So let's take a look at video resolutions. There's been a lot of talk about video resolutions
because the new iPhones can record up to 4K video. And the new Apple TV can play back
4K video. What is 4K video and how is it different than what we had before? So let's look at
four main video resolutions that we've dealt with over the years.
These are representations of those four. At the upper left we see the standard definition
video. Standard definition video can be defined a lot of different ways but one way to look
at as 640 X 480 pixels totaling 307,000 pixels. This is the resolution that you got on standard
TV say in the '70s and '80s, although they weren't digital so the pixels were kind of
blurry. It was adopted by DVD's so DVD's used standard resolution although not always 640X480.
Sometimes they're widescreen so they're wider than 640 pixels across but still 480 pixels
high. So that's standard resolution. That's where we started and that's where computers
handled video in the '90s.
Then we moved on to high definition. But there were several versions of that. The first was
called 720. 720 improved everything considerably. It standardized everything at 1280 X 720 pixels
which is three times as many pixels in the image as standard definition video. A lot
of phones, a lot of cameras, and everything used 720 and then it became standard on TVs
that you bought at the store. 720 high definition video.
Things got even better than that and we got to 1080.
1080 is 1920 X 1080 pixels. So you can see that the number used here, 720 or 1080, is
the vertical dimension. So 1920 X 1080 turns out to be 2.1 million pixels. So significantly
better than 720. Now you can see here in these representations I'm showing everything as
if every pixel is the same size. So if you were to have a TV where a pixel was a certain
size you're TV would have gone from the small image at the upper left to the larger image
at the bottom.
Now we're in the era of 4K. 4K is 3840 pixels wide and 2160 pixels high. 8.3 million pixels.
Four times the resolution of 1080. Believe it or not the new iPhones can record at this
and TVs that you get at the store, the nicer ones, can play this back including Apple TV
which plays this back on lots of different movies, rentals and particularly some of the
new releases.
So you can see how things have significantly improved. But you really don't see much of
a difference here. You just see that if you were to display things as every pixel being
the same size you could have a much bigger picture. Let's take a look at what happens
if we zoom in on a portion of this image here and we show you the same portion of the image
but at each resolution.
So first let's start 640 X 480, standard resolution. This is what the middle of the image looks
like. You can see we've zoomed in a lot. So you just see these blocky pixels. There's
the monument, the bus, and the street. It looks like an '80s video game. Now if we looked
at the same portion of the image at 720 we can see things improve a lot. We can still
see blocky pixels. I mean we are zoomed in at the very center of the image. But there's
a much higher resolution.
Now we go to 1080 and we can see something much more significant. You can see people
kind of start to take shape. You can still see the pixels really clearly here zoomed
in at this resolution but there's much better definition. Let's review. Go back. There's
640. There's 720. There is 1080. Now let's go and look at 4K resolution. You can see
it's a much bigger improvement over the original 640 x 480 resolution. You can see how things
have improved over time in not only our video playback devices but also just our cameras
in our iPhones.
So the ways this may effect us in our everyday life is say if you still make DVD's but you
maybe take the nice 1080 or 4K video from your iPhone and then make a DVD out of it
the resolution that you're going to get is the one at the upper left, standard definition.
So you're looking at it in pretty high definition on your Mac screen and then you make this
DVD and you go to watch it on your TV and you see it doesn't look as good. That's because
it's in standard definition. Even if you say have a television that's doing 720 and you
look at video on your Mac and then you go look at it on your TV streamed to it. You
see it's not that great resolution. Just keep in mind your Mac screen could very easily
be something between 1080 and 4K. If your TV is 720, of course the video is not going
to look nearly as crisp and have as much detail as it does on your Mac's display.
So some things to think about when you're watching video. When you're shooting video
you should probably shoot at the highest resolution you can because while you may have a 720 TV
today or you may be producing DVD's today think five, ten years from now when you're
watching this footage again. If it's important to you, you may easily have a 4K TV or playback
device and be disappointed if you only saved the video and recorded the video at 720. So
be thinking ahead to the future when recording your video as well.
Now on your iPhone, in the Settings app, go to the Camera settings and there's a record
video option there. You can set the recording resolution. So here on my iPhone X I can go
720, 1080, and 4K. I can change the numbers of frames per second. So standard is 30 fps.
That's what you're used to seeing but the iPhone X is capable of recording 4K all the
up to 60 fps. Which means that do things like slowing down the video, doing slowmo, or grabbing
still frames at a much higher resolution. However, of course, the higher you go the
more space it's going to take up on your device. The more space it's going to take up on your
hard drive as you archive it and put it in your photo library. So you want to think about
that and balance them as you decide which one to use. But do pay attention to the setting
and set it to what you want before you record any video.