WIDE ANGLE

Need something to watch on that new 8K TV? (You have one of those, of course, don’t you?) Florian Friedrich, a developer who creates HDR mastering software and who has worked with video expert Joe Kane to develop UHDTV test content, has created a reformatted 8K version of the 8K footage NASA recently made available for download on its website.

It apparently was necessary for Friedrich to reformat the original NASA 8K footage because it wouldn’t play on the Samsung 8K TV that he initially tried it with. Why not? According to Friedrich, “The whole encoding was not optimized for playback with CE-devices: wrong video levels, incompatible MPEG profile, critical bitrate.”

Friedrich’s consumer 8K TV-friendly version of NASA’s footage can be downloaded from his website here. All you’ll need to do to get it is enter a name and email address to receive a company newsletter.

The complete download package not only includes a reformatted 8K/HDR version of the NASA content, but additional 4K resolution versions Friedrich created with HDR10 high dynamic range, Hybrid Log Gamma (HLG) high dynamic range, and P3 wide color gamut, respectively. If nothing else, you can use these to check out the performance of your brand new 4K TV as this whole 8K thing gets sorted out.