From Black and White to Ultra HD and Beyond
IBC is always a great place to get experts together and at the event in 2025, the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) coordinated a panel session with the title “From Black and White to Ultra HD and beyond, the evolution of the visual experience”. Naturally, the 8K Association was invited to join the panel and Juan Reyes, Executive Director of the Association took part. The event was moderated by Ian Nock, Vice Chair of the IET’s Media Technology Network and who also works as a consultant including work with the UHD Forum. He is chair of the UHD Forum Interoperability Working Group.
It’s 100 years since the first human face was seen on a TV screen, so Nock briefly looked back at the development of TV technology. We published an article on this topic earlier this year. He pointed out that the term television was coined around 1900, although the technology to deliver it took a quarter of a century to develop. Nock said that the term television really should be applied to the service, not the display as so many people these days use other devices to watch video content. He highlighted that the TV sets of the past, based on CRTs, bears ‘no resemblance’ to the TV sets of today. There were many technical challenges in getting to today from the 30 vertical lines with 15 fps of the first TV.
Developments have included color TV development from NTSC in the US to PAL and SECAM in Europe. He sees the move to 1920 x 1080 resolution as the real appearance of high definition, although as we highlighted in our article, the term has been used many times to describe developments over the last century. Color representation changed from Rec. 601 to Rec. 709 and then to Rec. 2020 and Rec. 2100. Now we have 4K, HDR and higher frame rates on the horizon.
The Panel
The members of the panel were:
- Chris Johns – ex-Chief Engineer of Sky
- Tania Pouli of Vivid Manta
- Juan Reyes of the 8K Association
Each of the panelists introduced themselves. Johns has been in the industry for 40 years, starting with the BBC in soundstage production. He joined Sky before it had access to a satellite and he worked through from 4:3 analog TV to 14:9 analog and then 16:9 digital formats. Sky was a pioneer in these technologies including 3D. Now, Johns said, we are in the UltraHD age and sound has also improved a lot. The switch from mono to stereo was a big one as was the move to 5.1 audio. The move from 5.1 to immersive sound was less of a jump and there is also less of a jump as audio improves as well as video.
The ‘CQC’ Factors
Johns likes to think about Content, the Quality of the content and the Cost – what he called the CQC factors of new technology developments. In the past the quality issue was helped by broadcast standards that maintained quality to the consumer. However, although MPEG has been described as the ‘saviour of the industry’, Johns believes that it can destroy the quality of images in TV. If, he said, you have seen the original image coming out of the camera in an outside broadcast van on a Grade 1 monitor, you will know that this doesn’t equate to what the consumer sees at home. The aspiration should be to deliver to the consumer that high quality from the origin, but you have to deal with the issues of cost and the need to be able to distribute the content as widely as possible.
These days, Johns continued, you have “Two further ‘C’s” – Commercialization that adds commercials and other content that can degrade the experience and Consumption. In the past, viewers had standardized CRT TVs, but these days youngsters watch on smartphones, tablets and other small devices. You have to be able to deliver satisfying content both on the best home displays and on a wide range of smaller devices with different aspect ratios and resolutions. He sees the future as encompassing accessibility and content discovery as well as ‘perfect pixels’. He believes that the aim has to be to keep quality high although that is a challenge.
Pouli is a consultant in video research and workflows and has 15 years experience in the industry mainly in academia. She has a PhD and has worked mainly on areas such as color and HDR in video and visual perception. Her interest is in how you can deliver content that meets the creative intent of the original artists. You want to make the content as immersive and interesting as ‘the real world’. Pouli thinks that the work on HDR at the moment has ‘the most impact’.
Juan Reyes introduced himself as a 25 year veteran of the industry, starting with work on DVDs. He explained the growth of the 8K ecosystem and the challenge of the ‘chicken and egg’ issue with content and hardware, as we saw when 4K was first introduced. We are starting to see 8K content starting to be developed and that parallels the growth in screen sizes in the TV market. When 4K really arrived, screens were 55″-65″ but averages are at 75″ and more, while really huge TVs are less than $1,000.
However, viewers are not moving their viewing positions back so they are getting a much more immersive experience. In this case, the 8K resolution really helps to avoid the visibility of pixelation. Consumers need to be future ready. Reyes explained the 8K content from Warner Bros and IMAX at CEDIA 2025.
The session then moved to a panel discussion. Nock asked Johns about the issue of quality and how it is changed in capture, distribution and display. “Is the loss really in MPEG”, Nock queried.
Johns asked who remembered the conversion from interlaced to progressive and said that in general, converting from one format to another is the greatest cause of quality loss. It’s true that the best content always comes from the camera. In live production an 8K camera might drop down to a 4K mezzanine quality for production, as this is the most cost effective and stable production environment. For delivery there are other constraints and you may convert to 1080 progressive in HDR to deliver it to as many people as possible. If the consumer watches in a bright environment and ‘twiddles the settings’ on their set, they can degrade it further. For this reason, you have to start with the highest possible quality. If you start in HD, things can only get worse.
A Great Advantage in 8K Production
Johns sees a great advantage in moving to 8K production because with oversampling you can do much to optimize the image. However, the challenge of getting that optimized image to the consumer meets the need to be cost effective for the consumer. If you start with very high quality, you will tend to spend more on it to get it in a good condition to the viewer than you would with more mediocre content.Â
Pouli was asked how to define the quality of the image and she said that this is really down to perception, although you could also use statistics or count something in the image to try to measure it. Whatever number you have, it’s about perception. The most significant factor (resolution, dynamic range, color etc) is typically content-dependent. (This is in line with the research that was published at Display Week on the visibility of 8K – it is content dependent – editor ). For example, in sports, frame rate is really important, but not so much in a talk show. The type of device used in playback also plays a big part. However, perception is more important than statistics, in Pouli’s view.
Dynamic Frame Rates?
Nock asked if we are moving towards dynamic frame rates. Johns explained that early in his career, he did tests with mono audio with regular picture quality, and with stereo sound and a degraded image. Most viewers thought that the degraded picture with stereo sound ‘looked better’. The way that the brain uses the audible and visual information is complex. As another example, movie makers use extremely small depth of field to help focus viewers on a particular part of the image, with the rest often extremely blurred. That helps the creative to evoke particular emotions. There’s a big difference in the function of audio between drama and sport. It’s about getting the elements together in a harmonious fashion.
Reyes said that ‘the more pixels the better’ especially with large displays. In 2024, the 8K Association helped to enable demonstrations of live 8K HDR 60P content from the Paris Olymics and engineers from SMPTE and elsewhere were amazed by the quality. Really, it was hard to see defects in the image, despite the compression via VVC. As screens get bigger, the pixels do matter.
Nock asked about putting archive content on 8K displays, although the original might be in standard definition (SD). Reyes pointed out that AI is really helping to transform content to match the big new 8K displays. The technology is also continuing to evolve. Pouli said “There is AI, and then there is AI’. For upscaling, e.g. from 4K to 8K or for HDR conversion there are well established methods that work well. Some of those are AI based. With more complex processing, there is more danger of seeing issues. Going from SD to 8K may show issues, as would a change from 24fps to 120.
However, AI will have to be used as it works better than ‘old school’ analytical methods, Pouli explained.
Does it Make the Content Look Good?
Nock highlighted that there were similar issues and questions in the colorization of older monochrome content to color. It matters less on the technology used, the question is “Does it make the content look good?”.
While many expect the change from one format to another, Nock said, it should be remembered that the switch from monochrome to color took the best part of three decades from the first commercial services to the last. “Are we too impatient?” Nock asked. Johns believes that this all depends on the consumer. Do they really want huge screens or would they prefer to watch on tablets or devices closer to the face. He pointed out that in the movie “Spartacus”, while the male lead’s face was shown with high detail and ‘every pore visible’, the leading lady was shown with very soft focus and with details smoothed. It shows that the format has to be suitable for the content. Not all content will look great with huge detail, he believes.
Johns talked then about film grain and noise, a hot topic at the moment. There are big questions such as whether you should remove noise and grain because encoding it is very inefficient. Do you analyze it and replace it or leave it in as the director intended? That’s a question for creatives and how you balance the views of the creatives and consumers.
Crystal Ball Gazing
Nock then asked panelists to gaze into their crystal balls. Reyes reinforced the point about larger screens and also highlighted the demand for more immersive experiences, whether based on headsets or higher quality, such as the 8K 120Hz gaming that the 8K Association has demonstrated this year. Consumer like the experiences at locations such as the Sphere and COSM and would like to get more of them into the home. That means bigger displays and more immersive audio. New sound bars and technology is bringing the immersion of these locations to the home. The 8K Association is looking to help develop the ecosystem for these immersive experiences.
Pouli said that what the panel audience considers to be television is not the same as what their children consider TV to be. There is a massive transition in what TV is becoming. There is a split between always and everywhere consumption on mobile devices and the home-based immersive experience of large screen TVs and surround sound. The other challenge is the issue of diminishing returns. At some point, the cost and energy increases needed to deliver a better experience may be too much. “Good enough’ may be where we end up.
Johns highlighted the difference between broadcast and mass markets and smaller segments. He pointed out that his son watches sports TV on three screens at one time – a TV, a tablet and a smartphone. As we go forward, you need to find the sweet spots to meet all of these requirements.
Nock finished the panel session by highlighting the range of display devices and different content delivery available and the capability to deliver each way. Once you have the capacity issues solved via broadband, that will be the future with very high quality content that will be influenced by creatives.
You can watch the full panel session on the IET Media Network YouTube channel.
