When to invest in new equipment and sale old equipment?

[Steven Digges]

Thank you for the detailed response gentlemen. Having the luxury of a crop factor means very little to me. As I have said before I have no need for 4K yet as far as my clientele go. I am going to wait until I have a justifiable reason to upgrade.

And Rodger....you hit it on the head when you said it is a "system upgrade". I have been through this too many times before to think it is just about cameras. A change like this touches your entire work flow.

I am glad to hear your working in real time with your new system. Thanks again for the details.

Steve

[Chris Harding]

I remember well when I changed from SD to HD cameras ..it goes way beyond just buying new cameras and quite often your new computer system will easily be the price of a camera.

To be honest I have never used 4K for cropping anyway ,,that's what camera framing is all about so until 1080 becomes "obsolete" I really cannot see any huge advantages in shooting 4K unless specifically requested to deliver in a 4K format.

Your EA-50's are good for quite a few years to come Steve!!

[Noa Put]

I have a i7 4790k processor and a nvidia gt610 which actually is only there to make my 21:9 monitor work as the gpu on the processor didn't support the resolution of the monitor.

Working with 4k "feels" the same as working with hd on my system as long as you don't do any crazy stuff, for weddings I start with trowing all footage (HD and 4K) onto a 1080p timeline, sync all multicam video and audio, I cut out all bad stuff so that I have a about 2 hour long timeline left with usable video.

I then copy that timeline (sequence) 6 or more times depending on how many speeches etc and name each sequence to a particular part of the day, like trailer, highlight, ceremony, speeches and so on. Then for each sequence I just delete what I don't need and make the final edit with colorcorrection and add music.

I then export each sequence to the formats I need for my dvd, blu-ray or just as separate files to place on a usb stick. I use tmpgenc authoringworks for my dvd and blu-ray rendering.

If I want a 4k master I can just switch my 1080p project where I did all my editing in into a 4K project and render a 4K master out, the main benefit is that my processor can handle a HD project (even if it included 4k) footage with more ease then when I would edit a 4K project, I only switch to a 4K project if I need a 4K master rendered out.

I use edius 8WG and as long as I use the basic editing tools which include colorcorrecting everything is realtime, even my multicam edits with 3 to 4 camera's, I do crop on 4K footage if needed and then only in ceremony footage on unmanned camera's and it's still all in realtime even with edius basic 3 way collorcorrection applied.

Edius uses the gpu help with the realtime performance but als for rendering the footage out, one minute of 4K ax100 footage with colorcorrection rendered out from a 1080p timeline takes only 17 seconds.

I"m just giving this as a example that you don't need a expensive pc and that you don't need to take detours to have a pleasant editing experience, with the right workflow and teh right tools editing 4K is not much different to working with HD + you can benefit from the advantages 4K can give you.

[Noa Put]

Originally Posted by Chris Harding

To be honest I have never used 4K for cropping anyway ,,that's what camera framing is all about so until 1080 becomes "obsolete" I really cannot see any huge advantages in shooting 4K unless specifically requested to deliver in a 4K format.

I have seen people saying that cropping in post is just being lazy and that the only right way is to frame the camera right while you are shooting video.

While I do agree with the fact that you need to do it right from the start for specific applications cropping in 4K can have major advantages, specifically when doing weddings as a soloshooter and on unmanned camera's at ceremonies.

Often time is limited to set up camera's and once they are running you can't always access them again during the ceremony while you are operating your own camera during keymoments like the vows. Being able to reframe footage from a unmanned 4k to get it exactly right has been a lifesaver, it often happens I get into the frame of those camera's but with cropping I can take myself out without any visual loss in IQ. It's like being on location and reframe the camera depending on the situation.

Another example and I think some shooters of danceperformances can agree is that a single locked off 4K camera that has the entire stage in view can be used as a multicam camera in the edit. You can zoom in and follow dancers with a much higher precision then you could do from a tripod while shooting. You don't need to anticipate moves and always be a few millisecond late following the dancers while they move all over the stage, you can follow them with surgical precision in post, as if you are the choreographer of the play.

That's my take on cropping into 4K footage.

[Chris Harding]

I see how that can be a lifesaver Noa ... we actually use cropping all the time when we do a live broadcast as we have two unmanned cameras feeding the vision mixer software so you can reposition a camera in the software using pan and crop which is very useful instead of jumping up from your chair every time you need to reposition a camera and being live you can easily have someone shift position while you are away from the computer so by the time you get back the problem could have re-instated itself.

Sadly my i72600 struggles with 4K footage so to use it in my recorded footage I would have to upgrade my computer again ... I guess if you are going to upgrade then going to the max is a good idea if you are thinking about using 4K in the future.

[Roger Gunkel]

I completely agree with Noa on the cropping. I often have a ceremony locked off camera and it is great to be able to reframe in post. Sometimes the couple will end up off centre of where they were expected to be and reframing in post saves the frame and loses nothing. It's also nice to be able to zoom in slowly from a wide angle to a big close up or a slow pan from a locked off cam.

I also agree with Noa on stage productions. We regularly film school productions and have previously used 2 locked off cameras on full stage and centre stage plus 2 manned cameras. The problem is that dialogue can jump rapidly from speaker to speaker, often widely separated and the close up manned cams can't always follow quickly enough. With one 4K cam on full stage, every part of the dialogue can be followed as can all movement, smoothly and accurately. We have filmed a couple of productions these last two weeks and done the whole edit from the whole stage 4K cam.

We are hopeful that we will be able to film most productions with one 4K and one safety cam, which means that Claire and I will be able to take on a school production each on the same day. As they typically end up in the same term week, we will be able to double the bookings and of course the income from them :-)

Most of the wedding work is still filmed in HD on the same camera, but switching to 4K during ceremony and speeches gives so many framing options that aren't otherwise available. One example would be using the same clip for a cropped close up during the speeches of the main speaker and the couple at the same time, or being able to cut to a reaction shot from someone that even 2 or 3 camera coverage may have missed.

We needed to upgrade our editing system anyway and as Chris said, putting in a system that can handle 4k as easily as HD is sensible when upgrading. We will continue to work in 4K and HD in parallel for a long time I am sure, certainly until 4K delivery becomes the norm, but I love the options that we now have.

Roger

[Rob Cantwell]

It's true! if you have stuff a long time it's resale value tends to be very small, I tried recently to sell a Canon XL1 on behalf of an organisation I sometimes help out. I didn't get any offers, they were also trying to offload two old Apple eMacs, nobody was interested even for free.

So I guess you need to make sure that the item will pay for itself during the period of use as you wont recoup any extra due to the apparently sharp depreciation of electrical goods.

[John Wiley]

I think anyone who denies that 4K has benefits other than 4K delivery is kidding themselves. Whether you're cropping, down-converting, doing motion-graphics, etc there are plenty of reasons to think about upgrading to 4K now rather than waiting until it is "mainstream" (which I think could still be a decade away for everything other than big-budget films or Netflix exclusives).

Having said that, I've always avoided the cutting edge of technology and kept my camera purchases a generation behind. Right now, for example, I'm using an FS700 which I bought around about when the FS7 was launched and everyone else was upgrading. This is a great money saver, but also works for me because a lot of my work is end-to-end production where the client is fairly clueless to cameras. If you are a gun-for-hire freelancing for Tech-savvy producers, you'll need to have the latest and greatest buzz camera in your local market, such as the FS7, or the C300 before that.

I don't think too much about resale value. If it's not a tool that can make me more money, or help me earn that money more efficiently, I won't buy it. My FS700 paid for itself after a few months, and since then has been my most profitable camera to date. I just added a 4k recorder (at the same time as everyone else is upgrading again to the FS7mkII!) so it's got plenty of life left in it. Having said that I wouldn't be too stressed if it fell over the side of a boat tomorrow (hope that doesn't jinx me!) because it's already paid for itself many times over.

In summary: Invest when something can make you more money; sell it when it's not making you any money. And if possible, learn something from any bad purchase decisions!

[Adam Grunseth]

Originally Posted by Steven Digges

Roger,

This is off topic but I am curious......When you have a 4K time line and you manipulate the entire thing into crops, pans zooms etc aren't you creating a processing monster? Do you edit with a proxy file and then render out to HD from 4K? Or do you have a smoking hot editing system that can handle a long 4K time line (what is long 4 U?) with all of those effects in real time? Sounds like a great way to edit but I'm wondering about all of those effects in 4K dragging down real time?

Steve

I built my editing PC six years ago now, though at the time it was the best PC I could possibly put together. It uses an Intel i7 3970k processor, 64gigs of DDR3 memory, 16TB RAID, and dual Quadro cards in SLI with a combined 8 gigs of DDR5 video memory.

Using Adobe Premier CC I have no problem with 4K material, even uncompressed. I mix with with HD, pan, zoom, even color grade, all in real time. The key is to have enough video memory and fast enough drives. The pans, zooms, and effects should all be handled by the GPU, and any modern GPU should be more than capable of handling 4K material.

[Noa Put]

I built my editing PC six years ago now, though at the time it was the best PC I could possibly put together. It uses an Intel i7 3970k processor, 64gigs of DDR3 memory, 16TB RAID, and dual Quadro cards in SLI with a combined 8 gigs of DDR5 video memory.

Important note is that a pc should always be build around the NLE specifications, while Premiere would benefit from a lot of system memory and very fast videocards a program like Edius does not require that, my previous editing system only had 8gb of memory and no videocard and I also got real time performance with 4K material. a 3970k would give me a slower render performance then a 4790k just because Edius uses the onboard gpu of the processor which can handle this task faster then a 6core cpu.

[Jeremy Cole]

I have been shooting all of my interviews lately in 4K on the FS5 and then I down convert them to 1080 in AVID or Premier. This allows me to zoom in during an interview or do a pan or cut between individuals in a 2-shot. It is very handy. As for shooting b-roll in 4K, I don't find it as useful. While corporate clients don't talk 4K, they appreciate the extras I can do because I use it.