Extreme 4K Multi-Mon Video Editing on Windows 8

Windows Blog by Gavin Gear

I am amazed by the image quality that’s possible with today’s 4K digital cinema cameras. It’s like watching full-res images from a DSLR playing back at 24 fps on the big screen, 4K footage is just stunning. Seeing 4K footage on the big screen got me thinking about 4K displays and 4K video on a PC. With 4K displays just coming to market, I think it’s time to examine how this technology will impact our PC experiences in the not-so-distant future.

With this post, I’ll provide an introduction to running 4K displays with Windows 8 and demonstrate end-to-end 4K video screening/editing with the HP Z820 RED Edition PC.

After shooting some 4K and 5K footage with the RED EPIC camera, I wanted to evaluate the footage with a 4K projector or display. This started my quest to experiment first-hand with 4K display technology on Windows. With some research and with the help of friends at Toshiba, I was able to borrow a Toshiba Regaza 55X3 55” 3D 4K Ultra-high-definition television. This TV is not available in North America and may not be appropriate for a real post-production environment, but it’s great for to use for my needs as a technology demonstration on Windows 8.

When the TV arrived, I had two thoughts:

1. How am I going to connect it to a PC? and
2. How will this 4K display work with a multi-mon setup?

4K resolutions are supported with HDMI 1.4a, but I didn’t know what graphics hardware would meet this specification. After some research I found that both the latest round of NVIDIA Kepler-based cards and the latest AMD RADEON series cards (including the RADEON 7970) support 4K output! So, connecting a 4K display to a Windows PC was going to be easier than I had originally thought. read more...