekend at an annual antique auto show in town. It was shot in DCI 4K and uploaded to Youtube. I used a baked in LUT and the images are pretty much unaltered from how they came out of the camera.


[video]https://youtu.be/YnJpYcmNd54[/video]

Be sure to choose 2160P if your connection supports it, and display on your 4K monitor. If your monitor is UHD, it will be letterboxed. Actually, I suspect Youtube already letterboxes it, because it doesn't actually support DCI 4K, but either way, it should be an enjoyable experience despite 90% of the quality lost going from 10-bit color to 6 or 8-bit that Youtube uses, and the attendant lossy compression. The ultrawide ACES color gamut is lost, too, but unless you've seen the original on a wide gamut 4K display, it looks pretty good. Enjoy the cars from 1931 to 1975.
 

GaryProtein

VIP/Donor
Jul 25, 2012
2,542
31
385
NY
The overall exposure on my computer looks dark--about 2 stops under exposed.

I'm viewing on a 1920 x 1200 screen.

The problem may be part in my computer and part in youtube.
 
Last edited:

amirm

Banned
Apr 2, 2010
15,813
37
0
Seattle, WA
Hi Mark. THanks for the link. I tried playing it at 1080p since that is the resolution of my laptop. Unfortunately there are significant compression artifacts on the grass and ground. These are difficult things to encode but at the bit rate of 20 mbit/sec, I don't expect them to look this bad. There is a pumping action at I-frame boundaries which makes it even more visible.

I tried to look at the 2160p but my laptop is not fast enough to decode it. As it stuttered along, there were still compression artifacts but less noticeable.

Outside of that, loved the color and contrast. So job well done.
 

Mark (Basspig) Weiss

Well-Known Member
Aug 3, 2010
678
31
940
New Milford, CT
www.basspig.com
The video was produced on a 4K monitor that was set to REC709 levels, with the 7 IRE pluge just barely discernable from black (calibrated setup). Some computers, like my office PC, seem too dark playing videos. Also, this video was shot to capture as much dynamic range and protect highlights as well as shadows.

The compression is terrible. It lost 90% of the enjoyability factor due to the blockiness, especially where saturated colors appear.

I've uploaded some less compressed still frames on my Dropbox account, for those who wish to get a better idea what the unprocessed camera footage looks like: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/o1e15heg9sc6dpb/AABJHjbUE1aOblNjxJJi1An_a?dl=0

I encoded h.264 at a low enough bitrate such that I could upload the entire thing overnight and have my connection free the next day. Another problem is that Youtube has no support for DCI 4K and re-scales it to 3840x2160, which could explain why it looks so much worse. It might be better to crop the image and render direct to UHD instead of 4K. I will conduct some experiments to see what produces less artifacts.

Thanks for the comments!
 

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