Sky, BBC and 4K: is British TV turning its back on the Ultra HD revolution?

alive 3d trailer

TV broadcast history was made at the 2014 BAFTA TV awards this week as David Attenborough’s Natural History Museum Alive 3D became the first UK all-4K TV show to win a British Academy Award. Produced by Colossus Productions, a partnership set up between Sky 3D and Atlantic Productions, it features everyone’s favourite natural history broadcaster interacting with extinct dodos and dinosaurs. You’d be hard pressed to find a better analogy for TV’s technology evolution. And as we’ll see, this 4K project does not look like the first of many. Indeed, it would seem that Britain’s TV companies are very reluctant to embrace Ultra HD as a format.

What makes Alive particularly remarkable is that the entire production was produced in 4K, including the visual effects.

Given that even the largest Hollywood blockbusters typically render VFX at 2K, even when live action is lensed at a higher resolution, the project was nothing if not ambitious.

“It was conceived as a full 4K film for delivery in 4K,” says Anthony Geffen, executive producer on the project. “There’s no point going into a medium like this and not delivering something different. A lot of people are doing bits and pieces in 4K, but a film like this has a huge [Keep reading…]

Source: TechRadar

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