Why is 4K important

Shooting on 4K makes sense because you can. It gives far more scope when editing down to 1080 but it's a valid display mode - most of my clients still want 1080 but a few ask for 4K and more importantly some have come back to me a few months after and asked for 4k footage. Yes, you need a decent spec PC to edit on but you can always use proxies right up to the colour grading/final tweaks. Having a crap computer is not an excuse for only shooting in 1080P :D
 
You missed my point. My point has nothing to do with the veiwers. It has to do what you as the creator can afford. If you could afford to produce 4K video you would because there would be zero difference in post vs. 1080.
Nowadays you can get into 4K equipment relatively inexpensive, I recently upgraded my older Windows 7 Sony VIAO system to specifically process 4K videos from my Mavic, P3P & P4P now running an LG 32" 4K Monitor, IBuyPower Trace 930 1060, 1TB internal storage, from Best Buy US added a 1TB external storage device, this thing runs fast and has no problem editing 4K, the complete setup, Tax,Tag & Tile out the door was around $1,700.00 well worth the investment for providing quality photo/video combined with a decent editor package pretty much in any state of the art resolution to clients.

I would say there is a huge difference in 4K quality compared to 1080p, I have a 55" 4K TV and when using a screen that size watching from 25' away yes you don't notice it that much, but get close to the TV and you definitely see the pixel difference between the 1080p & 4K. Now scale that up to a 130" Home Theater system, you get my drift, the more pixels the better.
 
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In a few years 4k should be about where 1080 is now. Years from now when we go back and view older 1080 videos, they are not going to look so great because well be used to viewing 4k. Theres a huge difference in quality, like 4 times better.

From an editors view, 4k is great for making 1080 videos. You are able to crop and take the best from the clip with out sacrificing quality. For example, I have a clip of a bald eagle that flew under my drone while filming and then landed in a tree. I had to zoom a bit during editing to get the eagle to become a "subject" and lost quality doing so. I wish the clip was 4k because then I would of had a killer shot.....

If you fly commercial, you'll need 4k. My video shoot yesterday required 4k. My iMac will not play 4k smoothly enough to enjoy it. So I just dump all the clips into an editor and then export in 1080 to view them.

That being said, most all my personal fun stuff is filmed in 1080.
Which Max & OSX version?
 
Which Max & OSX version?
I have a mid 2011 iMac running the latest OS, I forget the name. I’ll check when I get home. I think it is High Sierra

Edit:
iMac (21.5-inch, Mid 2010)
3.06 GHz Intel Core i3
10 GB 1333 MHz DDR3
ATI Radeon HD 4670 256 MB
Running High Sierra 10.13.1
 
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Check out all the major electronic vendor ads on the web or on TV and you'll see there is a major push to 4K TVs, and millions will be sold this holiday season. With my original P4 I started shooting in 1080P because of problems displaying 4K on either my laptop or my desktop. However I have upgraded to the P4A+ and bought a gaming grade laptop with a discrete Nvidia GPU, and now I always shoot 4K videos. I edit with Premiere Pro using proxy editing, and I can output to 4K, 1080 or whatever. Also it's very useful to be able to crop to the best part of the footage or apply warp image stabilization when you have the higher resolution source footage to work with.
 
I always shoot in 4K even when I’m not planning to use any footage and just practicing or messing around. I didn’t know what I was missing though till I recently bought myself a 4K monitor—I started seeing details I didn’t know my P4P could shoot!

That being said: a large monitor about 3 feet away is very different than a typical TV in the living room. Most people aren’t going to notice the difference between 4K and 1080P if they’re sitting more than 1.5x the screen size; away from screen. If anything, they’ll notice more than anything the effects of compression. After all, with poor or too much compression you can make a 4K video look much worse than a higher bitrate 1080P—from any distance.

Of course using the standard of “most people” isn’t going to win you any awards. I’m often astonished, for example, how many people don’t notice they’re watching a 4:3 formatted movie stretched out on a 16:9 TV or vice versa.
 
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I shoot all P4P video in 4K. Why? Because I bring the 4k clips into Davinci Resolve and place them on a 1080p timeline, with the 4k frame centered on the 1080 frame. Now, I have free 2x zoomed shots on my timeline. I can choose to scale them anywhere between 50% and 100% and I still have full 1080p HD resolution.
 
tl;dr

4K Benefits:

+ Generally, video shot 4K and then edited on a 1080p timeline will have better resolution than footage shot 1080p and edited on a 1080p timeline. (At least with DSLRs / Mirrorless cameras).

+ Video that is shot at 4K and edited on a 4K timeline and uploaded to youtube as 4K will have a higher bitrate provided by youtube, and viewers interested in 1080p can simply view the 1080p stream instead of the 4K stream (in short, more flexibility).

+ When edited on a 1080p timeline, 4K allows you to retain more image quality while zooming in during post.

1080p Benefits:

+ Generally smaller file sizes

+ Generally requires less processing power from CPU, disk drives and graphics cards (Although I have been VERY IMPRESSED with how Resolve 14 handles 4K files in the really compressed Sony XAVC-S codec from a spinning disk. And as others have mentioned, editing proxy files - or even transcoded 4K files in prores - can help a machine run a lot smoother)

Certainly, pick whichever format is best for you and your clients.
 
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I shoot all P4P video in 4K. Why? Because I bring the 4k clips into Davinci Resolve and place them on a 1080p timeline, with the 4k frame centered on the 1080 frame. Now, I have free 2x zoomed shots on my timeline. I can choose to scale them anywhere between 50% and 100% and I still have full 1080p HD resolution.

That is a very good reason to shoot in 4K, IMHO.
 
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I recommend everyone editing 4K with the Mac get the Final Cut PRO X 3.4 version for High Sierra with the new Codec for editing 4K.
You can find the entire Suite on Ebay or Amazon for $150.00 that is a savings of over $200 on the app store and its the full retail version. The entire suite comes with Final Cut X and Motion and Compressor .
I want to thank everyone for supporting the 4K as its in everyone best interest to make money.
 
Also it's very useful to be able to crop to the best part of the footage or apply warp image stabilization when you have the higher resolution source footage to work with.

Yeah, I forgot about stabilization in post production. Good point.
 
You do not use 4k to shoot stills. Yes you can pull stills from video, but thats not the way to get the best still shot. Your best quality still image will be captured in a RAW format which has nothing to do with video.
While I agree that DNG stills result in the best quality still images, a still frame from a 60fps 4K video is roughly 8MB in size, and I get 60 per second, while still having continuous 4K video of the entire flight! :cool: Lots more images to choose from, while not giving up 4K video, which still allows rendering at 1080p with a zoom into any quarter of the 4K frame, with no loss in quality!
 
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While I agree that DNG stills result in the best quality still images, a still frame from a 60fps 4K video is roughly 8MB in size, and I get 60 per second, while still having continuous 4K video of the entire flight! :cool: Lots more images to choose from, while not giving up 4K video, which still allows rendering at 1080p with a zoom into any quarter of the 4K frame, with no loss in quality!

Yep, it equates to a 12mp still. If your moving, it most likely will be a blurred shot, this is the case in my experience. So you need to be “still” during that time to pull a proper shot out of a 4K video. You might as well take a proper photo. You will NEVER get a high quality shot while the camera is moving and the subject is not. We get lucky with our stable aircraft shooting 1/300 to 1/500 SS. It works, but when you get down to a SS of 120 and your moving, your not getting a quality shot that you could blow up to a 2x3 poster or whatever. It might look great on your device, but will look horrible when printed. There’s lots of ways to obtain photos in photography. Just like there’s lots of ways to paint a car, I’m sure you’ve seen a car that has been spray painted with cans, right.?

Bottom line, if you need to shoot 60 shots a second to get a good shot, you might want to practice a bit more at capturing a quality still. It’s called spray and pray and is something beginners in photography will do. Ever see a person with a dslr shooting in rapid on a motionless subject?

I’m not saying you can’t do this, many people do. It is just not the proper way to obtain a proper still shot, just like spray painting your car with spray cans is not the proper way to paint a car.
 
Yep, it equates to a 12mp still. If your moving, it most likely will be a blurred shot, this is the case in my experience. So you need to be “still” during that time to pull a proper shot out of a 4K video. You might as well take a proper photo. You will NEVER get a high quality shot while the camera is moving and the subject is not. We get lucky with our stable aircraft shooting 1/300 to 1/500 SS. It works, but when you get down to a SS of 120 and your moving, your not getting a quality shot that you could blow up to a 2x3 poster or whatever. It might look great on your device, but will look horrible when printed. There’s lots of ways to obtain photos in photography. Just like there’s lots of ways to paint a car, I’m sure you’ve seen a car that has been spray painted with cans, right.?

Bottom line, if you need to shoot 60 shots a second to get a good shot, you might want to practice a bit more at capturing a quality still. It’s called spray and pray and is something beginners in photography will do. Ever see a person with a dslr shooting in rapid on a motionless subject?

I’m not saying you can’t do this, many people do. It is just not the proper way to obtain a proper still shot, just like spray painting your car with spray cans is not the proper way to paint a car.
The point of 4K footage is not to extract stills, but to create awesome 4K video. However, the excellent still extracts from 4K footage on the P4P is just one more reason to shoot in 4K, as shooting in 1080p will result in completely unusable still extracts, even by my standards!

I have been taking still extracts out of my 4K video footage for over two years. Since the subject is landscape, which is isn't moving and is essentially at infinity, while the drone is flying forward, the gimbal stabilizes the forward movement of the drone and keeps the images sharp, and the shutter speed for our wide angle lens can even be as slow as 1/60 at 60fps with excellent results.

The advantage of the 60fps is you can choose the very sharpest still frame from among several at the decisive moment that you captured, and can select the frame where the composition is also the best, without any cropping.

I have several 2x3 foot poster images, mounted on the wall in frames, taken from 4K drone video that will stand up to even your scrutiny, when viewed at a normal viewing distance for such a large print. When viewed on my 27" 4K Dell monitor, they are also tack sharp, with every street and business sign completely legible while flying along, from above, at even 30mph. Try it. You'll like it!:cool:
 
The difference between 720 and 1080 is that 99% of the population actually has a device to view 1080 footage on and therefore it's worthwhile to shoot video in that res. This isn't the case with 4K over 1080p. Almost no one will ever see the quality difference.
You could NOT be more completely wrong. I shoot lots of 180P and 4K 30 and 60fps using various drones but mostly my Canon 1DXMKII camera. All being equal, a side by side comparison of a great 1080P vs a great 4K 30 or 60 fps video is in no way close. Thuis is not a matter of tast or opinion, this is clearly a technical fact.
 

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