Over the last few years, 8K has become accepted as an acquisition format for 2K & 4K delivery. Michael Cioni, of Panavision & Light Iron, believes that it is time to start pushing 8K as a distribution format. Listen as he challenges common misconceptions about the validity of 8K exhibition.
Cioni uses Moore's Law to explore the idea that the resolution of our capture and delivery of video will continue to grow far into the future. In the early years of Light Iron, Michael and his team faced many challenges in moving from a 2K to 4K digital intermediate for their customers. But they overcame those challenges and are now working toward supporting 8K distribution.
- Thank you very much, really happy to be here. That was a very kind introduction, thank you. And today, oh my gosh, here we go, here we go again. This guy, we're gonna be talkin' about 8K. But we're gonna take it a little bit differently than we did before because we have some new concepts to talk about and what is the next evolutionary process, what is changing as we're going forward. So, again, my name's Michael and it has been a really, really excellent couple of decades in exploring what is possible, and this is important because what I've been focusing on, and what the team, and what I think the community's been asking for has been based around this new technology. Which RED has been spearheading probably better than anybody else and the Panavision DXL, I'm the product director of this, this has been this 8K acquisition, and we focused on acquisition because this is sort of not a chicken before the egg kind of a riddle, you have to have infrastructure for acquisition, really before exhibition becomes an issue.
So this thing is 8K and this is sort of the elephant in the room but up until this moment, and this is the first time I'm starting to transition the messaging, we have been working for the last three years on making 8K acquisition possible. And that has created a lot of good things, and it's confused a lot of people. But now we're gonna be talking about how to make 8K exhibition possible and what that means for everybody in their different sectors of the market. So, are you ready, this is it, this is number one, this is day one, we're talking about 8K delivery, and 8K watching, and all this stuff. So this is exciting because the timing is right. Now, before I do that, we gotta set the ground rules. We like to set ground rules, it's important to do that. So this is something really interesting that all of you, all of you, all of you, all of you will understand because I find that when you electronically are sharing your ideas, you put yourself in the ability to welcome abuse, isn't that disappointing but true? You guys never had this happen, well it happens to me.
So, I wanna put out first some assumptions about my presentation, so first of all, I can be wrong. I can be wrong, all of us can be wrong. And so that's an important thing to understand when we're talking about presenting new information. It's imperfect data that we're trying to synthesize and then share with other people, so it can be wrong sometimes. Second of all, we will not agree on all things, that's okay. That's part of this, some things you will identify with, some things you won't identify with so that's okay. Not all info is relevant to all people. I am shocked why people will take an hour presentation or someone who has an expert knowledge of everything, they will find the one thing they disagree with to disqualify the entire person's wellbeing. Their existence on this planet is completely a waste of space because of the one thing that they do wrong, so this is important to understand. Not everything is relevant to all of us, right? And then, constructive commenting is helpful. You might not realize it but when you have comments on these different message boards, you can be helping someone you will never meet, and that's important. You can also hurt someone you will never meet. And I'm not trying to school anybody here on the morals of using the internet but I'm trying to let you know that if you want to be part of the solution instead of part of the problem, you have the choice to do that. So this is some ground rules and assumptions about my presentation, are we clear, is that okay? You guys, you guys feel free to use this slide, alright? And share the, you know that might be, that's the end. That would be a really good progressive story to tell today. But we can do some other stuff.
So in order to make sure that we are capturing as much information today and being able to synthesize that, and help everybody, I decided to go one month into the future. And I came back last night and what I did is I read all the comments on this video from next month, so basically, I have already done this presentation. And now this presentation, which has 4,000 views, I read your comments, and we're gonna use these comments to help us understand how to actually present this better so we have less trouble to run into, okay? Doesn't that sounds like fun, you're gonna love it. You guys went bonkers, alright, so, you're gonna love it. Okay, so the first thing we're gonna talk about is 8K road mapping, is 8K really even a thing? Like it's crazy to think 8K is going to be a thing because a lot of people been saying this isn't a big thing. Now let's look real quick here 'cause everybody loves an easy geometry lesson in the morning. So we understand that this thing is already getting out of control, I think it really helps to see the basic geometry because everyone watching this and everyone in this room, remembers when SD was the prominent system, you'd walk through show floors like NAB and you would see that prominent system. That was fine but then, we looked at HD, transition into 4K, and transition into 8K. When is this going to stop, this is never, ever going to stop, ever, ever, people think that there's some sort of physiological, my eye can only see so much, that's the reason and resolutional stuff, they're wrong. They're absolutely wrong, it has nothing to do with what your eye is capable of, it's way beyond that. It has nothing to do with, people sometimes think if you have higher resolution, eventually you're gonna be able to see like, atoms in somebody's face. That's not how it works. That's not how it works, it's never gonna happen that way.
This is about a process of technological exponential growth. And exponential growth is not something that you can stop because of your opinions on what a face should look like on a lens. It's past all that, it's way beyond that. Your job is to learn how to make the face look fantastic using exponential growth potential. Now in the previous iterations of my discussions about 8K and the roadmap, we've talked about significant benefits for 8K in large-format capture. And I'm not gonna go over these. You should know all these by now. And if you don't, there's lots of places you can get this information, 8K and higher resolution, lowers noise floors, it increases dynamic range potential for mapping DR to other places of the frame. You can reframe those images, you had shallower depth of field, which increases Z-Depth, which gives you more dimension. You open up a world of new optics that didn't exist before for large format, and wouldn't be taken advantage of. And then there's magnification benefits and perspective, and these depth cues that comes from the geometry, so these are all things about 8K acquisition. But we're gonna now transition into 8K exhibition. And how we can make that happen.
I was recently in a room with a very prominent leader that says about 8K, and I've heard this before. But this person said it really, really articulately. When I was talking and we were going over all this stuff, and I was pretty excited to meet this person and be with them, and said, "Nobody asked for this, Michael. "You just answered the question that nobody asked. "We don't want this technology, I didn't ask "for this technology, we don't want it." And I thought to myself, first I was disappointed but I'm disappointed a lot, so that's okay. But nobody asked for the iPod, nobody asked for TiVo, right? Nobody asked for, you know, Uber. Nobody asked for Angie's List or KitSplit, nobody's asking for this, these are all processes that are led by really, really intelligent, smart people that are identifying opportunities and identifying needs. And when I hear someone say, "Nobody asked for it," when there's a new technology, what I'm really hearing in my head is that I didn't ask for it. Or I don't understand it, or I'm uncomfortable with it. That's what I hear when someone says, "Nobody asked for it." So this is an important thing to understand in going forward, just because you're not asking for this now, that's okay. You might not understand this, you might now want this. You may not be comfortable with it. But you've been there before, you've had these problems when we iterated every single revolution, every single rhythm that happens, there's a cadence to the industry, there's a cadence to fashion, there's a cadence to music. And there's certainly a cadence to technology. And when you understand the past and how it's worked towards the future, you'll notice that you've probably said this before. Yet all of a sudden, you find yourself embedded in this and maybe even loving it, so. Oh, we have a, uh, someone wrote a message on the comments. So we should go to the comment. Let's see, um, little_patience_less_time says, "This guy takes too long to make a point." Oh, boy, so that's, that is disappointing. I understand that so our first comment is a little painful but we'll use that as a good place to start, so.
Let's move onto our next point since I do take too long to make a point. So when we are starting with 8K implementation, we need to make sure that we are talking about a lot of horsepower, and we've been able to do something really remarkable with the Mac, iMac Pro. And I'm gonna get to that in terms of how to make this more tangible for yourself, which is pretty exciting because 8K on an iMac is possible, and it's not just possible, it's actually really, really fantastic. But I want to start now with getting back to the rhythm of resolution because most technical objections to 8K that I find are these four. That the resolutions are too high, downloads are too slow, storage is too expensive, render times are too long. These is a very, very common set of problems that people say about resolution. But I posit that if these four things, which are very commonly said, especially amongst producers. And I know producers don't always find these videos on the internet so help them find these videos on the internet, don't hide it, and don't ruin it with bad comments so producers run away, this is a really, really good thing to think about. But if these are problems you're experiencing, you are doing something wrong. Because none of these things actually are real. They are in your head, they are not really problems. And the problem is we sometimes will want to justify our inability, or to our desire to integrate into something because we make up some barrier that isn't really there. So we gotta break these barriers down. Aw, we got a comment.
What's our next comment here, someone made a comment. Glasshalfempty says, "There are "other reasons people reject ideas. "Especially when the idea is bad." That is true, Glasshalfempty, you really have your way of pointing that kind of stuff out. There are other reasons to reject good ideas but generally, the four that I just mentioned are the most common, they're usually some sort of technological download, or playback, or rendering barrier. So those are the ones we're gonna focus on, Glasshalfempty, thanks for reminding us that there is other reasons people don't adapt ideas. Gordon Moore, we've all used his name. Probably used it incorrectly, but we've all used the Moore System and the Moore System is this concept of a paper that he wrote in 1965. This is one of the founders of Intel. And it's about exponential growth expectations with the information technology field. That's essentially what Gordon Moore sort of did. Oh, crap, alright. So, I made a mistake, so someone's got a comment here. Poorcollegestudent says, "My budget "isn't able to keep up with 8K technology." Now this is really interesting because Moore's Law, which we're gonna talk a little bit more about, is a way that enables even Poorcollegestudent to have access to a lot of this stuff. So it's really important, and how we're gonna break that down is something that we can call a Moore Cycle. Moore's System was essentially based on a repetition of increased power, inside of a 24-month cycle.
Sometimes people say it was 18 months, that's a different cadence, or a different technology field. But 24-month cycle and that's a 1 Moore Cycle. So we're gonna use this as sort of a way to explore-- Oh, crap, here we go. Uh, we got a new comment, the comment is, Livesinmomsbasement says, "Hey dummy, Moore's LAW "speaks about rate of growth for transistors, "not the technology field in general." Livesinmomsbasement, you are correct. It is not exactly a 24-month, it is based on the transistors and that's everything. But what we're gonna use, Livesinmomsbasement, is this cadence, or this rhythm of the 24-month cycle to help us understand other fields as well. So let's take the first one which is SD to 2K. So here, we're talk about SD to 2K. And the first problem we have with SD to 2K, all of you were there, you all remember this, we had an analog to digital transition problem. We had a 24 frame, or 24PsF was new and segmented frames. And CRTs were really costly, this was a hard thing to be able to work with. Okay, here we go, here we go, got the next one here. Comment is from filmasavideoicon, "The transition "to HD started well before 2001 and lasted a lot longer. "But by the way, I still prefer CRT." Of course when you use film as a video icon, you do prefer CRTs, that is absolutely common with this particular person but the transition did start between 2001 but in the ability for everybody to have tangible purchase on sort of a product, to be able to use it, this started to happen in 2001, that's when we started this standard def to HD, and standard to 2K position, right? You remember being there in '01 and that's when it really started to catch fire. Now that would mean over 8 years, we had 4 Moore Cycles because we had a 4K, I'm sorry, a four year based on a 2-year Moore Cycle so we have 4 Moore Cycles. So look at this, if I take the megapixel count of standard definition in 2001, which was 0.3 megapixels, and I add where we are in 2K, which is 2.2 megapixels, that's seven times the resolution from standard def to 2K. Now, 4 Moore Cycles, we have to base this across 4 Moore Cycles, look what happens. The first Moore Cycle 0.3 megapixels, we double that in two years to 0.6, we double that to 1.2. And we double that to 2.4, 2.4 is less than 1 Moore Cycle away from 2.2, which means the rhythm, the cadence of standard def to 2k over the course of eight years was right on time, it was right on time. It was exactly where it was supposed to be in that moment that we increased the resolution by seven times and we did it in exactly the Moore Cycle. And all the technology kept up with it. And that's why in 2009, doing 2K was as easy as doing standard def was in 2001, does that make sense? It felt exactly the same and it cost exactly the same. Now you guys remember devices like this, right? We changed the VTR by 2009, turne into a QuickTime movie.
Videotape turned into a media card, like a P2 card. CRT monitors turned into LCD and you were there for all of this and you remember carrying all the heavy weight on the left, and then it became essentially weightless in the columns on the right, and that happened in 4 Moore Cycles. Now let's look at our second section, HD to 4K. So now in 2009, we're starting this 4K challenge. RED cameras come out in September of 2007. And they start coming online in 2008. And then all of a sudden, everything started transition by 2009, from HD to 4K. We had monitoring problems, we had data archiving problems. We used to do DLT take back then. We debayering limitations, in order to do video we had to have OC-link SDI, OC-link S-- Really, OC-link SDI, and there was really a hard way to de-embed audio, it wasn't easy. So audio was out of sync 'cause you had to run it through a separate system usually so this was pretty tricky, being able to do that. Oh, of course someone's gonna comment on that one. They were there, eagleeye2015. eagleeye says, "This topic is irrelevant. "You can't see the difference between HD and 4K "more than 2 screen heights away." Oh, eagleeye, ye of little faith. Um, eagleeye is not correct about that. But eagleeye, and many of his friends, really want to believe that that is the case. And this isn't necessarily about seeing atoms, eagleeye. It's not about seeing atoms, it's about improving clarity and flexibility with all these other tenants that are associated with resolution. Plus the human eye is able to see this type of resolution because the human eye is able to focus in a million different areas, and apply more than 4K resolution to every single spot that it's looking at. And that doesn't even factor in what we call hyper-acuity, all this resolution on the outside which is how you're able to avoid being chased by people, and tripping when you're running, you know.
These are all these other things. So, we talk a lot about that in other places but we understand that some people think that you can't see the difference between these high resolutions. And I would posit that they're just not accurate 'cause they're not factoring in all these other physiological things that come into play with it. Back in 2010, we worked with director David Ventura and DP Jeff Cona with on a movie called The Social Network. And we did this with our friends at RED Studios. And we used a Sony SXRD projector back then. This was OC-link SDI, no audio, and for us in 2010 to be able to monitor 4K in a DI situation was really, really hard. Sony took a really strong point at being able to deliver 4K projection technologies, it was pretty clever. And ahead of the curve, and that technology allowed us to get some really great pictures very, very early on in the status, but doing 4K back then was really hard. And doing it with monitors was even harder. In fact, this was my first 4K monitor. When I found this photo, this is tape, and this is where the tape went, so this is essentially real example of what a 4K monitor back then actually did. But this was real, and this was the like the only way we could do it back when we started Light Iron and started doing this stuff. So it was kind of interesting how we've come along. But now, by the time we got to 2009, 4K monitoring moved into 2015, so what started in 2009 is difficult, 4K monitoring now is easy.
Data archiving is easy, debayering is easy, you have HDMI cables you can push up to 60 frames per second, what used to be OC-link SDI with no audio, all that's gone, and of course we have things like YouTube and Vimeo that are 4K HDR. And all that's easy by 2015, it's the same price as what's high-def was in 2009, it's the same ease of use. It's actually even cheaper in some ways. But there's no limitations in 2015 of a 4K infrastructure. And all of you are doing a 4K infrastructure. Your phone probably shoots 4K today. You can upload that in 4K, oh, but eagleeye is gonna have a comment about that but eagleeye, it's not about the compression and stuff like that. That's a different thing, we're talking about the ability to find, use, and implement these things, which is really powerful but then something changed again. The rhythm picked up, and the rhythm now shows us in 2015, moving 4K to 8K, now this time, this is a pretty exciting story because it's recent, now we're getting into today's world right now which is really important. So 8K capture, 8K monitoring, display protocols, compression, playback hardware, all of this in 2015 is really, really hard, really hard. In fact, in 2015, at Cinegear, Light Iron and Panavision had their first booth together. And we had a theme that year called 8K Possible. Some of you might have been there. And we appreciate you guys coming. And many of you have shirts, I see shirts 'cause we made these shirts that say 8K Possible. Because in 2015, 8K was only possible. It wasn't available, it wasn't easy, it wasn't inexpensive, it wasn't simple. It was just possible and I wanted to capture that by not flaunting, "8K's arrived, 8K is here." Making some sort of proclamation that's untrue because when these rhythms start, they are hard. They are expensive, they're difficult to find. There is very few people that can help you do that. And there's a lot of challenges and a lot of confusion surrounding it. That is what 8K possible represents. But you find the things that come together. RED built the first Weapon Vista Vision sensor. The first 8K Vista Vision sensor prototype.
There were two prototypes in 2015 of this product. BOE, which is a raw panel manufacturer that's a really, really fantastic talent in technology. They had 1 of 2 HDR, 8K panels. And we got one of these 105 inch 8K panels, that there are only two in the world of. Rio, which is a Quantel product, or was a Quantel product was a really powerful tool that had the first 8K DI, but they only built one 'cause they knew that only one guy was crazy enough to try to make it work, and they found me. So we were able to get Quantel to use 16 DVI cables to communicate and connect to the BOE panels because it's 16 times HD, and stitch those together. And Light Iron puts this together and Light Iron, of course, is a bunch of one of a kind people, and the Light Iron team was able to take what RED, BOE, and Quantel assembled together and prove that 8K was just possible. This is only three years ago and it was just barely possible, that's what's so-- Oh, here we go, that's what's so exciting about this. imnottrolling@aol.com says, "This "guy is a hypocrite, he originally said 8K "is ideal for 4K monitoring, not 8K." Well, two things, imnottrolling@aol.com. One, yes, you are, and two, no, I'm not. See, what we're showing here is that this is not just about the acquisition side, it's now about the exhibition side. And we're not being hypocrites here, we're moving the ball up the field. And so the message changes because the story changes, because the technology changes 'cause the people change. And the opportunities change, and so we're not changing our tune, we're modifying, and growing our tune. And that's a different thing, those are different things. So now we look at 4K to 8K challenges from 2015 to today. Now we have hundreds of DXLs and Monstros. Hundreds of helium cameras, 8K there is in the hundreds. It's probably in the thousands of people where three years ago, it was two. Sharp Aquos, Sharp now made a consumer-level 8K television which two, uh, three years ago, it was a science experiment from BOE, now it's a real product.
Thunderbolt 3 didn't exist three years ago and we not have that, Final Cut Pro and Resolve are able to actually playback and work in 8K timelines. And the iMac Pro came at the right time because it's accessible, and it's simple, and it's consolidated, I don't need a machine room and a whole clean room in order to make this work, we're able to use it with basically off-the-shelf technologies. So what about 8K today, this is what's really crazy. 8K monitoring is now possible through Sharp. The Nvidia GTX1080TI is able to give us 8K display technology, Sonnet makes a Thunderbolt 3 Expansion chastity. And now we have the CPU performance to assemble it all together, and the iMac Pro is doing something that is totally remarkable. And I kind wanna show that to you-- Oh, I got to show you in a second, I guess. We got another comment, the comment is, Nothingevergoodcomesfromapple says, "This guy's just trying to indiscreetly "sell on the behalf of Apple." Well, I'm not trying to do that. I'm trying to show products and processes that everybody can grab hold of, and three years ago I couldn't do that. And throughout my career, when we start, for those of us that like to live on the edge, we can't make it accessible to everyone, but over time we can. And I want to show you this today. This is my iMac 18 core, iMac Pro. You can see the 18 core is there. The 18 core, number of cores right there in the middle of the screen, this machine is small, lightweight, affordable and simple. Here I'm taking a bunch of 8K media and I'm able to import that right into my Final Cut. So now once I import that, this is all, this 8K DXL, RED Monstro stuff. And Final Cut's able to import all these raw files. No proxies, no, you don't even need, pro is, Quicktime movies for this stuff. And I can change my timeline to actual 8K. And once I type that in, I can take a bunch of these clips and just like everything else that you would expect to happen, you can put it in a timeline, and then you can go into your timeline and start editing your stuff.
This happens just like everything else. And now it's gone from being impossible to being totally easy, we can add our lux, which is a common thing now, and we have 3D lux support. That's actually a 65 point lux, with some very, very high resolution light. I have full raw control that I would normally have and want to expect with a raw format like RED code. And then, I simply can just hit play. And I when I hit play, on my iMac Pro, I'm able to now look at my 18 cores that are not even maxed out, and I'm able to play back using the CPU, being able to play back 8K timelines inside of an iMac, inside of an iMac using Thunderbolt 3 technology, and this is real. I couldn't bring it here today and do it this way. I actually thought this would work pretty well, especially for people online, they could actually see this actually happening in a way. But this is no longer a science experiment. And I'm able to output this in 4K. So now I'm taking my 8K timeline, and what is very, very easy for the moment is to just display that on a 4K monitor. And it takes 8K and scales it down, that's really easy. In Resolve, I could take the 8K files, and if you're a Resolve user, I can set my timeline to 8K or 8K HD, and I can hit play, and in two seconds, I'm able to hit 24 frames per second.
And play back in Resolve on the same iMac Pro. So I have the ability to assemble timelines or color-correct them, edit them in final cut, manage the lux, or color-correct them. And this is just another image of our suite where we are able to have our playback working in a 4K world, but what about an 8K world? Well, Sharp put together the first 8K Aquos system. An 8K TV is nothing to laugh at, it's incredible. And this technology will come down in price and be more, and more accessible. It uses quad HDMI, so four HDMI signals all delivering 4K independently. And then what I do here is I'm able to take the Sonic and I'm able to connect it through the apps. And what's cool in this device, they did a really nice job of connecting to 8K compatible devices. And you can route your system, and the TV already has the menus for connecting to 8K. And so once I do that, I get four HDMIs together. 4320p, 4320p. You guys get that, that's the height, right? And now I assemble my quadrants together. And once I do that, this is a real product that can now play on a 70 inch 8K TV out of my iMac and play that in real time with pixel for pixel, 8K monitoring technology.
All that happens now and it's all consumer accessible technologies, this is mass produced, this is easy to get your hands on, and this is what that system looks like, and it basically looks like a normal edit bay. This doesn't look that unreasonable. There's no machine room, the cables aren't going off the walls, or through troughs, or anything like that. Everybody can do this that needs to or wants to. And everyone that doesn't need to or want to will have to when we get to the next rhythm of resolution, won't they, 'cause they all joined up now with the 4K world. And they all joined up with the HD world eight years ago. So all that together allows us to do that. Oh, we got another comment here. Nothingevergoodcomesfromapple says, "I knew it, he used Windows to make the 8K work "with the Nvidia ti card," and it barely worked. Nothingevergoodcomesfromapple, that's not the point. The point is today the driver technology only exists on the Windows platform because what Apple does in their closed eco-system, which is a double-edged sword. And sometimes it burns us, sometimes it helps us. They will wrap the drivers for Nvidia eventually into the OS and you'll get one of those security updates that never goes away, and never stops, and it'll tell you click on that, eventually it'll work.
But today it doesn't, today the 8K infrastructure is going to be on the iMac, for independent 8K images, it doesn't stitch them together as and present it as an 8K single picture, does that make sense? That's what the Nvidia does today. By the time this video comes out, that'll probably not be accurate. But in this moment standing here on April 11th, that is the case, so this where running boot camp is what I did on the iMac in order to download the proper drivers so that the Sonic worked. But the Sonic Thunderbolt 3 out of an iMac with 8K material going to an 8K TV is the point. And so Nothingevergoodcomesfromapple is missing the core point here, everything that I just showed actually still works. And this is where people like these comment people don't understand, in the technology adoption rate, we have this little graph, this little bell curve. And you may have seen this before. And essentially, innovators and early adopters favor this sort of side of the world. And so they're able to kind of be down in this space over here in the corner. But early adopters kind of once they move into early majority, late majority, and then the laggards, that's a different category of people. A
nd the people that are resistors to this are generally on the tail end of this type of curve. And in the case of 8K, we are here. You are here and this is where we're starting right now. And this is where it kind of works. So, as I finish up here, I want to just rifle through a couple of Moore's Cycles, and take a look at these. And see how they actually apply. Because remember this list we had where these are the reasons that people have objections to 4K, when you run into this with your world, with your producers, with yourself, with your production company, with your directors, maybe your DP's, when you run into these problems, I want people to remember that these are not real problems. If we look at 2000 to 2015, in terms of resolution, we went from SD to HD, HD to 4K, 4K to 8K. That's 16 years of 8 Moore Cycles. We went through 8 Moore Cycles since SD to HD. SD started at 3 megapixels, 8K was 35 megapixels. If I take 8 Moore Cycles, and I look at the first one, I had 0.3 megapixels, I multiply that by 2, I get 0.6. I multiply that by 2, and that by 2, and that by 2, and eventually I get 38.4 megapixels. In 8 Moore Cycles, we are within one more cycle of exactly where we're supposed to be based on the year 2000, now 18 years later. Do you see that pattern, we're at 35.4 megapixels of 38. That is less than 1 Moore Cycle of exactly where we're supposed to be. So resolutions being too high, they're all the same. All the infrastructure required to do that, capture it, and manage it, is exactly the same as it was in the year 2000, just the pixel count went up. But no change, so downloads being too slow, well let's look at 2000, 2016. 16 years, so that's 8 Moore cycles. In 2000, the consumer transfer protocol was Firewire 400 at 400 megabits per second. By 2016, Thunderbolt 3 is 40,000 megabits per second. That means that if we take 400 across 8 Moore Cycles, and we double it, and double it, and double it, and double it, we get 51,000 megabits per second. Less than 1 Moore Cycle away from exactly where we're supposed to be. The data transfer speed today, in other words, is exactly the same speed as a data transfer in the year 2000, you get it, it's exactly the same speed as it was 18 years ago. So, downloads are too slow, it's not true, it's exactly the same speed.
Storage being too expensive is the next one. Well, if we look at a total 18 year span from 2000 to 2018, that's 9 Moore Cycles. In the year 2000, the average gigabyte price was $18.40, $18.40 US, gigabytes per dollar. In 2018, $0.04, I know most of the world doesn't have pennies but for some reason the US still has pennies. And four of those pennies would get you a gigabyte today. So if we look at 9 Moore Cycles and we take $18.40, and we cut that in half, and we cut that in half, and we cut that in half, we get to $0.07 per gig. We are actually cheaper than we're supposed to be so we're ahead of schedule, less than 1 Moore cycle away from being right where we're supposed to be. And so the arithmetic on storage being too expensive, data today cost exactly the same rate as it did in the year 2000, anyone that tells you that data is more expensive simply doesn't know the arithmetic because it costs exactly the same as it did 18 years ago. Therefore, it's not true, it's a myth. And then render times are too long. 18 years from 2000, 2018, 9 Moore Cycle. In a standard def transfer in the year 2000 was real time, mostly because you had to play it back. So we have a realtime transfer in the year 2000. And 18 years later, we are now able to do a standard def transfer at 300 times speed, or a little faster in some cases, so if we do a 9 Moore's Cycle, we basically have to hit 256 times realtime, which we are actually exceed, so we can actually transcode standard def 300 times faster than we could in the year 2000. Now I know you're not transcoding standard def today but what it means is the threshold for transfer times of SD is the same speed or better of the transfer times, transcode times of 8K.
Does that make sense, it's the same, nothing's changed. It's just the entire scale has changed. All of these objections to 8K have been fixed by cameras, transfer protocols, hard drives, and computers. Yet what's really fascinating about this is the camera companies do not make transfer protocols. Transfer protocol companies do not make hard drives. Hard drive companies don't make the computers. All of these are independent manufacturers. All of these groups have different vested interests and they work together, sometimes not even being aware of it, do you realize that? It's fascinating that all these companies that make 8K possible don't really have many meetings together, they don't really communicate with each other, they don't really make money the same way, they don't charge the same price for their different products, yet when we're all following the Moore's cadence, and we follow the rhythm of resolution and those of us who are early adopters identify and pioneered this stuff, we end up realizing that we have, these guys have our backs. The manufacturers have our backs and they're supporting us. And a year ago, we were at LumaForge talking about Apple not responding to the professionals. And we just showed a year later, we have a raw codec from Apple, and we have 8K playback through devices that you never even heard of, some people, until I just mention them just now. And you can buy them, tomorrow.
That is profound, that is professional early adoption. That's exponential growth, and we haven't really done anything different that we haven't been doing for 20 years. So what does this mean to artists? Well it means three things, I think. You've been here before, you've had the struggles of data rates, transcodes, resolutions. You've had the discussions with people like eagleeyevision that cannot see the difference. If you want to see the difference and you know an eagleeye out there, or you know a pixel counter that's using it against you, tell them to go to the Sony booth. Sony just cracked everything because they just put on a display that is unlimited resolution, at virtually unlimited quality levels. Because their tile-base system is so profound, and so magnanimous, did you notice in the Sony booth, the projector, the projection, the projector business of Sony is gone, it's not there, it's done. There's no projectors in the Sony booth.
They realize that technology is antiquated and not scalable anymore, and it's all tile-based. And their tile technology, you would need 20 projectors to make the image that I saw from their tile system. And it runs, I think, about the equivalent of power of four xenon lamps. So it's just like incredible technology. You've been here before, and we've been able to make it through, secondly, you need a better quality acquisition than you do your exhibition. Always, always, always, your acquisition has to better than your exhibition. So keep up with the exhibition or your content gets compromised. People trying to tell you and sell you that 2K's good enough, or now even 4K's good enough, are foolish because the exhibition technology continues to improve and we have to improve ahead of exhibition, which means for an 8K infrastructure, we will need 11K camera technology. We will need to be able to continue to super-sample. We will need to be able to improve this technology. And so this is where this is going. This is where I believe the future's going to be. And that original chart of showing all those resolutions, it's not going to stop, it's not going to slow down.
People think that your eyeball can't see enough resolution, that's gonna have so many diminishing returns, you're not gonna be able to do it, well I'm from the future, and I'm coming back to tell you that those people are wrong. And that they've been able to kind of get it wrong. And JPLwannabe says, "You're not "a real time traveler, give me a break." JPLwannabe doesn't know that for sure. But what I do know is that over the last 18 years, we have been able to look at and evaluate where we are, and there have been a few really good companies that you probably know and recognize, you can trust are not gonna let you down when it comes to progressive technology. And those companies probably are singing a different song right now than they did in earlier iterations of the rhythm. So you make sure you understand that when you hear someone change a story, you don't criticize him necessarily of being a hypocrite. You understand that they may have been able to change their rhythm and adopt their technology. And they're part of moving the ball forward.
There's a, Eddie Vedder has a song. And there's a lyrics in that song where he says, "I changed by not changing at all." That's not the change you want to be. That's not the change you want to be. You want to be a part of the change that is distinguished because you're in a different place than everyone else by being, moving forward. Not by staying where you're comfortable, where it's good enough, where it's affordable, where I have the infrastructure. If you want to be a part of this iterative, of this early adoption in exponential growth future, and you wanna be part of a change maker, then it's painful, it's hard, sometimes it's very lonely. But at the end of the day, when we have days like this, and events like this, and stories like this, and people nodding their heads because we are all in this together and some of this sounds familiar, that's validation. Manufacturers that count got our backs and then we gotta make sure that creatives are able to deploy that to make better products in the future because that's what this is all about. I wanna thank you guys for this morning. My name's Michael, really appreciate it. Thank you so much.