NAB 2025 Buzzes – and a World First?
The 8K Association patrolled the aisles at NAB to see the developments in the technology of 8K and above. There were several particularly significant announcements and demonstrations at NAB 2025 and a number of lesser items of news. We’re covering the major ones in this article and will cover the smaller items in another round-up article.
A disruptive factor this year at the show was the astonishing announcements from the Trump administration about tariffs, which were changing day by day and concerning almost everybody in one way or another.
Blackmagic Design Raises Excitement with Pyxis 12K
Blackmagic Design had its usual large booth near the entrance to the South Hall. A lot of space was taken up by discussions and demonstrations of the DaVinci Resolve editing suite which is about to receive a major update, but we focused on two other areas.
First, just before the show, the firm announced that it was taking the 12K sensor from its larger Ursa camera and putting it in a new version of its PYXIS ‘box’ camera body, which was previously limited to 6K. Blackmagic’s sensor differs from other sensors (among other things, it uses an RGBW pixel configuration) in that it can shoot 12K, 8K and 4K using the full area of the sensor. This is in contrast to some other cameras that merely crop the image, meaning that you are not enjoying the optical advantages of the full frame.
The company announced pricing at $4,999 before the show, but then had to raise it briefly when the tariff announcements were made. However, by the next day, the firm told us that it had been able to move its production location to a more favourable region. As we went to press, the price on the new camera was being quoted at $5,495 and available with a range of mounts (Leica L, Arri PL, Canon EF). Blackmagic RAW format in 12 bit color with H.264 proxies are supported. Storage is with CFexpress or via USB-C and there are connections for uploading to Blackmagic Cloud including an RJ-45 ethernet port. Monitoring is supported up to 4K using 12G SDI. There’s a hardware streaming engine for direct connection to YouTube, Facebook and more.
The camera can record the full resolution at up to 40fps with 8K supported up to 112 fps (although staff told us that this was just in the 2.34:1 aspect ratio – 72fps is the maximum in ‘open gate’ mode) There is a built in 4″ display with 1500 nits of output. The PYXIS 12K will be available in July.
Elsewhere on the booth, there was a long line of visitors that wanted to try the Apple Vision Pro headsets which were being used to show content from the Blackmagic URSA Cine Immersive camera that the firm developed in collaboration with Apple and which exploits the firm\s 17K sensor to capture dual 8K per eye images.
Sony Adds a new 8K Remote Sensor
Sony was showing a new 8K sensor for its Venice II camera, The new sensor is quite small, with cable to the main camera body of up to 12M (with an optional cable). The remote sensor can allow easier capture where space is limited. However, there is another application where the small sensor is valuable and that is in stereo 3D videography. The remote sensors can be set up to be just 64 mm (2.52 inches) from center to center. The sensors are available with Sony’s E mount or with PL mounts. There is a drop in ND filtar facility.
Other news included new firmware for the 8K Burano camera, which now supports some additional lower resolution modes and a new 4K HDC-F5500V camera for live production.
Lasergraphics Makes Warner Bros Happy with 8K Scans
During the panel session that the 8K Association facilitated during NAB 2025, we heard that Warner Bros were happy users of the Lasergraphics Director scanner which can scan up to 13.5K wide images and scans 8K at 5fps with film up to 70mm. By chance, the booth had at NAB was just a few yards from the panel session. Warner Bros said that it has scanned around 20 films in 8K in recent years. Each film is scanned at 4K or 8K depending on the visible difference.
Like the scanner from DFT that we saw at IBC last year , the scanner uses a static film + RGB flash illumination to capture each frame. The scanner has a number of unusual features and as the products are widely distributed around the world, its design is modular to allow remote repairs. Staff told us that there is a Lasergraphics scanner in the US Library of Congress. The company is based in Irvine, California.
AstroDesign is All-in on 8K
AstroDesign of Japan had a number of 8K developments. The first item that we looked at was a camera that the firm is building around the 8K x 8K sensor that has been developed by NHK and that we have been monitoring.
We next looked at the AB-4815 portable 8K 120Hz camera. AstroDesign was highlighting the use of the camera for sports, including technology that it is developing to extract multiple ‘point of interest’ windows that are generated by AI. For example, 1080P windows might be created to follow particular sportsmen.
Next from AstroDesign was a new camera with a separate sensor and body. The AB-4834 camera has an L Mount and will be released in Q3.
The company has developed a server that can capture 8K uncompressed video. Although it has 16TB of storage, but that is sufficient just for 30 minutes use. The company told us that endoscopy and other medical applications are likely to be the main users. Medical users want no compression at all – they are often looking for very fine details.
A server that Astro has had success with is the MC-2087 which can support a 16K x 4K display surface and multiple physical displays. The firm told us that it has sold around 500 of these systems in Japan where they are used for horseracing and ‘keirin’ cycle racing.
V-Nova Exploits LCEVC format for Immersive 3D
One of the most impressive demos that we saw at the show was from V-Nova, the company behind the LCEVC codec which has been adopted for broadcast in Brazil. The firm acquired PresenZ, a developer of a 6DoF format for VR applications. It combines its hierarchical codec technologies with the format and the combination can be used to stream stereo 3D video to headsets (the Meta Quest 3 was used at the show). The development came about as V-Nova had been developing codecs for volumetric 3D video.
If 3D CGI content is available, it can be rendered in the cloud, with the views being created from data sent by the viewer’s headset. The use of the cloud eliminates the need for a high powered PC for each user. The most surprising aspect of the demo was that there was a real sense of presence, as the view changed as the viewer’s head moved, with different levels of occlusion showing previously hidden objects.
V-Nova told us that it has had a huge amount of interest from studios that have 3D CGI assets from previous 3D productions which can now be simply re-rendered to create movies that are very immersive. (having said that, we spoke to others who said that it’s not untypical for all the original assets to be disposed of once a 3D movie had been created!)
The company told us that latency is around 65-70ms using AWS. It would like to get this down further, but its tests have shown that latency is not an issue until it gets over 100ms. In the videos, there is no interaction other than the viewpoint, so it’s not quite the same as gaming. V-Nova is partnered with Nvidia to develop the rendering side and the LCEVC codec ideally needs at least 25Mbps to send 6K video at around 70fps although 30-50Mbps is better.
8K Association Shows 120Hz 8K Gaming – A World First?
The 8K Association was at the show with several areas of interest. At one end of the booth, there was a demonstration of real time gaming using an AMD-based gaming PC and a special 65″ TV flown in from Korea by 8K Association member, Samsung, that supported 120fps display. The game was Horizon Forbidden West and the TV was a modified Neo QLED 8K set with
- Auto Low Latency Mode (ALLM)
- Variable Refresh Rate (VRR)
- FreeSync Premium Pro
The PC was from Maingear and used an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D CPU and an AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT GPU. The game supports the Steam platform which allows analytics to be shown and confirming the 120Hz operation. The game was rendered at 5K and was then internally upscaled using AMD ML-based FidelityFX Super Resolution 3 technology.
The signal was sent to the TV using HDMI 2.1b with DSC support and the impressive smooth visuals attracted a lot of attention from visitors, especially those that were already aware of the game, which is visually very impressive.
In the center of the booth was the latest 8KA ‘sizzle reel’ which includes video provided by member company Imax featuring some impressive content scanned from its 70mm film stock.
BZBGear, another 8KA member was showing its range of switches, splitters and HDBaseT transmitters and receivers which all support 8K.
Getting a lot of interest for its eye-catching demos was 4By4, an 8KA member company from Korea which was showing its AI-based offline scaling technology and its pre-processing which can boost the subjective quality of video images, while significantly reducing the bandwidth needed to transmit the video.
Super interested in the 8k120 display!
Samsung Korea sent us a 65″ specially modified QLED TV for our demonstration. It is not a production product as far as we know. One of the challenges in developing 8K 120Hz products has been the interface to connect the timing controller on the back of the panel to the panel drivers. It is dealing with a lot of data and can add a lot of cost or cause challenges with RFI.
What is currently being talked about absolutely nothing, but what is very pleasant to note and what is of great importance for everything is that modern semiconductor storage media can easily record long videos of very high resolution.