Yesterday, The Hobbit blog posted a behind-the-scenes production video that highlights the amazing work they are doing to shoot in 3D at 5K resolution. 5-what resolution? 5K. That's essentially "ridiculously-high definition." This might help. Here's a comparison I put together of what 5K resolution looks like with respect to other standard resolutions...
Yeah. It's amazing. They are filming on RED Epic cameras, which not only shoot at 5K resolution but will do it at 48 frames per second (50% fater than the current state of the art 1080P cameras). That's important because it's starting to get close to what is believed to be frame rate of the human eye (about 60fps). At that resolution and frame rate, The Hobbit should be as near as anything can get to looking through a crystal clear window. A window into another world.
One of the most amazing things about the behind the scenes video is when Jackson stands at a massive table full of Epic camera bodies and mentions there are 48 of them in total. At $58,000 a pop, that's nearly $2.8M in camera alone.
