4k Video

What is 4k video? In fact it is just a pictureformat with a resolution of four times full HD. So, one frame is 4096*2160 pixels. Without compression this boils down to nearly 8 Gb/sec (including very high quality sound). In practice this results in 5.5 TByte for a movie of 1.5 hour (1200 dvd's)

Advantage of 4k video

One advantage of 4k cinema is that one could sit closer to the screen, or watch a bigger image. This increases the viewing angle, without compromising the perceived image quality. A bigger viewing angle result is a bigger emotion response. For scientific visualisations the biggest gain for using 4k video is the amount of detail that can be seen in the data.

4k in Reality Center

The big screen of HPC/V is well suited for displaying 4k video. In fact its even better because it is a curved screen, with a viewing angle of 135 degrees, which greatly enhances the sense of presence. This makes it a great virtual reality experience. Unfortunately we can't play 4k video directly as we need to split it into six parts.

Chroma Key

Unfortunately, we don't have a 4k camera. We made a 4k video by using a normal HD camera and a green screen. This enabled us to blend in the 4k content in a process that is called chroma-keying. By using different shades of green, the teacher was still able to see where he was pointing at.

4k in 3D stereo

The Reality Center is normaly used for interactive 3D (stereo) data, which is displayed in real time using 6 PC's. For our opening we made a kind of 4k stereo movie (requiring 12 movies in total).