Quantel's now grading in real-time in 8K

Quantel post in 8K

Real-time post production in 8K is now a reality. Just.

Think of a number. Then quadruple it. Then quadruple it again. Then double it. That's the sort of calculation you have to do when you're figuring out how to post produce 8K video at 60fps. 4K is four times the data rate of HD, and 8K is four times the data rate of 4K. And if it's 60fps instead of 30fps, you have to double it again.

Whatever else you say about 8K, one thing that you won't be saying about it any time soon is that it is easy.

Quantel has always been famous for real-time performance with high resolutions. I remember seeing a (mere) 2K system about twelve years ago and it was incredibly impressive.

At NAB 2015, Quantel showed its Pablo Rio system working in 8K, and displaying the output on a Sharp 85" 8K monitor.

Here's how they say they did it:

Realtime 8K 60p input and output is achieved using the latest AJA Corvid 88 multi-channel I/O boards to achieve the required 5GByte/s continuous data rate. The processing muscle is delivered by three of the latest NVIDIA Tesla K80 GPU accelerators and three RAID 60 arrays controlled by Quantel's FrameMagic technology, enabling them to deliver the required performance from 160 minutes' 8K 60p storage.

When you think about it, this is a quite amazing achievement. It's the world's first ever demonstration of realtime 8K post production.

Fifteen years ago, we were all working in SD. HD is at least four times better than SD. So that means 8K at 60p is 128 times the data rate of SD.

Think about it: a 128 times increase in 15 years. What's that if it's not exponential progress?