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Wednesday, February 11, 2015

Gizmodo- Whacky TimeLapse

This Timelapse Shot in 10K Resolution Is Fantastically Bonkers 

4K? That's so last year. 8K? Yesterday's news. This timelapse video was shot in an astonishing 10K resolution using an 80 megapixel camera. The level of detail in these gorgeous shots is mind-boggling.
Joe Capra of Scientifantastic shot this video to test out the PhaseOne IQ180 digital medium format still camera. Its 80 megapixel resolution means that each original frame is 10328x7760 pixels. Good lord. 
What does all that resolution mean for us humans actually watching the video? Well, since Vimeo only supports regular old 1080p, you can't actually see the shots in their full size and resolution. Even if it supported 10K, there isn't a monitor you could buy that would display it in full. Even if there was, your eyes would be hard-pressed to appreciate it. But you can still get a sense of the vastness of each image when Capra zooms waaaay in on each shot. He explains: 
Each shot sequence starts off with the full resolution footage scaled down to fit within a 1920x1080 resolution (14% scale). The next shot in each shot sequence is the full resolution shot scaled to 50%, so basically zooming in quite a bit. From there we go into the full resolution shot scaled to 100%, which is an extreme zoom/crop. As you can see, the quality and detail holds up extremely well, it's pretty amazing.
We agree. Here's a still of the first full shot in the video, followed by the enlarged portion:
I wonder if the future of photography is cameras of such high resolution that you can just zoom in to any tiny area of the frame instead of using telephoto lenses. Makes you think.
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Resolution has nothing to do with vision acuity (20/20—barring receptor deficiencies). I can create a 1,000K (Terapixel range for square images or shorter side being 1,000K) image...using a smaller and out of focus image...net result: still 1,000K image, but wasting resolution.
However, if you take 1,000K image and then a 10K image, using the same optics (assuming optics are tuned for >10K images), the detail that can be discerned with the higher resolution will be greater.
So what our eye sees, and what we think we see, are very different things. 20/20 to start, is about focus/clarity. Not resolution at all. Our eye's resolution would in theory be related to the density of the rods and cones, the light receptor cells that make up the retina. 

There is a highly specialized region of the central retina that measures about 1.2 millimeters in diameter called the fovea. In it, the density is as mucha s 200x that of the rest of the retina. The cones are responsible for high rez vision, and colour sensitivity. And at the center of the fovea they take over completely. 

The rest of the retina has relatively poor resolution, and the are in your field of sight the fovea in responsible at a glance, literally, is tiny. I've read comparison to a medium size coin held out at arms length. But our vision, works more like video compression than like a camera. We are constantly scanning the environment.

The larger field of vision is dominated by rods, and they are more sensitive to contrast and movement. Anything changes in their range of detection, we're prone to glancing that way with the fovea to update the record of that part of our field of view. You might not even notice you do it, most of the time you don't. 

Not talking about out of the corner of your eye change, but things happening say, 10 degrees even from the center of your vision.

You brain uses that glance to update the mental model of the world you hold in your mind, unconsciously, and that is the image served up to you as your 'sight'. That has no resolution bounds at all really, it's a figment of your mind. 

Ever wandered around stressed trying to find keys, only to find they were laying on a table out in the open all along? It happens because the stress shorts the updating process so that information does not reach the conscious mind and we keep seeing the empty space we're sure was there.

Added to that aspect of vision that is essentially, an artifact of the mind rather than of a screen or camera resolution, is the fact that rather than being a static stationary record, with a fixed dpi, our eyes are constantly scanning and updating the data we call vision. So kind of like the way the new E-M5 greatly increases its resolution with pixel-shift technique accomplished by moving the sensor around and getting multiple scans of the image with the sensor in different positions, our eye accomplishes something similar by being constantly on the move. 

So our vision is basically not at all defined by fixed resolution at all, except at the millisecond level of time intervals. In that context it's actually not great at all. But over time, with all the combined effects of it as a behaviour and a perceptual phenomena, we experience it as having no resolution limit beyond our ability to focus. But at the same time, it can be fooled by as low as 300dpi in print, and just a few frames a second on a screen, into thinking it's seeing things it isn't exactly. 
Slightly Related: Does anyone know what the current "gold standard" is for HD security cameras?
I think I saw a Giz article (or some news source..) a few years ago mentioning a crazy high-def security camera that can record an entire parking lot and all the visible license plates from a single vantage point. I'm curious what level of detail could reasonable be recorded where security monitoring is in place?
This is happening faster then I thought it would. Resolution is a killer app of sorts, it transforms our viewing experience in a powerful way, need I mention we are highly attuned to the visual. Based on past events I see this as its own genera, lots more to come. At some point we will all be waiting for the solid state memory chips to grow larger in capacity and shrink in cost so many amazing things can happen. I give this transformation of ideas using new visual capabilities to hit in eight years.
about the 35 second mark theres a naked lady on the porch of a green roofed building of the bottom left corner.............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

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