I recently learned that the resolution of the camera is only half the battle. I was asking how movies from my childhood were able to be reproduced in 4K if they weren’t filmed that way originally.
The camera sees everything. Just like our eyes take in the information around us and our brain processes it, it’s what you are using to work with the footage that determines the final quality. Your eyes technically see everything, but your mind only focuses on the important parts, leaving you with a memory of what happened even if you didn’t know what color shirt someone was wearing at the time. Older films suffer the same fate—the camera caught it all, but the system could only handle a lower resolution image, so the final outcome looked like it was filmed in the 80s because it was.
If you’re working with a professional camera, the source footage is everything the camera could see, so even if the final version of the film had a soft focus and less skin detail, the source footage can be used by a better system—one that can keep up with the details.
Atmos provides what is essentially a brain for your camera that can capture the footage at the resolution of the camera without compression or any loss in quality. You can then work with that perfectly-clear footage.