If you have a full high definition monitor, it displays at 1080 by 1920 pixels. That’s very close to 2K.

“Wait, though”, you’d say, “Isn’t 2K 2000? by that standard, shouldn’t the resolution be something like 2160?”

You’re looking in the wrong direction. The designations deal with horizontal resolution, that is, side to side pixel numbers. The standard HDTV is, of course 1920 pixels wide, which is close to 2000, hence, 2K. 4K is about double that number.

So, why the switch? Well, it’s not really a switch for content providers as much as it’s a switch for us. We’re used to defining resolution in terms of broadcast quality, in terms of monitor size, so the first number we look for tends to be the vertical.

Content providers, though, are by now used to dealing with the measurements they came up with when they started scanning film into the computer, beginning about 15-20 years ago. Those were basically horizontal.

I’m not quite sure of the reasons myself, but my theory is that for many films, width, not height is the crucial measurement, the information least likely to be lost. See, most 35mm filmstock is actually imaged much like your old TV, the one you had in the nineties, at the almost square aspect ratio of 1.33:1.

To get regular widescreen, as the typical movie had, they would tend to matte the projected image, or in other worlds, stick a square around it and cut off the top and bottom of the image. The typical aspect ratio for that is 1.85:1, which is very close to 16X9. In fact, most movies shot for that screen width show up as full screen on your HDTV, which is very much intentional. Long story short, though, that vertical resolution wasn’t going to stick around. You’d be losing it because of the matte being set on the 35mm image. So, in such a case, horizontal resolution would be much more important.

What about the really super-widescreen images? Those come out around 2.35:1, a little under 12 unites for every five. Did they matte those, too? Well, that would be a big waste of film, wouldn’t it! You’d lose almost half the film doing that. No, instead, they created a number of processes to deal with that. One way to do things would be to shoot the film on a bigger kind of film, 70mm. Another way would be to shoot three different 4:3 images at once, and project them together to create the widescreen image. This was Cinerama, the formate used for 2001. Techniscope, the format of choice for George Lucas in American Graffiti, basically solved the problem by cutting the 35mm image in half, sacrificing resolution for the ability to use less film.

The typical approach was to shoot with anamorphic lenses. That takes a little explaining. the easiest to understand lens is spherical, that is, it’s round. Anamorphic lenses have elements that take the horizontal part of the image, and squish it together. You may have noticed, back in the bad old days of VHS that some credit sequences or images seemed rather thinner than they reasonably would be. That is anamorphic squeeze, or anamorphosizing. That’s how the film looks before it’s reprojected through other anamorphic lenses in order to make it look right.

In that case, the squeeze makes it doubly important to measure things horizontally, because the image you project to an audience will need extra resolution to look good.

One way or another, resolution used to depend on the size of the film, or at least the size of the area of the film you’re exposing the image on. IMAX is what you get when you run 70mm film, normally run vertically through the camera, horizontally instead. Just think one of those crystal clear 70mm images stacked on top of another one and turned sideways.

But such concerns might be become a thing of the past, with cameras like the ones taking those 4K images. Nowadays, though the size of the sensor matters, you’re not necessarily getting all the problems that used to come with the issues of film. 4K delivers about film quality without the need to carry around all that actual film, which is something of an issue when you’ve got a high-definition film format like 70mm or IMAX. If you’re recording onto a flash medium, you don’t even really need moving parts in the camera aside from the lenses.

This one seems almost a classical equivalent of a music video with the rock concert scenes towards the end but that’s fine by me! 8)

The tree at the 33 second mark reminded me again of how tough and remarkable plants are – to be able to grow not just in rock on the edge of a cliff but also right in the middle of a torrential waterfall!

Given the colour of the Moon at the 23 second mark I presume it’s in eclipse there, yes? Be interesting to get more of that in the video if they want any more ideas!

[You can also watch it on YouTube.]

Actually I can’t a clicking that link found it saying only : “Sorry this clip is private.”

Just so you know. Perhaps its an issue at my end?