Well, one can render video on a 386 at 16MHz 
It will just render very slowly. I guess I should have been more specific: how do you edit and preview the finished 4k video? It would need to be a really top-end machine with a really top end (as in top end gaming-level) video card.
Anyway, this is from the FDR-1000V, mounted externally in the waterproof housing
5mbits/sec as normal for Vimeo. The original rendered version, at 25mbits/sec, is 5.8GB. One cannot upload > 5GB to Vimeo (not unless I pay a lot more than the $50/year) so I downsized it to 15mbits/sec for the upload. The original material, 5mbits/sec, would be about 12GB.
A small piece of it, 750MB, is here
Another bit is here
An update…
I found that the assembly shown in this post worked great at room temperature, showing a total recording life of c. 10 hours (external power pack life + camera battery life, and with a 128GB SD card and recording 1080P 50FPS PS).
That’s a great solution because you just fix it up, start it simultaneously with the sound recorder in the cockpit (intercom-connected, obviously) and forget it totally for the entire flight.
Except that the camera doesn’t run from an external supply once the ambient goes anywhere below c. +20C!
I discovered that by running the thing inside a +5C fridge. All that happens is that the internal battery runs down, giving it a 2hr life. It so happened that this remained undiscovered because the longest flight with it fitted was under 2hrs!
Then another user (in the USA) found the same thing. I guess it just happened to be colder over there. Also I am using the waterproof housing which enables the camera to self-heat by some 10C. He wasn’t. He actually found it worked at 5.3V, which is ridiculous.
It looks like Sony screwed up somewhere.
But it gets more complicated. It depends on the power supply!
Normally people are supposed to use an “intelligent charger”. With just 2 wires connected, this camera draws current but it gets dumped internally, and other devices (e.g. an Ipad) do similarly useless things. These chargers use the two data wires to negotiate the charging protocol. Google on a TPS2511 to get an idea of how this works.
Unfortunately, probably most intelligent chargers don’t use a TPS2511. The €20-30 ones seem to do various bodges…
With a real TPS2511, the camera assembly runs for a verified 9 hrs (nine hours) at -20C (minus 20C). That is the case even with the pricey Zendure power pack I am using, where I pick up just the two output wires. It is supposed to be an “intelligent” charger but god knows what it is doing.
I suspect the Sony implementation was “done to standards” but not widely tested with real chargers. Maybe even they tested it only with their own charger…
Final Cut Pro on any decent modern Mac (including the laptops) works live in real time with 4K content. All the complex stuff is offloaded to the GPU. There are a couple of plugins available to correct the output from ‘action cameras’ and they too work in real time. You can set a video playing back and adjust the parameters whilst getting immediate feedback on what’s happening.
If we ever finally bump into each other somewhere, I’ll give you a demo. I always have my machine with me!
Vegas works the same way. Real time preview.
Whether it offloads to the GPU depends on the GPU. There is a lot of history to this; some work, some don’t. Only some video cards support the required API. However with an i7-970 (6 core) it runs fast enough.
The $99 NewblueFX lens correction plug-in does work but not perfectly. I was surprised by this because the correction equation cannot be rocket science, especially if correcting for distortion of distant objects only and not having to bother with “architectural perspective” distortion.
The difference is that there’s no difference between preview and render on FCP. You said your machine took 2hrs to render 15 minutes.
My machine (which is only a laptop) renders a 15 minute 1080P source with geometric corrections in about three minutes. It’s way faster than real time not eight times slower.
What source and destination file sizes (for the 15 min video) and what is the output mbps data rate?
It’s irrelevant – the incoming and outgoing file sizes only affect the decoding and encoding of the video – both tasks which are done faster than realtime on my machine.
Surely you’re not constrained by this on your fast i7 machine? If you just render a video without doing any processing to it at all, it would surely take just a few minutes to do your 15 minute example?
I’m thinking H.264 in (at whatever bitrate comes from the camera) and H.264 out, 1080P / 25 or 30 at about 12Mbps?
FCP only ‘renders’ stuff that can’t be processed in real time. Some plugins are not realtime obviously, but many are. Internally, the output to a finished file actually is the same as a preview. You could have a very complex timeline with huge bitrates and multiple tracks, and as long as you aren’t using any of the ‘non real time’ plugins, the absolute slowest it will take to output 15 minutes of video is about 15 minutes. It’s usually way quicker.
The architecture is quite different to Vegas.
Final Cut Pro is Mac only, so this is not a whole lot of use to me.
