Super Hi-Vision Olympics ⇒

John Zubrzycki over at the BBC Research and Development Blog has a nice piece on how, with the help of Japan’s NHK, the Olympic opening ceremony was shown to a select few in Super Hi-Vision (SHV), a video technology that makes HD look like SD and SD look like grease stains on a highway:

The SHV content has 16 times the data of HDTV, so rendering and processing time is slow, even using very powerful workstations. Even so, the NHK production team and a BBC editor are able to edit a new content package overnight ready for showing the next day.

Oh, did I forget to mention this part:

SHV has sixteen times as many pixels as HDTV making a picture with 7680 pixels across by 4320 pixels down. It was displayed on an 8-metre wide screen, accompanied by a 22.2 multichannel 3-dimensional sound system.

Yes, please.

(via James Thomson.)