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HD and 4K (AMA linking) in MC 7
Hi, all.
I am on MC 7.0.2., on a MacBook Pro running OS 10.8.5.
Recently I began working with footage that was shot in 4K. But as you may know, MC 7 does not allow that high a resolution. I can AMA link to the 4K clips, but the clips show up in 1080 (for all practical purposes), in my 1080 projects. (If I try to zoom in on the 4K shots, they blur out at the same rate as the very same clips transcoded to 1080.)
Currently, my producer is only concerned with delivering the final products on Blu Ray, but eventually we will have to deliver at a higher resolution than 1080. So my question is this: If I edit now in projects that are 1080, then upgrade to MC8 (which allows 4K editing), create new 4K projects, and then open the previous 1080 timelines, will they automatically show up as 4K sequences?
Many thanks!
Tom
2013 15″ MacBook Pro, 2.5 GHz, Intel Core i7, 16GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M 1024 MB, OS X 10.8.5
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3 Replies
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You won’t need to create a new project, just switch your project settings to a 4K or UHD setting.
Note that, unlike HD, many higher resolutions have a different aspect ratio than 16:9, so you may need to make FrameFlex adjustments, if the framing is no longer to your liking. -
Keep in mind your resizing problem is happening because (even though your source is 4K) you are zooming in a clip that has a raster setting the same as your timeline.- because you’ve imported, or transcoded the media to that setting. (1080) If you link to this clip, you may have more success with a pan and zoom type operation, but when you jump to 4k timeline, you are back in the same situation. You are taking a 4k clip, in a 4k timeline, and zooming in on it. You will once again, start losing resolution, because all Avid can do is enlarge the shot. You are no longer working with parts of the frame that are outside the raster size.
A lot of people think that just because its a 4k clip, they can zoom in on it all they want. That works to a certain degree if working in 1080, but not in 4k.
In my experience, what really happens when reframing a 4k clip while in a HD timeline, is you actually start to see that the focus was a bit soft…and the result is not as clean as you might expect it to be.
Glenn
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As mentioned in previous posts – you do not get any of the oversampling if your editing 4K footage in a 4K project. The only time that may come into play is if your source footage is greater than the project/timeline size, and event then it may depend on overall percentage of source to target ratio as you can read about here:
https://endcrawl.com/blog/2048×1152-is-a-total-crock/
Combine this with the fact that Media Composer’s resize algorithms are decent, but not great and are not optimized for scaling versus scaling down, your “quality” mileage may vary.
I reference this quality issue on a blog I wrote about stabilization, 4K, and FrameFlex:
https://24p.com/wordpress/?p=253
Michael
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