4K editing efficiencies and advice

Anthony does a nice job in this article going over some of the tricks he's learned about working with 4K footage. He's focusing on optimizing your 4K workflow for efficiency and keeping your costs to a tight budget.

IEBA Tech Thoughts by Anthony Burokas Editing 4K footage really depends on the camera you use and how you intend upon editing it. For instance, I have the Panasonic GH4. It shoots 4K footage. But the data stream for 4K is about 10 MBytes/s. Just 10. If you don’t have a hard drive system that can do 10 MBps, a single hard drive- FireWire, USB-2 – you definitely need a new computer. But realistically, most any computer these days can handle a 10 MBps stream. If you’re taking your 4K footage and you’re expanding it into ProRes or DNxHD or some other editable codec then, yes, your data rate will be higher and other constraints come in the play. All that comes in the play are going to focus on editing for K footage in a camera original format. In this case with the GH4, it’s a H.264 codec with a max of 100 Mbits/s. It actually only averages about 80 Mbits/s which is 10 MBytes/s. read more...