NAB2013 has been and gone and its clear that 4K was a strong message from the show. So has anything really major changed from my previous scriblings in the latest round of announcements? I don't think so. I don't think the overall trajectory has changed.

The leading area at the moment is acquisition with a strong growth in the number of 4K capable devices from Sony, Blackmagic, Phantom, Kineraw etc. The post world is keeping up with support for codecs, 6G SDI and Moore's Law helps with the processing. We have a problem with storage though. We are dealing with a double data whammy of RAW and 4K, but storage mediums are not increasing in density per cost much at the moment.

We have the same problem with distribution. Sony's announcements to support their 4K consumer devices are a bit of a drop in the ocean at the moment and not very compelling, even for AV enthusiasts like me. My 1080p projector can reveal the difference between a blu-ray and a more compressed HD signal (download or satellite) or an up-scaled DVD. Ultra HD has to be perceptibly better than HD blu-ray otherwise its just a waste of bits.

I am getting more tempted to look at 4K acquisition. I do think there is a strong case for getting as good a "digital" negative as you can justify. Even if your post workflow/pipeline is going to have to wait a while to catch up, there are probably enough options round dual record and proxies to make it viable now.

At some point, the infrastructural and technical challenges will be sorted and the sheer desperation of the consumer electronics business for you to buy new stuff will succeed. Who knows, British Telecom may even realise that my rural exchange is still wired with string and replace it with something from the 21st century. At that point I will be able to take a trip on my hover chair to a dusty cupboard and drag out those old 4K files.

Film has been a pretty good archival medium. Maybe not in its nitrate days when it was close to a WMD level of danger, but in the post war years. I have pictures in my Aperture library going back to the turn of the millennium and my first digital camera - a 2MP Canon S10. I have scans from the same era from slides made with a slide scanner. Resolution, contrast, colour fidelity ... they have none of those things. However, a scan of a slide now taken with my multifunction printer looks like it came from a DSLR. There is little I can do now to my S10 files to make them better. Digital files will always be limited by the technology they were acquired with.

Zoom and Enhance - still largely Science Fiction