It’s not quite up there with the level of putting a man on the moon, but the first footage captured from space in 8K has been released by NASA. Unfortunately, the video posted on YouTube is only available to watch in HD, unless Chrome Browser is used.
Rodney Grubbs , Dylan Mathis, and other astronauts have been living, working and conducting research from the International Space Station. Astronaught Rodney Grubbs said, “I’ve been so excited for this to get released. Earlier this year we flew an 8K version of the Red digital cinema camera. We started getting shots downlinked over the past few weeks. Fantastic job of shooting by our astronauts. Being part of another “first” in space keeps me motivated to keep pushing the state of the art for imaging in space. Big thanks to my co-investigator Dylan Mathis and our partner, Red, and Red’s Jarred Land for being, well, Jarred. Any time we hit him with a crazy idea for doing something new in space imaging, he’s all-in!”
NASA said that while a 4K camera brought beautiful footage of fluid behavior in the space station’s microgravity environment to the world, the new 8K video takes viewers through a variety of experiments and facilities aboard the orbiting outpost, which on Friday, Nov. 2 celebrated the 18th anniversary of humans living continuously aboard the Internation Space Station.
The nice thing about shooting in Zero-G environments is you don’t need a tripod, gimbal or Steadicam to get nice smooth footage.
The RED HELIUM was delivered to the station in April aboard the 14th SpaceX cargo resupply mission through a Space Act Agreement between NASA and RED. This camera’s ability to record twice the pixels and at resolutions four times higher than the 4K camera brings science in orbit into the homes, laboratories, and classrooms of everyone on Earth.
The Helium 8K camera by RED, a digital cinema company, is capable of shooting at resolutions ranging from conventional HDTV up to 8K, specifically 8192 x 4320 pixels. By comparison, the average HD consumer television displays up to 1920 x 1080 pixels of resolution, and digital cinemas typically project in resolutions of 2K to 4K.
If you want to download the original video you can here.
