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4K for all?
Panasonic is making big noises about 4K video and the 8Mp stills you can extract from it, so we caught up with Panasonic's Product Marketing specialist Mark Baber at The Photography Show to find out why this is such a big deal and why 4K is much more than just a high-end broadcast medium.
We've spoken before, Mark, and you're obviously a kind of 4K evangelist, so what are you doing at The Photography Show?
I am a 4K evangelist, and we're here to show people what it can do and explain away any misconceptions about the technology.
So do you think people misunderstand 4K, that they think it's all too high-powered and way off in the future?
Oh, absolutely. I think a lot of consumer electronics purchasers see 4K as a television, a camera or maybe a piece of broadcast technology they won't ever get to use because it's expensive. But you can now buy a Panasonic 4K 40-inch television for £400-500, so this is becoming mainstream technology. So the challenge is what you're going to watch on a 4K TV? We want to show people that if you're buying a new camera and you've got a 4K television, you could shoot content on your 4K camera and play it back on your TV with 4x greater information, 4x greater resolution. That's one argument.
So you're saying that the average user doesn't have to worry about high-powered editing tools and computing hardware?
You don't even have to get into that. You can play 4K straight from your camera into the television. Or, if you've got a 4K camera and a full HD television, you can connect via HDMI and still play back your 4K footage at 2K [1920 x 1080] resolution.
The other thing that you're really pushing is that you shoot 4K video solely to get 8Mp stills, but a lot of photographers are going to think that it's just a novelty, that the quality won't be very good.
This is a testament to the technology. You've got four times more data from 4K over full HD and – this is comparing it to other Panasonic products – you've got better dynamic range, improved resolution, better grey tones, better colour, improved ISO performance, potentially, over stills. But the main message is that shooting at 4K allows you to shoot at 30 frames per second. The GH4, for example, shoots 16Mp stills at 12fps but, as you know, if you don't use the right card or you maintain the burst for long enough, then gradually, over a few seconds, this speed deteriorates and you've lost the moment.
So the trouble with regular continuous shooting (burst) modes is that you run out of buffer space after a certain number of shots – and you can't always predict when you need to start shooting.
No, you don't know when the action's going to start, and actually, that's a really good point. And there are things you can do with video while you're filming that you can't do with stills, too. When you're recording full HD, or 4K, or slow motion on a Panasonic camera – the GH4, for example – you can change the settings live. You can change the ISO, you can change the shutter speed, you can change the compensation while you're recording. You don't have to stop like you would in burst mode.
Panasonic's 'ambassadors'
Panasonic uses professional 'ambassadors' to promote the technology, and it looks like they're using these stills professionally for themselves – is that right?
Absolutely right. Our first ambassador, Hugh Hastings, came to Panasonic last year – he's an ex Chelsea Football photographer, and he's now the Archive Manager for Chelsea Football Club and a freelance photographer – he said, 'I've just swapped my old kit for your kit, and I want to talk to you about it.' Since then, we've grown from Hugh to 20 photographers shooting portraits, sports, landscapes – we've done work with Charlie Waite this year and we hope to do more – and we've got Stuart Morgan on our stand, a freelance videographer who's done work for Top Gear using the GH4. Ross Grieve is an award-winning portrait photographer, and he and [sports photographer] Ian Cook use Nikon DSLRs but also Lumix G cameras in a way that they can't use their Nikons.
So you're talking about shooting 4K specifically for stills, and not for the video itself.
Each frame of video is a full 8Mp frame of detail on its own. If you've got the right shutter speed and the right ISO and the right lighting, you can capture motion. You take pin-point accurate stills from video in the cameras, so if you're on holiday and jumping into the pool you're able to record the whole thing from the start – from arriving at the pool, getting ready, jumping in, jumping out, and the reaction afterwards. Then you can play it back in the camera, and actually go through frame by frame by frame and pick the best shots out.
It sounds like you're going to need a lot of storage?
People are saying, 'don't I need a fast card, how much memory do I need on an SD card for 4K?' – well, yes, the more space you've got the more you can put on there. But you may not need all that video – so you can delete it, but keep the stills.
There's this other idea that maybe you've got 4K footage shot from a static viewpoint, but then you can crop in, do selective panning and motion effects – and even in that cropped section, you still get full HD quality.
That's a good point. If you zoom in 200% in post editing, you have full HD but with 4:4:4 and 8-bit or 10-bit output, which is one of the highest levels of full HD output you can get. We've got two or three consumer products now where you can make beyond broadcast quality video. Stuart Morgan has made videos for Skoda, Top Gear and so on, where he's been making his own scaffolding, bolting the cameras on to the sides of cars so that in post editing you can then do the cropping and the panning and make a static image look like it's moving.
So if you're photographing wildlife, for example, you can't tell the animal where to go and how fast, so this ability to crop and pan later could be useful?
That's a really good point, actually. Yes, sometimes subjects are unpredictable.
Any final words for video, and 4K, sceptics?
Sometimes there's that fear, isn't there, of that red button on a camera? People say, 'I know it does video, but I'm not going to use it'. We're not forcing the 4K message – the 4K message is very strong and we're showing people just what it's capable of.
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