A good resolution demo (Destiny)

by Cody Miller , Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Monday, July 31, 2017, 13:30 (2717 days ago) @ kidtsunami
edited by Cody Miller, Monday, July 31, 2017, 13:36

Steve Yedlin, cinematographer on Looper, Brick, and now The Last Jedi, took a bunch of high end cameras and discusses the impact of resolution on quality and I think the arguments he makes translate pretty well to games as both involve pipelines that process those pixels, in albeit different ways.

Resolution Demo

I get what he's doing, but trying to match the images with color correction as close as possible defeats the purpose of shooting on film anyway. You can make film look like a digital camera, but there is still a lot film can do that a digital camera can't match. So yeah, you can bring film down to that level, but you can't bring digital up. At least not yet.

I'm not even a DP, and I can tell immediately whether something is film or digital, and can even tell the difference between the Alexa and RED quite easily. These digital cameras have limitations film does not, but it's getting better all the time.

Kodak created the Cineon file format when 35mm film needed to be digitized. They obviously wanted the best image possible, so they chose 2K for resolution, and a 10 bit logarithmic color format. They prioritized color and dynamic range over resolution. Huh. Isn't that something?

Screen size matters. 35mm and 65mm of the same film stock will both look basically the same on a TV. But when you go watch Dunkirk on a screen literally 100 feet high, the extra resolution of IMAX film really matters. 35mm starts to get fuzzy. So yeah. In that instance anyone can see the difference.

But when we are talking about screen sizes in your living room, you are not going to gain a benefit why rendering your game at 4K. Other things make the images look 'better'.

If we are talking VR, that is a different story entirely. We are looking at 8K per eye before the resolution is acceptable.