When does Ultra HD come in 3D?

In addition to the fourfold resolution, Ultra HD offers other important advantages compared to Full HD. Thus, the color space was significantly expanded and covers almost all the natural colors. The picture may become so much more colorful and crisp. The fineness of intensity gradations (quantization, bit depth, etc.) is also improved, combined with a potentially higher dynamic, ie an enormous brilliance.


Why is 3D missing in the 4K standard?


The fact that in the first run of the 4K standard ITU-R.2020 50 and 100 hertz for European TV broadcasts were forgotten, should be remedied, but why nobody has thought about an integration of the third dimension? Before TV devices became smart, it was the cash box, and nowadays every full-HDTV full-HD TV supports 3D.


3D in movies and on Blu-ray


It is probably due to the fact that the broadcasters NHK (Japan) and BBC (UK) were in charge of the ultra-high resolution and were more interested in UHDTV2, ie 8K with 32 megapixels for screens up to five meters in diagonal.


In cinema everything is better


This is behind the new Ultra-HD standard


Best image material in Hollywood


Ultra HD was researched long before the 3D boom started, and maybe the developer's developer was not seen or overslept in the ivory towers.


The flare of the 3D fire took place in the cinema, where Avatar had more success than was generally expected. And over the kinonahe Blu-ray technology the films have found the way into our living rooms. The medium was quickly expanded by a new profile (5.0), which unified the data flows for the two independent eye views efficiently and with full quality.


The same has not happened with the TV broadcasts until today. When 3D is sent, then Side by Side, so without changing the sending machine, losing half the resolution. And the only ones who want to send 3D are private homes with pay TV. The public broadcaster, whose international counterparts are the ultra-HD pioneers BBC and NHK, are not interested.


The ultra-HD ambitions of the TV stations in all honors, but with the evolution speed with which work is there, in five years the classic HD-ready resolution will come through the cable and over the satellite. ARD and ZDF use today not even Full HD. If you actually sit as promised in the first row, you can recognize this resolution. And the second eye for a better view is only necessary for ZDF. It would be especially necessary for the 3D impression.


Ultra HD - The new generation of television


Looking at the Kinotechnik, a bright glow appears on the horizon. For some years even old celluloid films can be scanned in 4K or better. A director who goes with the times can also long in 5K, 6K or 8K rotate, now also with maximum quality in 3D and even with 48 or 60 frames per second (HFR)

The hopes of being able to feed new high-resolution TVs as soon as possible with super-sharp pictures should not be based on the broadcasters, but on the film companies of Hollywood. They have enough source material for a TV revolution, but one can only guess how far the talks with the equipment industry have advanced about a new method of bringing films to the man. Burning an Ultra HD movie to a Blu-ray disc is now possible, but it can only be played on the special PC.


HDMI 2.0: Upgrade for 4K content


The new video compression method HEVC is the first step towards Ultra HD, the right interface HDMI 2.0 has also been introduced recently. However, there are still some important building blocks in the 4K puzzle. Decisive in the restraint of Hollywood's rights holders will be that the copy protection of the Blu-ray cracked. The best currently available studio quality easily copied to anyone seems to be no option.


Data processing for Ultra HD and 3D


Streaming over the Internet will not meet the highest quality requirements due to lean data rates, so that hard disk players or optical media should be used again.


A current Blu-ray XL would have just enough capacity for a perfectly coded current Ultra-HD film (24 frames per second, 8 bits) with 100 gigabytes, but what is the 48, 60 proposed in the ITU-R.2020 standard Or even 120 hertz with 12 bit quantization? Or with 3D, which could increase the data expenditure again by about 50 percent?


This brings the future


A colloquium of the Institute of Rundfunktechnik stated that all this was being researched and costs weighed against the benefits. For example, the data rate should not increase linearly at higher image frequencies, but the number of images should be reduced, since images closer to one another are more closely resembling each other and thus can be compressed more easily.


All about HEVC - High Efficiency Video Coding


In our research on the state of things with 3D we have found. The ITU / ISO / IEC Joint Collaborative Team "JCT-3V" meets every three months, develops and examines novel algorithms and procedures, generates reports and works on new techniques, for example to integrate 3D video into the extended codec 3D HEVC .


So someone has thought of the third dimension of Ultra HD, but it has not been communicated yet. If you look at the available documents on the developer side, the depth coding approaches are much more advanced than the MVC (multi-view coding) used on the 3D Blu-ray. American researchers are also developing, such as the Fraunhofer Institute and RWTH Aachen.


However, when results are to be expected, perhaps with regard to the 3D capability of an ultra-HD medium that has not yet been finalized, parameters of an ultra-HDTV 3D emission, or even a coding of many viewpoints through a 3D object Could stand in the stars. Ultra HD will soon become very concrete in 2D, 3D is not dead, but will be delivered later.