Q&A: Avid’s Matt Feury on State-of-the-Art Avid 4K Workflow
By Jim Bask
Speaking of HDR, how is HDR handled by Media Composer?
We support it. We are agnostic to it. It flows through editorially. The big thing with HDR is the monitoring, and that’s still cost-prohibitive for a lot of people. The Dolby Vision stuff is coming down in price and they’re doing some cool things, but you’re still looking in the tens of thousands of dollars for the right monitor to do it. It’s becoming a specialist thing. “We’ll do traditional editorial and standard Rec. 709 color-correction, but somebody else is going to have to do the HDR treatment.”
You mentioned earlier that 8K isn’t something we need to be especially worried about yet, and then clarified that you were talking about North America. But obviously Japan is pushing forward. So how far is the horizon for 8K in North America? Do you see that becoming part of the broadcast landscape in the near future — say two to three years?
No, I don’t see it. There are arguments to be made that what’s important is not so much the resolution as the compression, how the color is treated, [and] how much contrast you have, which is why HDR is such a big topic. The difference with Japan is there are a lot of manufacturing interests over there selling new technology, with giants like Sony ready to spit out TVs that can do 8K or infrastructure that supports 8K. And then you’ve got the government pushing NHK to get 8K out there. They will always be leading the way in terms of trying new things. It’s getting harder to stand out from the pack, with so many people creating content, so someone will always be leaning into it. I’d say we’re definitely more than three years away from 8K in the states.
Any final thoughts on 4K?
I think, rather than seeing changes on the source side, it’s the mastering side that becomes more important. Can we find a standard there? There’s a lot of talk about IMF and delivering to these entities like Netflix and Amazon who need 4K masters. On the source side, in Media Composer, we’ll take whatever you’ve got. But what’s the ultimate deliverable? And how do we make that part easier? Maybe IMF is the path forward. That’s where the real discussion is shifting — delivery.
