4K Ultra HD - What makes 4K so much better than standard HD?
As wedding filmmakers we always want to produce the best wedding films possible, in the best quality possible – shooting in 4K allows us to do this. Simply put, 4K is the best quality currently available, and wedding films in 4K look stunning! It’s also the perfect way to future-proof your wedding films – as 4K viewing becomes more common, standard HD is starting to show its deficiencies. As an example of the growing importance of 4K and its significance in terms of quality, major film and TV studios like Netflix will now only accept productions shot in 4K.
Wedding Videos with 4K Resolution
4K has four times the pixel resolution of HD, and so your wedding film will look exceptional whether watching on your mobile or a large screen television. In addition we use advanced post production filters to smooth out skin tones and produce the most flattering look possible.
Better Quality - whether watching on a 4K or HD Screen
Even when watching a wedding video originally filmed in 4K on a standard HD screen, the quality is arguably better, this is thanks to it having a higher resolution image in the first place and downscaling. Compared to a standard HD wedding film where it is often in actuality a sub HD camera upscaled. To summarise – whether you are watching your wedding film on an HD screen or a 4K screen, a wedding film shot originally in 4K will look better!
Specialist 4K Filming Techniques for Weddings
Shooting wedding videos in 4K at such high resolution on multiple cameras does have a toll on production – where the cameras are more expensive, the lenses need to be sharper, the media costs about a hundred times more and the storage requirements are huge – per wedding we now shoot on average about 4000GB which is ten times more than when we were filming in HD. But, for all the reasons mentioned here, we believe it’s well worth it to capture the very best images possible!
More Detail for More Flattering Images
4K is new, and there are some who have their concerns that higher resolution images might make for less flattering images, particularly with close ups of people. We would like to dispel these worries!Having the extra resolution recorded means wide shots and detail shots look so much better - for example a wide shot of the ceremony and you can actually make out peoples' faces and expressions. And venue shots look so much better having the extra detail. For close ups of people having the extra resolution means our post-production filters have that much more information to work with (for close ups we use a variety of post-production filters that smooth skin etc without softening the whole image). With 4K you can also selectively soften parts of the image as required, but with HD you can never get detail back.
It's worth remembering that even though 4K is the highest resolution currently available in the video world, that's still only the same resolution as an 8MP stills camera. And most photographers will use stills cameras of well over 20MP and wouldn't dream of shooting with less resolution! This is precisely because they know that having the extra information recorded means they can produce far more flattering results in post.
4K is becoming more commonplace and it's amazing how quickly you become used to watching in 4K. I find I'm now so used to filming and editing in 4K that when I watch standard HD it looks blurry and ill defined by comparison. As 4K becomes the standard, HD will look dated, and this is another reason having your wedding film in 4K is a great way of future-proofing.
