YouTube

YouTube has announced at  the Vid-Con 2010 conference that it is  now launching support for videos shot with 4K cameras, which are a  new generation of very high resolution video cameras, usually out of the reach of most amateur filmographers.

“Today at the VidCon 2010 conference, we announced support for videos shot in 4K (a reference resolution of 4096 x 3072), meaning that now we support original video resolution from 360p all the way up to 4096p. To give some perspective on the size of 4K, the ideal screen size for a 4K video is 25 feet; IMAX movies are projected through two 2k resolution projectors,” Ramesh Sarukkai, YouTube Engineer,said.

YouTube has a  playlist of five films that can be played back in their original 4k resolution. As Sarukkai warns, viewing these properly requires considerable bandwidth speed, as well as the right gear which is – a large display, or 4k-capable projector.  1080p remains top size in most consumer HDTVs, as well as the service’s previous resolution limit. Newer-model phones like the iPhone 4 and HTC Evo are just now becoming capable of shooting in the lesser 720p resolution, leaving 1080p and above to dedicated filming hardware.