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It's beginning to sound like some of you are getting triggered by this whole thing. If the various investments and work-arounds of shooting 4K are worth the additional investment for your particular situation or emotional attachments then go for it. The history of mankind is more of a cosmic wonder than I thought.. just think of it, all the people that can't live without 4K would have died all through history up until only a few short years ago! This is beginning to get tedious. Please do yourself a favour and do a little experiment.. shoot a 1080p BRAW clip and then shoot a 4K BRAW clip, put each of them on a native resolution timeline and then load each of them up with effects until your computer can't keep up. Compare how many effects the 1080p timeline got to with the number that the 4K timeline got to. I look forward to the results of your test and the proof that the 4K timeline, and processing 4x the number of pixels, takes the same processing power as the 1080p timeline, with its quarter the number of pixels. This thread is about 4K vs 1080p, not the very specific situation and particular camera selections that you happened to make. Cool. If you render a 1080p master file then upscale it to 4K and upload that to YouTube then we can compare the numbers and see if your 6K timeline is that much better than having downscaled to a 1080p timeline and then upscaled the result to 4K YT. I look forward to comparing them.

When I first started working in the tall buildings in the city, I was really taken back and concerned when hearing the next rumour about how big company X was about to downsize by 600 people, and big company Y was going to outsource it's blah department. This was in the wake of the GFC, and bonuses were only a month or two salary at best! After three years I realised there are always rumours and that disaster is always looming. It takes more than whispers to cut through the noise for me. Covid is putting pressure on the whole world, there will be blood in the water, but it's not there yet.

You're confusing the processing power required for decoding the image from the original codec with the processing power required for doing effects once it's been decoded. RAW, and BRAW especially is a radically easier codec to work with over AVCHD. I'm guessing you don't put enough effects onto your files to really slow things down. Try putting your BRAW on a 12K timeline and apply a bunch of OFX plugins and see how far BRAW gets you then 🙂 I'm not arguing that 4K is no use, I'm just saying that it has hidden costs. It's a bit of a stretch to say that mentioning media size and encoding time covers things like the concerns of noise management from extra fans. It sounds like your 4K workflow doesn't have any hidden costs because you've already paid for them. Think about what the cheapest system that could do what you do with 1080p BRAW would look like - probably a 2012 laptop - which is close to being free at this point, so in that sense the entire cost of your whole editing setup is the "hidden" cost you have already paid. It's like trying to tell someone that there are extra costs involved in driving 400Km/h and the person saying to you "I don't know what you're talking about, I just get in my Bugatti and do it, so it totally costs the same!"

Most of the time I just go into Resolve and look to see what stuff is called or whatever, but I don't have the free version so can't reference it 🙂

I've seen that before... years ago actually. When it was written 🙂 Seriously though, I looked through that and multiple nodes wasn't mentioned, so I wasn't sure. I find BlackMagic aren't the greatest about keeping the documentation up to date and easily findable.

You're so gracious!

Which bit isn't correct? I've never been able to get a clear idea about which restrictions there are on the free version. If the free version has multiple nodes, then that's pretty awesome, and makes it a lot more useful.

It's the whole workflow. Just off the top of my head: Having to buy larger cards for capture Spending time changing media in the field Creative energy spent worrying about media management Extra batteries (if higher resolutions take extra power, not sure) and worrying about batteries going flat Having to wait longer for media to transfer to storage Having to transfer more cards to storage Having to pay for more storage Having to scale up when a drive gets full, eg, having to manage multiple drives and adjust backups and figure out extra media management protocols due to having more drives, or having to go to an expensive NAS style solution when you get more drives than the simple and cheaper docks can handle Having to buy larger editing SSDs for holding footage because the project is larger Having to buy a more powerful computer to play footage smoothly, or time spent waiting for proxies to render is longer Having to buy a more powerful computer / GPU to process the footage Having interruptions to your workflow when you max out your hardware with effects and transitions and the NLE can't play realtime anymore, or having to spend more time working with caches to pre-render those heavy computational sections of a project Having your creativity limited by sticking to processing options within your hardware performance (did you know Resolve has some time-stretching algorithms that use AI? and that's just one effect, there will be more) Having to wait longer for projects to render Having to wait longer for files to transfer during delivery and/or having to buy better/more internet to cope with the increased sizes Having to wait longer for backup cycles and media management tasks further down the line There's even the minor stuff that probably isn't that much, but includes extra cost of electricity, extra cooling, extra effort or creative drain dealing with the extra noise in the studio due to more fans or faster spinning of fans required for cooling, etc etc etc As a quick attempt at naming some stuff how was that?

I have bolded the most significant word in your post... "almost" 😂😂😂 I suspect that YouTube might make some kind of allowance for making 1080p videos better in 1080 than 4K videos are, as there's kind of a relationship between upload resolution and who watches stuff. People that have channels with nothing to do with aesthetics aren't likely to chase the highest resolutions. There will be exceptions of course, but as a general principle I think it holds up. I expect that @fuzzynormal probably does see a difference. I can see a difference, and once I learned where to look and what to look for, I think I could probably see that difference even if there weren't comparable shots. Perhaps the most interesting thing about this thread is that there wasn't consensus about if it was visible, or for those who had a preference, which one was even best. I think it's one of those things where being right doesn't necessarily align you with popular opinion, and it may not actually give you any kind of advantage in the end anyway. By the time we factor in all the overheads, which may be hidden for many people at this point but are real nonetheless, I think that for many 4K isn't worth it. That's easy.. we'll all need to go on a prolonged campaign to blow up my channel and get it to a million subs, then I promise I'll do the test 🙂

I agree that a 4K upload watched at 4K is WAY better than a 1080p upload watched at 1080p. Absolutely. The challenge with uploading 6K and 8K is that people won't watch at 6K or 8K, they'll watch at 4K or 1080p. It's kind of like me saying that you're going to love my new video because I shot it in 25K, and you have to watch it in 25K or you'll miss out. Not going to happen. At some point you have to optimise your viewing experience for the people watching, rather than the best possible experience if a viewer sells their car to setup a system. For many that's people watching in 4K, for most it's people watching in 1080p, or even 720p.

1) yes, 2) not necessarily. The 4K file was uploaded at over twice the bitrate as the better 1080p upload, yet the 1080p from it was only 70%. It might be that a 4K reference file might give a slightly better IQ per bitrate stream, that 'bump' is competing with a 70% bitrate, and considering we're talking FHD at 2.5Mbps - I'd think the bitrate would win. No. The 4K file was uploaded at over twice the bitrate as the better 1080p upload, yet the 1080p from it was only 70%. Judging from this, the logical conclusion is that more bitrate at the same resolution helps, and the same bitrate at a higher resolution HURTS. I suspect that YT might be looking at bitrate-per-pixel, which would explain why the 47Mbps 1080 was closer to the 225Mbps 4K file. Let's summarise that again, but looking at bitrate-per-pixel: Notice that the bits-per-pixel matches much more closely than the absolute bitrate.. still some variation, but much closer.

Here are the videos if you are curious to pixel peep... 4K 225Mbps: 1080p 47Mbps: and 1080p 96Mbps:

Here's some data... Original 4K upload 225Mbps: 1080p upload 47Mbps: 1080p upload 96Mbps: So: 4K at 225Mbps upload gives a 1080p stream at 2.5Mbps 1080p at 47Mbps upload gives a 1080p stream at 2.0Mbps 1080p at 96Mbps upload gives a 1080p stream at 3.5Mbps I'm willing to call that conclusive.. Uploading at a higher resolution is not the answer to people watching in lesser resolutions.

@Neumann Films @SteveV4D @fuzzynormal I think this is actually a myth. I don't think that uploading a video at 4K gives you any better quality when viewing the 1080p stream from YT. I'm doing a test right now, but I've previously looked at the 1080p stream across multiple videos, and the average bitrate for the 1080p stream was basically the same when the video was uploaded at 4K or at 1080p. What will get you a better looking image is uploading at a higher bitrate. So if you upload 1080p at 25Mbps and 4K at 100Mbps then the 1080 stream from the 100Mbps file will be better, but not because it was in 4K. People seem to still be very confused by YT....

I think it depends on what you're trying to achieve. A video showing test shots of brick walls, charts, high DR scenes, and scenes where a colour gradient is pushed in post to expose any banding would be very useful to a technical film-maker, but would be useless to the expressive film-maker who wants to see the aesthetic potential of the camera. Likewise, an emotional and dreamy creative piece where the composition is an interpretive dance between cast and crew can tell a creative everything they need to know about the texture and refinement of expression that the camera possesses in pure potential, and would tell the technical operator very little. The older I get the more I realise that people dramatically underestimate how different we all are to each other. Put more simply, what doesn't work for you might be useful for someone else.

Great test of (almost) all the Meike MFT lenses:

Also also also... being able to apply multiple treatments to an image is really where professional colour grading begins. You'll see in every colourist / colour demo that they start with the image and then they'll show several wipes to show how they did something, then something else, then something else again, etc. That really needs multiple nodes to do as you need the full control of one or more nodes to properly do each correction.

Also also, having multiple nodes allows you to have parallel processing of the image, for example you can take a key of an object, split it and the rest of the image into two separate paths though the node graph, and for each one you can have it pass through multiple nodes, before they get combined again.

Also, I forgot that multiple nodes allows you to do things like layer adjustments and parallel nodes, which allow all the kind of effects that having layers in an image editor gives you.

That's what I thought as well. It doesn't directly talk about your setup, but there are a bunch of articles on Pugets website talking about what benefits you get from having multiple GPUs, like this one: https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/DaVinci-Resolve-14-GPU-Scaling-Core-i9-vs-Xeon-W-vs-Dual-Xeon-SP-1121/ Of course, buying a second GPU also means buying Resolve, so it's more of an investment. I found with my system that the CPU was the bottleneck until I added an absolute ton of processing, so I had to upgrade to my new laptop. You can use the Activity Monitor application under Utilities to see the load on your system (go to Window and enable CPU History and GPU History then go do things in Resolve and see what got maxed out). I would definitely upgrade to Resolve Studio. IIRC the free version of resolve only lets you have a single node? If that's the case then having the ability to have more than one node let's you do a few killer things: Choose what order your effects get applied in by separating them into different nodes You can start to work with selective adjustments where you take a key and adjust only certain ranges of colour (eg, skin tones) or certain areas within the image (eg, track a moving window on someones face) Apply multiple OFX plugins Use Temporal Noise Reduction that compares multiple frames to do NR instead of blurring just one frame at a time

Agreed. I should do a follow-up with different scenes, but including some landscapes at infinity focus. Having a composition where lots of stuff is out of focus really helps any compression algorithm along, so having lots of detail is much harder. Would you suggest a shot with lots of stuff moving? That's not that easy to find, although I guess the ocean would be pretty good for lots of random motion at a far focus distance.

I focused by focusing at f0.95, then stopping down several stops. I think I shot at either f2.8 or f4 (stopped down 3-4 stops). I then shot in whatever mode the camera was in 4K / 2K, if the camera was in 2K then I would wait a few seconds then shoot again, then change to the other mode and shoot. I shot handheld standing up, so slight focus changes are possible. In post I used a random number generator to decide which of the 2K shots got Super Scaled and which was kept unprocessed, and also on the sequence of how the 2K SS / 2K / 4K appeared in the video. I've done tests comparing how much lenses sharpen up when stopping down (closing down by 2-3 stops is normally close to their sharpest) and I compared the Voiglander 42.5mm to the Helios 58mm + 0.7x SB (41mm) and the Konica Hexanon 40mm and all were similar sharpness when stopped down, on MFT at least. Once again, if it's only visible by direct comparison of identical shots then it won't matter because I don't get the option of watching a YouTube video shot in 4K and then watching the same video shot in 2K and then up-scaled.

You never heard it from me..... 😳😁😁

Actually, for it to be a real test, I should have shot different scenes altogether.