Resolution - Not Just a Number as Fast As Possible
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2015-05-07
·
1,111 words · ~5 min read
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next on the list of things that apparently I need to explain resolution
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what is it why is it important it's become a much hotter topic than usual
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because of a quote from the Ubisoft blog justifying their use of a lower than
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1080p resolution in Watchdogs that reads as follows resolution is a number just
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like frame rate is a number all those numbers are valid aspects of making
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games but you make choices about the experience you want to deliver in our case dynamism is everything so for that
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reason I will focus on the role resolution plays for gamers more and L
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on the role it plays for photographers and movie Buffs although much of this
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will also be applicable to those folks the term resolution is used to describe
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the finess or detail in an image it
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quantifies how close lines can be to each other and still be visually
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differentiated from each other by the I there are actually lots of different
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ways to measure resolution but they all boil down to this add an equal distance
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given two same sized and otherwise equivalent images the higher resolution
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one will look sharper clearer more true to life and just generally better to a
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point first there's the requirement that all links in the chain the content the
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software and the display need to be capable of the resolution you're trying
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to achieve or you'll only realize the capabilities of the weakest link and
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second is that there's actually an upper limit to what your eye itself can
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resolve anyway the marketing term that Apple coined for this is Retina you can
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actually learn more about how they calculate that in the video that we made
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here and this is where things start to get a little bit tricky on that retina
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calculator you see three values the pixel count of your display the size of
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your display and the distance from which you'll normally view it so you could
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have a 1080p display that delivers an image so fine you can't see the
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individual pixels and a different 1080p display with an effective resolution so
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low you might as well go back to playing Atari because it's so big or you're so
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close to it you see maybe you be soft on their blog how a point 1080p is just a
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number the perceived quality of your content depends on much more than
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whether it runs at 1920x 1080 pixels versus 1280 by 720 or whatever else the
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distance and screen size factors are just the tip of the iceberg 2 what about
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color depth or frame rate what about visual effects that we can turn on if we
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use up less of our Graphics processor's horsepower to push more pixels the one
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you're looking at right now is a bit of an embellished example here but hopefully you see my point so yeah all
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of these things are important too so why do we fixate on wanting gains to run at
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1080P or higher so much well the answer is that on a typical flat screen TV at a
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normal viewing distance a 1080p pixel count has a reasonably fine resolution
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one that most people will find tolerable and running less than that has a couple
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of undesirable effects number one is that it makes curved and diagonal lines
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look blockier and less sharp which draws the user's attention to the fact that
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they're looking at a digital simulation rather than a real image and number two
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goes back to to that chain I was talking about before if one part of the chain
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let's say your Xbox can't handle the pixel count of the others let's say the
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game and your TV instead of getting a pixel by Pixel Perfect representation of
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what the image was supposed to look like some approximations are being made these
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approximations are called interpolation and if you want to know what that does
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to image quality go ahead set your display right now to something other
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than its native res and see what it looks like yuck so there you have it
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resolution might be only one determining Factor when we're evaluating visual
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quality and it might just be a number but it's a really important number
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because a high resolution simple scene can look great I mean look at look at
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Nintendo's graphics on the Wii U but even the best looking the best image in
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the world can be easily ruined by lowering the resolution too much because
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you can't see the details in the image anyway speaking of detailed images
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shutter stock we absolutely love shutter stock around here I actually found out
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I'm supposed to be getting a free account as part of this sponsorship deal
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and it hasn't been happening and honestly even if the paperwork doesn't
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get sorted out and I keep having to pay I'm going to keep using it even though
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it's over $200 a month if you're a content creator or really anyone who
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needs to be able to quickly and easily find high resolution royalty-free images
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and video for integration into other content Shutterstock is fantastic they
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have a ton of different plans all the way from just buying a couple of images at a time to Enterprise grade ones that
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let you broadcast on TV and stuff we save so much time that our account pays
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for itself easily we just grab the images we like embed them in our videos
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then proceed to not sit around worrying if we're going to get a YouTube strike
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for using someone else's content without an appropriate license and if you decide
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to give Shutterstock a try today we've got a 20% off code for you Techquickie
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614 give it a try it really is awesome
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thanks for checking out this episode as fast as possible don't forget to subscribe for more videos just like this
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on Techquickie like this video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it and leave a comment if you have anything
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say about resolution or our videos or my
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hair or who knows ponies I don't care you can
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leave a comment with whatever you want I mean that's YouTube comments I can't
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control what you put in there if I could let me tell you half of you wouldn't be
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allowed to comment at all
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so