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4K - is there any point?

Peter wrote:

Life is full of compromises… Apple have the advantage of a very small range of known GPU hardware, but for these uses the GPU doesn’t do much, nowadays. 10 years ago, the advantage was massive.

I give up – it’s never been more relevant than it is today!

Youtube and Vimeo will both host 4K but the bitrate will be so poor (22mbps for Vimeo; less for YT) it isn’t worth doing.

Unless the material is of a type which looks good at a low bitrate, e.g.

  • most CGI or game imagery
  • a “talking face with a stationary background” type of scene (the DJI Osmo Pocket is substantially aimed at the booming if slightly bizzare “walking selfie” market but is actually a brilliant little video camera for stuff like ski videos, producing good 4K footage at 100mbps)
  • a slowly moving scene e.g. a flying video from altitude

With regard to the OP’s part-Q i.e. future-proofing one’s videos by shooting and rendering to 4K:

Whether this will change anytime soon, I am not sure, because while things move forward all the time, good quality 4K videos are massive files, and the hosting costs continue to be rather painfully based on quite limited storage quantas. For example the 160GB EuroGA server, which is $60/month, could host just ~5hrs of a 4K video at 100mbps, so no chance of running a p0rn video site The big hosting sites aren’t using virtual hosting and can get loads of cheap storage but they are still have to pay for loads of bandwidth and make money. Vimeo (I give them $50/year to remove adverts from my videos) allow you to upload up to 5GB per week, and they store the original file (!), so their business model clearly runs on the hope that not everybody will be doing this (versus how many give them money, and how many viewers are not adblocking the adverts) but who knows? Picture hosting sites keep going bust, or change policies so as to be virtually useless (e.g. Photobucket). Hence I would not render to 4K but instead to high quality HD.

To pick up Dirk’s point, very few action cams will shoot in 2K, which is a pity.

Even home storage is a hassle. I shoot few videos but already have a few TB of video files. Too much to store on a PC, and one needs two places so I have two 10TB NAS drives, which were best part of £1k each… You could throw some money at google and get this stored on their servers (“cloud”).

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

I have only had the time to have a short look. As we all know setting these things up takes the best part of a day in total!

I have worrked with a very short true 4K file with high bit rate (from the new Mavic drone) which I understand is considered to produce professional quality video, whereas on the previous version the 4K had a lower frame rate.

Previoulsy it was all but impossible to edit this video. My assessment now is that it is useable. The editing is a little stuttery, but more than possible to work with. If the editing is done with a proxy file then things improve significantly to almost being seamless.

The rendering is surprisingly quick and certainly for home use more than acceptable.

The playback with a file in full 4K is excellent.

Of course the files are truly enormous, and the 2TB SSD is proving invalueable.

So far, so good, The editing as I say is not absolutely seamless, and I can imagine for a professional working with bigger files, and more complex editing, it would end up grating a little, but the improvement is very significant.

I am working in the Mac partion at the moment. It will be interesting with Bootcamp to see how Windows 10 compares suing the same editing software and my preferred Windows editing suite. I am expecting a similiar performance, and hoping that the Mac architecture doesnt throttle back Windows too much.

If that’s a 4k file from the Mavic 2 then it’s likely 100Mbit with H.256 encoding, for reference.

United Kingdom

IO390 wrote:

the Mavic 2 then it’s likely 100Mbit with H.256 encoding

You meant H.265 AKA HEVC I assume? I tried searching for what this unkown-to-me “H.256” was, but didn’t find anything.

ELLX

Fuji_Abound wrote:

I am working in the Mac partion at the moment. It will be interesting with Bootcamp to see how Windows 10 compares suing the same editing software and my preferred Windows editing suite. I am expecting a similiar performance, and hoping that the Mac architecture doesnt throttle back Windows too much.

What software just out of interest? There are settings you might want to check if for example you are using Adobe Premiere to make it use the GPU for rendering (ignore what was said above about it not making any difference – it’s just plain wrong). I’m guessing it is Premiere because of the top of my head I can’t think what other decent cross platform app there is. On the Mac side of things go to Project Settings > General and check Renderer is set to either ‘Metal’ or ‘OpenCL’ – you might want to try both – one may outperform the other. When booted into Windows, I’m not sure what options you will be presented with here. If you had an Nvidia graphics chip, you’d be offered CUDA, but Apple haven’t used Nvidia for years, so it won’t be that – you’ll probably only have the choice between ‘Software’ or ‘OpenCL’ so select the latter. In the Windows partition, make sure you’ve got the latest graphics drivers installed.

The thermal / power management isn’t as good under Windows as it is under Mac OS – so expect a reduction in battery life / increase in heat. But performance should be the same unless (perhaps until…) you hit against throttling due to temperature.

If you can be bothered, do try Final Cut Pro… 30 day trial so no risk. It’s a bit peculiar at first, so if you do give it a whirl, watch some tutorials. These guys are brilliant.

Last Edited by stevelup at 15 Jun 15:10

I use premiere and filmora pro.

Yes, thanks so much for the tips.

I was surprised microsoft charge for the 4k codecs but its nothing.

Still ar the learning stage with 4K.

ignore what was said above about it not making any difference – it’s just plain wrong

That comment is context dependent – on specific hardware and software.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom
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