The Reality of Editing 4K
Posted: Wed Jan 17, 2018 10:07 am
An associate of mine had an inspiration for a documentary a couple of years ago. He assembled a team, solicited talent, and shot it. It's been languishing on a hard drive ever since.
I did sound for him on a cute little indy RomCom, and in the course of conversations afterwards, he mentioned he needed an editor who could take the raw footage from this documentary and put it in some form that would allow him to begin selecting the story.
The premise was that he'd read an experiment in a scientific journal about a series of 16 questions. Take two strangers, put them in a room together, have them ask each other these 16 questions, and by the end, they end up with a bond akin to years of friendship. So, he recruited six pairs of strangers, had them go through the questions, and shot it.
For the first interview, he used 7 cameras. For the others, he used 5. There was a BlackMagic PCC for the cover shot, and he had begged/borrowed 4 DSLRs to do OTS and CU shots of each person. The OTS shots were 4K; the CU shots were HD; the cover was 2.5K. Master audio was recorded on some form of Tascam; each of the cameras had some form of onboard mic for scratch tracks.
The interviews totaled about 16 hours. Multiply that by the 5 cameras, it's a ton of footage to wade through. Add in the fact that much of it was resolution above HD, it was too much for him to process.
So, I thought I'd do him a favor. Lay the interviews out, sync the cameras, do a multi-screen presentation, add in burns for file names and time code. After a couple of hours of noodling, I settled on this layout.
Now, getting everything synced was painful. When you record long segments of video, it gets broken into multiple computer files. On a REAL video camera, these files go back together seamlessly. On the hodge-podge mix of DSLRs he had to work with, that was not the case. Some of the cameras put gaps between every. single. file. and the gaps were of variable length. Some cameras were prone to overheating, and would scramble file names so that the proper order might be file20, file21, file25, file22, file23. Sometimes an overheated camera would make duplicates of the same file name, but with differences in length. (If I had been a camera snob before this project, I'm twice the snob now. I won't work on another project where principal footage is acquired with a DSLR.) Here's the Timeline attached to the image above.
Anyway as annoying as it was, my newish iMac and Adobe Premiere performed well. I wasn't hindered by choking or lagging. Well, not much. For having 5-6 scaled images on the screen of a 4K sequence, each one generating 2 distinct pieces of text information, literally the only concession I had to make to computing power was that when I repositioned the playhead, I had to wait about a second before I could resume playing. Other than that, full real-time functionality.
I was quite impressed. I'd done a little bit of 4K stuff before, but this was a monster project, and my mainstream computer was handling it beautifully!
(Fred, Dave, Leila, and Mike are laughing already. They see the punchline coming.)
Then it came time to export the project. The first segment I completed, 20 minutes of Brady Bunch video in 4K.
.....
It took 22 hours. Twenty-two hours to get out of my machine!
Keep in mind that I had 16 more hours of content to do. At roughly an 72-to-1 ratio... ick!
I decided to finish all of the editing, then do a batch export. I was working on this over the holiday break, so walking away and leaving the office computer grinding for a week wasn't a problem. I did stop in to check and make sure it hadn't crashed, but it performed flawlessly. It actually only took 5 days instead of the month I was expecting, so... yay?
On the one hand, I was impressed with the stability, reliability, and functionality of the platform.
On the other hand... having to wait for such an extended time on an export... it was like a time machine back to the early days of HD video. And the early days of DVD authoring. Pretty much all projects had 2 or 3 segments of "and walk away and let the computer grind all night." I thought we were past that!
Anyway, just sharing an experience in the exciting new frontier of 4K. I wonder what my little iMac would do with raw 8K from a Red Weapon?
I did sound for him on a cute little indy RomCom, and in the course of conversations afterwards, he mentioned he needed an editor who could take the raw footage from this documentary and put it in some form that would allow him to begin selecting the story.
The premise was that he'd read an experiment in a scientific journal about a series of 16 questions. Take two strangers, put them in a room together, have them ask each other these 16 questions, and by the end, they end up with a bond akin to years of friendship. So, he recruited six pairs of strangers, had them go through the questions, and shot it.
For the first interview, he used 7 cameras. For the others, he used 5. There was a BlackMagic PCC for the cover shot, and he had begged/borrowed 4 DSLRs to do OTS and CU shots of each person. The OTS shots were 4K; the CU shots were HD; the cover was 2.5K. Master audio was recorded on some form of Tascam; each of the cameras had some form of onboard mic for scratch tracks.
The interviews totaled about 16 hours. Multiply that by the 5 cameras, it's a ton of footage to wade through. Add in the fact that much of it was resolution above HD, it was too much for him to process.
So, I thought I'd do him a favor. Lay the interviews out, sync the cameras, do a multi-screen presentation, add in burns for file names and time code. After a couple of hours of noodling, I settled on this layout.
Now, getting everything synced was painful. When you record long segments of video, it gets broken into multiple computer files. On a REAL video camera, these files go back together seamlessly. On the hodge-podge mix of DSLRs he had to work with, that was not the case. Some of the cameras put gaps between every. single. file. and the gaps were of variable length. Some cameras were prone to overheating, and would scramble file names so that the proper order might be file20, file21, file25, file22, file23. Sometimes an overheated camera would make duplicates of the same file name, but with differences in length. (If I had been a camera snob before this project, I'm twice the snob now. I won't work on another project where principal footage is acquired with a DSLR.) Here's the Timeline attached to the image above.
Anyway as annoying as it was, my newish iMac and Adobe Premiere performed well. I wasn't hindered by choking or lagging. Well, not much. For having 5-6 scaled images on the screen of a 4K sequence, each one generating 2 distinct pieces of text information, literally the only concession I had to make to computing power was that when I repositioned the playhead, I had to wait about a second before I could resume playing. Other than that, full real-time functionality.
I was quite impressed. I'd done a little bit of 4K stuff before, but this was a monster project, and my mainstream computer was handling it beautifully!
(Fred, Dave, Leila, and Mike are laughing already. They see the punchline coming.)
Then it came time to export the project. The first segment I completed, 20 minutes of Brady Bunch video in 4K.
.....
It took 22 hours. Twenty-two hours to get out of my machine!
Keep in mind that I had 16 more hours of content to do. At roughly an 72-to-1 ratio... ick!
I decided to finish all of the editing, then do a batch export. I was working on this over the holiday break, so walking away and leaving the office computer grinding for a week wasn't a problem. I did stop in to check and make sure it hadn't crashed, but it performed flawlessly. It actually only took 5 days instead of the month I was expecting, so... yay?
On the one hand, I was impressed with the stability, reliability, and functionality of the platform.
On the other hand... having to wait for such an extended time on an export... it was like a time machine back to the early days of HD video. And the early days of DVD authoring. Pretty much all projects had 2 or 3 segments of "and walk away and let the computer grind all night." I thought we were past that!
Anyway, just sharing an experience in the exciting new frontier of 4K. I wonder what my little iMac would do with raw 8K from a Red Weapon?
