When medium format timelapse photography meets the colorfully-detailed cityscapes of Rio De Janeiro, things get interesting.

Joe Capra (aka scientifantastic), a photographer and videographer specializing in high-resolution work, recently uploaded some stunning 10K timelapse shots of Rio De Janeiro that he captured with the PhaseOne IQ180 medium format digital camera, which is capable of resolutions up to 10328 x 7760 with its massive 80MP sensor. Needless to say, the results are more detailed than you could ever imagine.

Here's what Capra had to say about how he shot and processed these images.

Each shot was very minimally processed and included curves, input sharpening, saturation adjustments. The h.264 compression really kills a lot of the fine detail. No noise reduction was done on any of the shots. I tried to keep the shots as close to raw as possible so you may see some dust spots, noise, and manual exposure changes I made while shooting. For a final video edit these adjustments would be smoothed out and fixed.

I wanted to show a couple things with this demo video. First, the extreme resolution of this camera (and medium format in general). Second, the amazing amount of flexibility this resolution allows for in post production. You can literally get about 8-10 solid 1920x1080 shots out of a single shot. You can also get about 5-6 solid 4K shots out of a single shot.

Unfortunately, a basic PhaseOne IQ180 camera and lens package will set you back in the neighborhood of 40 grand, so we probably won't be seeing many 10K timelapses and videos in the near future. However, as a brief experiment in the power of ultra high resolutions to capture absurd amounts of detail, this was an absolute treat to watch. And maybe, just maybe, it provides a glimpse into what our everyday cameras will be capable of in 10 years.