What does 8K allow us to do?
French stock footage leader Frames Dealer’s take on virtual production
What does 8K allow us to do? We at Frames Dealer have a very good answer to this question. As a licensing platform, our business focuses on premium stock footage. This high quality video material is produced by our network of more than 150 multi-award filmmakers across the world. We believe in a new way of making films, by up-cycling pre-existing rushes to offer exclusive and unpublished content to our clients. These include advertising agencies, post-production studios and production companies.
Basically, we turn dead data into smart data: by internally editing and post-producing hours and hours of raw footage, collected by the best directors and cinematographers in the world while on a project, we’re offering a new life to more than 60,000 shots that otherwise would have remained hidden into some hard drives.
This precious “Shot Base” is the pulsating heart of our company, increasing the production value of our clients’ projects. At the same time, their carbon footprint shrinks. And this precious “Shot Base” contains more and more 8K footage!
Technical & Artistic Interest
Frames Dealer’s interest in 8K resolution is both technical and artistic. On the one hand, being an image bank, we’re committed to adapt to the evolution of industry standards. On the other hand, being deeply passionate about cinema, television, and commercials, we simply love to fill the ultra-high-definition screens of our clients’ clients with the best video content possible.
8K resolution helps us anticipate certain of the creative drives of our clients, for example in post-production, such as 3D integration. To obtain the best results, this type of processing often requires footage in very high definition, so that editors can work properly.
Having said that, we’re also aware that advertising, for instance, doesn’t natively tend towards 8K resolution, although cinema and broadcast are moving in that direction. However, TV series, games and entertainment shows are a fertile ground for experimenting with new techniques, and we at Frames Dealer are driving innovation.
The Sony Partnership has Meaning
From this perspective, our partnership with Sony and Plateau Virtuel has particular meaning. We were pleased to see Sony, a major technology company, working with a French virtual production studio to upgrade their stage to extended reality. Plateau Virtuel became the first European set equipped with Sony Crystal LED technology in its virtual production facility.
Now, this unique technology, only available in Tokyo, Los Angeles, and Paris, has unique needs. You can’t use ‘whatever’ images on a 90 m2 screen. To place content on that screen, very high resolutions are required, starting from 6K. And our HDR premium footage of wild nature, cities and abstract art is perfectly compatible for a LED wall, as more than 50,000 shots in our catalog comply with its technical standards (i.e. 4K 10-bit resolution minimum).
As a partner in this new exciting and rapidly developing business, we realized that we could contribute to the training of directors and cinematographers in shooting for virtual productions, by using 8K resolution.
With this in mind, Frames Dealer, together with Sony, organized an exploratory workshop held at Plateau Virtuel. As part of the program there were technical demonstrations, real-time tracking systems, VFX workflows, camera testing and live shooting examples.
This last section was spectacular. Thanks to tracking, cameras have full freedom of movement, because they constantly transmit their exact position, angle of rotation and information about the sensor. In just half an hour, the studio crew shot a sequence with a crane, set in a phone booth in New York, on a rainy night. You should’ve witnessed how the audience was glued to the control monitors!
This first workshop had such positive feedback that Sony is now planning a larger second event in spring, by inviting stakeholders even from outside Europe. If you’re interested in taking part, you can find all details about the event by following our social media accounts on Instagram and LinkedIn
So, do you see what 8K allows us to do 😉 ?
