4K Drone footage of the Lahaina Maui Fire - Finally a good look at what happened there.
(youtu.be)
Lahaina, Maui Fires
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Does anyone else feel the video has an unreal quality to it? The entire thing looks like it was rendered with a video game engine. I don't know what's really going on in Maui, but this is not it.
That's because it's in 4K. It's a real estate camera - "Realtor" Association logo on the bottom right corner - it's high definition for land/house tours etc. Many people bought their house this way during the peak.
4K or not, there's no depth of field, no motion blur, and the trees and water, which are difficult to get right, are right outta uncanny valley. Also the lighting just looks off to me, like a bad mix of ray tracing and ambient sources applied to large flat texture mapped polygons.
But the quick -1 tells an even more compelling story.
Some food for though:
Depth of field requires three things: A large sensor, which only the higher end drones have (most are essentially point/shoot camera or phone level sensors). A large aperture lens, also only on higher end and cinematic drones, both because of cost and weight. A fairly close subject. Anything more than 10-20 feet away requires the lens to focus to ∞, and only much closer subjects get blurred. You rarely see landscapes with depth of field, and when it's added in some other way, you get the tiny-world "tilt shift" effect.
Motion blur is undesirable in drone footage, and rare in bright daylight (very fast shutter speeds).
This is recorded and playing back in 60 FPS (typical in video games, and not so much in filmed content), which coupled with uncommon subject matter (flying, burned town) gives an unusual feeling to the video.
These is also a lot of sharpening in this which tends to give highly detailed subjects (trees and water) an uncanny shimmer.
What's the magic with the "Realtor" logo?
To me it looks like part of the controls added by youtube, and not part of the video itself. The "logo" pops up and down with the other controls like Pause,FF, and Rewind.
This is typical with Youtube channels.
Sure, but it does not refute my point. The video could have come from anywhere. The Realtor logo is added later, not by some special real estate camera. Thus it could be CGI.
The drone used by this video is incredibly stable. And so are teh palm trees. I counted maybe 2 or 3 branches moving. Just compare that and the colors and lighting to this video, alledgedly from the same people.
ive noticed this lately...4k-8k is way better than what we are used to.
The thing about 4k is it exacerbates the CGI lighting issues because there's so many more pixels to calculate. The sun is NOT a single point light source. It has a visible disk. And ambient light does NOT emanate evenly from EVERY direction. Most of it comes from the sky dome. Both of these make it very expensive to calculate realistic lighting, reflections, and shadows at high resolution.
Watch the water.