{"id":98949,"date":"2018-02-06T07:00:08","date_gmt":"2018-02-06T13:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.premiumbeat.com\/blog\/?p=98949"},"modified":"2019-05-28T09:56:18","modified_gmt":"2019-05-28T14:56:18","slug":"downscaling-4k-1080p-online-compression","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.premiumbeat.com\/blog\/downscaling-4k-1080p-online-compression\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Downscaling 4K to 1080p Worth It After Online Compression?"},"content":{"rendered":"

There are a number of reasons why shooting 4K for 1080p is a good idea, but does online compression mean you’re wasting your time?<\/h2>\n

Cover image via gnepphoto<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Shooting in 4K to deliver in 1080p\u00a0offers a number of benefits, such as\u00a0the ability to\u00a0crop your composition <\/a>without loss of (HD) resolution, digitally zooming and panning with techniques like a digital dolly zoom<\/a>, and (of course) increased sharpness and image color.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve previously covered why the sharpness and color is better in\u00a04K vs. 1080p using the GH5<\/a>.\u00a0Here’s the tl;dr version:<\/p>\n

When you downscale from 4K to full HD, you\u2019re essentially oversampling the image to have 4x the data for every pixel. Therefore, when you have 4K footage and downscale it to 1080p (Full HD), the image is going to look better than it would at native 1080p. You\u2019ll find the picture is a lot sharper, the colors more vivid, and (depending on the properties of the image) you\u2019ll also see less noise.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Recently, filmmaker Alejandro Hernandez<\/a>\u00a0brought up an issue in the Color Grading Central Facebook group<\/a>\u00a0\u2014\u00a0a community of professional and amateurs colorists, managed by Resolve tutorial wizard and color-grading expert Denver Riddle<\/a>. Hernandez\u00a0posits that unless you render a 4K file for 4K online delivery, the perceived increase in 1080p sharpness you get with a 4K downscale gets nullified.<\/p>\n

YouTube, of course,\u00a0uses a heavy compression \u2014 that’s no secret. We\u2019ve recently\u00a0discussed<\/a>\u00a0that using coarse film grain will deplete the sharpness of your image after YouTube compression. If we compare a 400 percent zoom into an offline 4K file against 4K YouTube image, we can see a slight decrease in the clarity, and surprisingly, a red cast to the actor’s\u00a0face. However, this is a 400 percent digital zoom. YouTube’s 4K platform is otherwise fantastic for what it is.<\/p>\n

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However, this raises an important question: does\u00a0YouTube really make a 4K to 1080p render obsolete?<\/p>\n

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The Test<\/h3>\n

While filming in 4K solely to deliver a sharper HD picture hasn\u2019t been my primary use of the resolution,\u00a0I have<\/em> indeed had\u00a0projects that required 1080p delivery,\u00a0so I shot in 4K to\u00a0get a sharper HD image. This, of course, comes at the cost of larger and faster media \u2014 along with the need for\u00a0more offline storage. And if you\u2019re selective, we can talk about the increase in offload time and processing power for slower machines.<\/p>\n

Here we have a still from a 4K shot:<\/p>\n

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. . . and a still from a 1080p shot:<\/p>\n

\"Is<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a slight discrepancy between the actor’s position and the sweat on his face, but if we only focus on his eye, it\u2019s 99 percent close enough that we can use it as an example.\u00a0Of course, for offline delivery, the principle stands. Delivering 4K to 1080p will look better than a standard 1080p file, and we can see this when we compare the two exported files.<\/p>\n

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There’s a lot more clarity to the image on the left, and we can see the finer details directly underneath his eyelid.<\/p>\n

For the test itself, I rendered both video files using Premiere Pro\u2019s 1080p YouTube preset, but I increased the bitrate to 50mbps.<\/p>\n

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The results above\u00a0came from YouTube, and, well, they’re certainly not great. Again, YouTube is compressing the video, so we know it’s going to lose some of the finer details, but as Hernandez suggests, YouTube\u00a0nullifies the benefits\u00a0of the 4K downscale to the point\u00a0that there’s minimal difference between the 4K to 1080p image and the native 1080p.<\/p>\n

\"Is<\/p>\n

Again, the hue\u00a0has undergone some minimal changes, but more importantly, we can really see how much detail\u00a0we lose\u00a0by comparing the offline image to the compressed YouTube image. Ultimately, for many, this will not be an issue. More than half of YouTube views\u00a0come from smart devices, and most do not support 4K. However, if you have been shooting in 4K solely for a crisper online image, now you know it’s unnecessary. Although, given how YouTube is continually developing, perhaps in a year or two\u00a0this article will become redundant.<\/p>\n

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Looking for more info on video production? Check out these articles.<\/p>\n