8K playback comes to YouTube

Excuse the large red arrow, but just in case you hadn't noticed...

As we posted on Facebook yesterday, Ghost Towns in 8K, a film by Luke and Marika Neumann, has become the first public film that anyone knows about to be uploaded and publicly available in 8K on YouTube.

Why are we dancing around this slightly rather than unequivocally stating this is the first ever? Because, rather to everyone’s surprise, it turns out that YouTube has been capable of supporting 8K since 2010, or at least that’s what it told the 9to5Google blog when it asked. Furthermore it said that labelling for such content was added ‘earlier this year’, a rather vague time period that stretches from a couple of days ago back to January 1st.

Anyway, it was all actually noticed by people for the first time a couple of days ago and Ghost Towns is the first content in 4320p, which somewhat understandably plays back well in Chrome but seems to struggle in most everything else. And that’s before you get to any questions about the bandwidth.

The film, of course, was not captured in native 8K, but rather each shot was taken in portrait orientation using a RED Epic Dragon 6K and then stitched together in Adobe After Effects. Some shots were also scaled up from 6.1K by 125% to meet the 7.6K threshold.

Now, if only we had an 8K monitor to play it on…

Ghost Towns in 8K