This morning I nearly fainted when a project I have been working on (using a mixture of 4k and 1080p) got stuck at the same point in loading. This project is a QVC campaign promo with a pretty hard deadline! We have been shooting on and off all week and today I wanted to add the new footage to the project.

After lots of panicky troubleshooting I worked out it was the 4k footage that was causing the loading problem by moving it to a different folder and replacing the media one file at a time (thankfully only 52 files). I noticed that when I got to the first 4k clip Vegas started (very slowly) to build a proxy.

And then I remembered . . . a week ago I edited some 4k footage which needed a lot of colour correction, timing adjustment, titles, pan/crop, stabilisation etc. The plugins were really slowing the preview down so I thought I would try out the automatically created video proxies for UHD footage for the first time.

After the edit I didn't turn it off.

So, when I came to open up the problem veg this morning, for the first time since it was created (which was BEFORE I had turned on proxy building), I think it must have been creating the proxies for the 4k footage. There was no disk or memory activity shown in Task Manager, though, so I wonder if it was getting stuck at that point rather than actually doing anything. Also, there was no indication on the status bar that it was building a proxy (unlike when I loaded each file individually).

However, opening a different project and turning off the proxy option resolved the problem immediately and the troubled project opened in seconds. Phew . . .

So, as a cautionary tale - if your 4k project seems to be stalling when loading, check the video proxy switch first before wasting an hour trying to troubleshoot.

Perhaps I will leave it opening overnight and see if it actually does complete its task. Presumably on subsequent loads it will detect the proxies automatically. Thankfully I have a fairly ballsy editing pc and it is only when I'm loading a 4k timeline with plugins that it starts to struggle. Suffice to say my first (or rather my second) experience with proxies has not been particularly encouraging.

I always keep turned off all automatic actions except Automatically save trimmer markers and regions with media file.

I think that's good advice :-)

And this is why i'm terrified of going 4K until it's a bit more mainstream and my customers know the advantages of having it.

I have to say I haven't looked back since adding 4k to my capabilities. I don't shoot in 4k on every job, but only when there's an advantage, such as having the ability to crop or stabilise without losing resolution. Most of the time my clients don't know whether I'm shooting HD or UHD, but the last two jobs (one for a global retail technology company and the other for the QVC campaign) had 4k as a requirement. Admittedly that now makes only three jobs that have insisted on 4k since I took the plunge (early summer last year), but that's mainstream enough for me!

Also, keep in mind that this particular hiccup was as a result of me not doing something correctly in Vegas, not as a result of 4k being a difficult child :-)

James, I've been shooting and editing in 4K for almost two years and it's been fine. Typcially have two cameras in 4K and one in 1080, so I'm editing three camera multicam projects with few issues.

IMO 4K is plenty mainstream enough for me, it just not a new thing anymore. It's true the TVs are still not common, but almost if not all the local theatres deliver in 4k now.

I do not always choose to shoot in 4K, but I shot everything in 4k for the first 18months of having the cams. There really is nothing to it. If someone does not NEED to buy new cams, no reason to go 4K yet, but there is certainly no reason to fear buying 4K cameras unless you are using an ancient PC. My CPU is about 4 years old and is doing just fine. Still no plans on upgrading!

It feels a bit scary at first but there's nothing to it.