The need for the editing gear to progress in the 4K era

[Brellivids]

It's great to have 4K video cameras at reasonable prices. Cheap 4K makes it possible to anyone to show their creative vision as well as the film can. We all know it takes HHD space to shoot 4K and even more so if you shoot 4K RAW. 

 

So one crucial thing regarding the edit is the machine that can house a lot of HDD's and the size of those HDD's.  Intel is about to release the same processor for the third time (the Nehalem) And the biggest HDD size is pathetic 4 terabytes. Capitalism right now is not pushing the tech forward at the same pace as it does in camera technology.

 

So we need to have bigger HDD's .. where are you Westerndigital 4tb red/green .. and more importantly 6-8 terbatyte drives have yet to be released. 

 

Motherboard manufacturers have yet to make boards with 20 sata ports. 

And computer case manufacturers could choose to make cases with room for standard ATX board and 40 HDD's .. 

 

Adobe is doing it's part quite well regarding the editing software. 

Intel could release the 8-core socket 2011 cpu if they wanted. They have no competition and no need to do so. 

 

Some of you may like Apple and external expensive HDD's. That's fine if it works for you. I prefer cheap and effective gear. 

 

We need to ask for the products we need. 

 

 

 

[daomay]

I have just bought the Imac 27inch and 1tb was full in less then 2 weeks from shooting with my FS700 - 1080P. With Black Magic 4K camera hitting the market in July. I hope by the end of the year there will be something cheaper to store my data. I do understand where you are coming from. Filming is only a hobby for me so by next year I will have to start to shoot most of my clip in 4K to get the best quality out of my camera. Interesting time indeed.

[Sean Cunningham]

You should be working with an array if you're 4K (or serious 2K or 1080P).  Individual drive sizes aren't really an issue as much as throughput (the real elephant in the room is back up and archival).  Individual drives aren't going to support much more than compressed formats.  This isn't something you're going to effectively build internally and never has been.  Internal arrays of a couple drives aren't really meant for, or ideal, for this.

 

So this begs the question, should you even be going 4K?  Odds are the realistic answer is "no" and so you're creating problems for yourself that already have solutions for those that actually need it, which is almost nobody except big event, commercial, theatrical.  Regardless of what the churn in consumerism tells you you need.

 

 

hint: maybe one in ten, if that, blockbusters you've ever seen has been finished at anything but 2K.  Sony and the rest are lying to you.

[HurtinMinorKey]

I have just bought the Imac 27inch and 1tb was full in less then 2 weeks from shooting with my FS700 - 1080P. With Black Magic 4K camera hitting the market in July. I hope by the end of the year there will be something cheaper to store my data. I do understand where you are coming from. Filming is only a hobby for me so by next year I will have to start to shoot most of my clip in 4K to get the best quality out of my camera. Interesting time indeed.

 

 

iMac means thunderbolt, use it. Use external drives for storage and editing, with the requite RAID configuration (RAID 0 for storage).

 

Here is a 16TB Array that supports multiple RAID configs:

 

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller/home?O=&sku=889613&is=REG&Q=&A=details

 

It's expensive, but if you are editing with RAW, read time will be a bottleneck.

[Escapist]

I admire Blackmagic for what they are doing, but it's not a camera for everyone. I foresee 4K, especially if dealing with uncompressed RAW, as being somewhat of an armchair revolution for the majority of the population. I came from DSLRs and for a while people have been asking for RAW and high bitrates. Now we have them and we aren't even sure what we got ourselves into. Uncompressed RAW workflow is not something to take lightly in respects to both hardware requirements and space requirements. Prores is a middle line that is probably more reasonable for people. Still, it takes more space.

 

If you're starting from nothing, the Blackmagic 4K for $4k suddenly becomes a lot more. The PC or mac you will need to work in Davinci, to transcode the files, etc. The hard drives for working in real time, then the hard drives for storage. This doesn't even account for the SSDs you need to buy for the camera in which you will need backups on hand if you do client work. Then you have all the gear required to rig up.

 

 

So basically, I don't see 4K being cheap. Even with a PC.

[Chrad]

I wonder where a lot of the people clamouring for 4K think their work is going to be seen? 4K TVs barely exist and won't pick up in sales for a long time. Blu-Ray tops out at 1080P. On the internet, the majority are happy with 1080P, and most people don't have 4K resolution monitors. To add to that, a lot of video is viewed on mobile devices. 

Is it because you're sure your stuff is going to be projected theatrically? Almost everything shown in cinemas these days is 2K, and you don't see many complaints about that.

[mtheory]

Get an external drive dock and blu-ray burner and you shouldn't have issues with organization and archiving. Or just get this -

 

http://www.sonnettech.com/product/echo15thunderboltdock.html

[FilmMan]

4K workflow needs storage as everyone is aware.  The 1DC has a compression of roughly 7 to 1 or so?  In Canada, during the "Black Friday" sale in the States, there were Canadian "black sales" too.  I bought 4, 3 TB hard drives (I think I paid around $80 a piece).  Other components were cheaply bought too.  Had my computer made.   Watching prices and buying at the right time could save a lot of money.  Some companies offer to beat competitor pricing by additional percentages too. Cheers.

[Brellivids]

I personally build my machines. My background is firmly rooted in the PC world.

I agree with FilmMan .. Buying at the right time saves alot of money. It was not long ago when we hd the crazy HDD prices due to Thailand floods.

 

I dont see my self buying a 4K camera right away. The 4K resolution is like a lure in the water for me..  4K's main allure is the resolution when you scale down to 180p.  And it does not hurt to have 4K it in one's camera as a feature even tho a 6k or 8K sensor is likely needed for detailed 4K image.  For now I'm purely a hobbyist but I did build my workstation with future in mind .. I chose a motherboard with thunderbolt ports.

 

Doing the math for any kind of serious work scenario where you backup everyrthing on a second set of HDD's .. that's alot of HHD's.. even if the example would be 30% RAW and 70% PROress from a Black Magic cinema camera.

 

Good thing is that I havent yet bought the Software for video editting. So for now I'm honing my skills with 5DMKII. I might go the Magix 2013 route and if video turns out to be my thing I will get CS Production Premium 6.5 or just premiere 6.5. Magix video pro 4 can take proress in but 400 euros for mediocre software is alot.

 

 

 

BTW. any suggestions for the cheapest possible decent software that can handle PRORES and it has to be for Windows enviroment???

[Sean Cunningham]

Oddly enough, though it doesn't seem to write it, Premiere Pro reads ProRes on the Windows platform.

[Sean Cunningham]

Get an external drive dock and blu-ray burner and you shouldn't have issues with organization and archiving. Or just get this -

 

Except that a single-layer BD-ROM can't even backup an average sized SD card much less a single dump from the SSD of one of these new RAW cameras.  Is it worth half a day of doing disc swaps to back up one SSD dump from a multi-SSD shoot?

 

Optical, in any form, hasn't been a viable backup solution for anyone but your mom and dad, or maybe MS Office users,  for a long time.

[chauffeurdevan]

http://support.apple.com/downloads/Apple_ProRes_QuickTime_Decoder_1_0_for_Windows

 

You can read, can't write.......... you could compress in ProRes using ffmpeg 

 

BTW. any suggestions for the cheapest possible decent software that can handle PRORES and it has to be for Windows enviroment???

[Bioskop.Inc]

4K is a marketing ploy (come on, wake up!) & if you're not making films you simply don't need it - even then 2k is the standard.

Shit HD TV broadcasts aren't even 1080!

And the RAW aspect is nice, but it isn't a realistic/cost effective option for a big production - they still have DPs don't they & precisely because they get it right. RAW seems to be great for people who just can't be bothered or can't do it (harsh i know, but it kinda rings true).

 

And why buy a more reliable/expensive external HDD, well if you've never seen a cheap one melt in front of you then just wait until it happens to you! And it will happen. Its distressing & v.funny! 

As far as archival goes, the safest option would be to just keep the original card/s & save the NLE project file (safest, not most cost effective).

[Sean Cunningham]

RAW isn't a replacement for DP talent.  That was a rumor started over at personal-view...

 

RAW is most useful for big productions.   The more talented the DP + Colorist the more RAW's potential becomes material.  You're pretty backwards on how it fits into the picture.  

 

RAW overcomes the limitations of all these codecs, including ProRes.  ProRes 4:4:4 is a viable alternative to RAW (though with its own limitations) but, pretty sure, all the more affordable cameras shoot, 422HQ at best (definitely better than AVCHD, way better, good enough for most low-budget projects where media cost represents a significant portion of the budget, whether that's a hard or relative cost).

 

NBC's Hannibal, an awesome looking Alexa show, is ProRes 4:4:4 because the Alexa requires a more costly solution to shooting RAW, apparently, than the lower end cameras from BMD, RED, etc.  

 

I forget the project where Soderberg shot digital to CF cards and too lazy to look it up, but production just bought caseloads of them and each card, once filled, was ingested and then the card itself was archived, never to be used again.  It became the film's "o-neg" or camera negative.  Considering what HDCAM tapes cost this, as expensive a proposition as it was, was far mor economical.  High quality SD cards are quite a bit more expensive though  so this is an option for only the exceedingly well funded project (one that would beg the question, "why are we shooting on a camera that records to SD?").  It doesn't apply at all to SSD-based cameras, which brings us back on topic.