You’re familiar with 4K video, but there are already moves towards 12K — as this stunning footage of New York City, shot by a helicopter, shows. The video is the creation of cinematographer Phil Holland, who used a helicopter and a very impressive camera rig to get his shoot on.
The New York flyover was done with a rig called the Shotover K1 Hammerhead, a chopper-mounted setup that incorporates three RED Weapon Monstro 8K VistaVision cameras. Each camera comes to about $80,000 (a little over R1 million), making this a very pricy camera arrangement indeed. But first, the video.
The money spent shows. Even in plain old HD, the video tour of New York from the sky is an impressively clear and detailed trip about the city that never sleeps. The 12K video works out to about 100 megapixels per frame, which is way, way overkill for most conventional usage. It would be great for IMAX, according to Holland, but even then it’d be scaled down a little. So… expect 12K in a cellphone camera in about 2032, we guess.
This video may have been shot in 12K but you’re not going to be able to view it that way. It’s been reduced for 8K in the video above, and YouTube will show it to you in that resolution if you like, but odds are that you don’t have an 8K-capable display lying around at home. Watch it in 4K and realise that the video looked three times better when it was originally filmed.
If you’re keen on the technical details behind how the cameras were mounted, and how the shots were filmed and then stitched together, check out Holland’s blog on the subject here.