4K (or 2.7 for that matter) Post editing

rrmccabe · May 13, 2015

New to 4k as many of us are. Just bought a GoPro 4 black which is my first GoPro.

I am not a professional but can appreciate decent video. Its nice to have a little extra headroom to crop ect, but guessing for the most part I am going to be filming in 1080 with a high frame rate.

Yesterday did a little video recording at 2.7k and it was a major pain to mess with. The transfer time from the card should have been a good indication of what I was in for before taking ti to Premiere Pro. Pretty sure there is no way I want to try to edit 10 to 20 minutes of 4k from a solo flight on a regular basis

Now granted I don't have the fastest computer but it is an first gen i7 with good video card, SSD drives and 16 gig of RAM.

Hard to even view the video !

Rothgarr · May 13, 2015

I recommend taking more short busts of video than fewer really long recordings. This makes it easier to work with since you toss out all the takes you don't want/need and you are importing much smaller files.

I find that people have an extremely short attention span. Even when I start with 20 minutes of video when adding up all the clips I try to narrow it down to the four to six best "scenes" and even then I try to make sure the final video is no longer than around 60 seconds. No one wants to watch a bunch of filler -- Unless you are doing some sort of documentary keep your videos short.

rrmccabe · May 13, 2015

Yea I am sure that's true. However I am just a casual flyer out for the view so I normally record power lift off to landing. Maybe I will grow up and start doing something real

And I agree about attention span. Found that out doing youtube video reviews. 3 or 4 minutes and they are gone !

Thanks for reply

Buzz313th · May 18, 2015

You can create reference clips (Lower Res) in premier so you can edit offline faster and more efficiently. Then when your done, render out the original footage using the post work you did on the reference clips.

rrmccabe · May 18, 2015

Thanks Buzz will have to try that. In my case MOST my post work will be the entire clip with a little color correction and fish-eye removal. So it would be painful regardless.

Pretty sure I am going to do most my normal flying in 1080 unless there is something significant I need to shoot. I may end up buying a P3 advanced for my goofing off work.

franknitty69 · May 18, 2015

i will say that even on a late model macbook pro with ssd, editing 4k is tough. 4k workflow requires very good hardware. try the 2.7k resolutions. it gives you alot more flexibility than 1080.

rrmccabe · May 18, 2015

So something like 2.7 k?

I am rendering about 8 minutes of video and its a 2 hour and 15 minute job. First Gen i7, SSD, Win 7 16 gig machine.

Crazy slow. No way I will have patience for 16 to 18 minutes of video

DBTabasco · May 18, 2015

Also make sure you adjust your preview to 1/2 or 1/4. I find using "render in to out" helps the viewing. But does not speed up the process.

Another trick I have used to help edit 4k is to render in to out and then save and exit. Then re open. It has worked well for me.

Final trick I use. Make sure your sequence is 1080i not 4k. I use 4k so I can crop out things and add motion or remove motion to the camera if needed.

franknitty69 · May 18, 2015

yeah, i meant 2.7. the first time i tried 4k it stuttered and froze. and this was on 2013 macbook pro. on my desktop it doesn't even blink, but that is a custom 5ghz liquid cooled pc.

i recently got a raid 0 thunderbolt drive for the macbook pro and now i can play and edit 4k footage easily.

Ian [P13] · May 18, 2015

Before editing the GoPro footage you can transcode it to a format more suited to editing software, either GoPro's CineForm or maybe even a flavour of Apple's Prores. It'll be faster to work with that way. https://gopro.com/support/articles/why-does-gopro-studio-convert-file-to-the-gopro-cineform-format

franknitty69 · May 18, 2015

i also found that transferring your footage to your computer is faster using a card reader vs pulling it from the GoPro with the usb cable. it's like night and day. i can get 4k clips on the desktop in seconds vs minutes with a usb 3.0 card reader.

rrmccabe · Jun 11, 2015

Swapped out the Mobo today along with an i7-4790 cpu and slightly faster RAM.

Difference in rendering was not huge but some gains. Have not tried After Effects yet. It was painfully slow and I am told a video card wont help AE compared to what I have.

Still comes back to the fact I don't think I want to mess with 4K unless I have to. I don't have the patience to wait an hour and a half on something

captblaze · Jun 19, 2015

rrmccabe said:
Swapped out the Mobo today along with an i7-4790 cpu and slightly faster RAM.

Difference in rendering was not huge but some gains. Have not tried After Effects yet. It was painfully slow and I am told a video card wont help AE compared to what I have.

Still comes back to the fact I don't think I want to mess with 4K unless I have to. I don't have the patience to wait an hour and a half on something

if you want a machine that renders video quickly you need an x99 based processor. i7 5960X with a mild overclock and 32 GB of ddr4 memory would lower your render times enough to notice. The only draw back is you are looking at an $1100 or more proposition. the i7 5820K has a few less cores, but will still spank a 4790 all day. if you want to go balls to the wall look into building a dual Xeon E5-2650V3 work station with a total of 20 actual cores of number crunching ummph

rrmccabe · Jun 20, 2015

Yea that's not going to happen at this point. I have more money in it than I would like. I tried a 12 gig Triton video card which made zero difference so went back to my GTX570

I just realized the biggest culprit in slow render times is trying to do fish eye removal.

To be honest I don't think the CPU is the bottle neck. I can do a render with fish-eye removal and Adobe Premiere CC 2015 is only using 18 % CPU.

Lonewulph · Jun 21, 2015

I have the Adobe Premier suite, however as was stated earlier, I usually take shorter clips, render those individually in a program that doesn't require as much cpu usage to run, such as PowerDirector. After each clip is rendered, I create a new project and bring all of the clips in together and render as a single video. I have a Z820 HP workstation so it handles HD pretty good. I have yet to try 4k files, they are huge so we shall see.
Edited to add: The GoPro studio app also works very well with these HD files.

rrmccabe · Jun 21, 2015

Thanks

I think my custom lens on the go pro might be my savor. If I dont have to remove fisheye, the processing is much faster.

That function does not take advantage of any kind of acceleration apparently.

RyanG · Jul 6, 2015

Have you tested the render times in the GoPro app vs Premiere.. Oddly enough I found the GoPro app works really well with render times. Premiere (adding effects will increase render times substantially) can take a little longer.

Ryan G

rrmccabe · Jul 6, 2015

RyanG said:
Have you tested the render times in the GoPro app vs Premiere.. Oddly enough I found the GoPro app works really well with render times. Premiere (adding effects will increase render times substantially) can take a little longer.

Ryan G

Yea same here. But I really cant do enough in GoPro studio. But for fisheye removal the GP apps kicks butt!

Kabz · Jul 7, 2015

I have a maxed out Macbook Pro retina and I'm using Premiere CC 2014 -- I edit professionally, and it's taxing my system to basically it's max at 2.7K 60 frames.

In the future I will just work with proxy files, as most 4K projects would need me to do.

To the lay person: Using proxy files for 4K means making smaller files of the same video, so you can playback flawlessly, and understand the decisions you are making as an editor.
For a commercial, for example. If I have to make it 15 seconds and NOT A FRAME more, and I'm given 6K footage (nightmare for an underpowered system). I will not get smooth playback and even a single dropped frame in playback can throw off a project like that.

So it is an added step, but if you have an hour of GoPro footage at 2.7K or 4K -- unless your machine is a beast, you will have to make proxy files.

Once your project is done, move the proxy files, and when the project asks to reconnect media, reconnect it to the full resolution files, render it out and export. This way you barely touch the raw media until the last step.

There are dozens of tutorials explaining editing with proxy files and it is no doubt going to become a necessity for people trying to get into 4K editing.

Also regarding simple playback: mp4 is not the greatest format for editing and playback, even though programs hand handle it natively. I prefer using ProRes to edit, because even full res playback is smoother.

rrmccabe · Jul 7, 2015

@Kabz That makes sense and I never really thought of that. Does that work of you take a clip on your time-lime and cut it up, delete sections, etc. I assume it would as you are just replacing the original complete file and it will cut all the segments from the new file automatically.

One thing this would not work well for would be if you had correction work to do. Probably would not want to attempt much correction on a lower resolution file and then swap in a 4k file.