• Adobe Premiere Pro

  4K to 1080 Question

  Posted by Greg Flory on January 13, 2017 at 10:05 pm

  Currently using GoPro Hero 4 with motorized hand-held stabilizer for walk-thru video tours of residential homes. Found that recording in 4K-30 yields a better distortion-free clip after using GoPro Studio conversion software.

  I am seeking advise on converting from 4K to 1080 during GoPro Studio export OR when importing clip into Premiere Pro CC. If recommendation is after import into Premiere Pro CC, what are settings to retain as much detail as possible.

  For example, does PP crop or zoom out to achieve 1080?

  Thanks,

  Greg Flory

  Jeff Pulera replied 9 years, 4 months ago 3 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

• 

  Jon Doughtie

  January 14, 2017 at 4:01 am

  Sure does. Make a 1080/29.97 timeline and bring in your footage. You can bring it out full frame easily, or be “zoomed in”. You can also keyframe zooms in and out. Easy as pie.

  System:
  Dell Precision T7600 (x2)
  Win 7 64-bit
  32GB RAM
  Adobe CC 2015.02 (as of 6/2016)
  256GB SSD system drive
  4 internal media drives RAID 5
  Typically cutting short form from HD MP4 and P2 MXF.
• 

  Jeff Pulera

  January 16, 2017 at 5:05 pm

  Hi Greg,

  To add to Jon’s comments – in Premiere, right-click the 4K clip in the 1080p timeline and select Set to Frame Size (not SCALE to frame size). This will make it so you can see the entire 4K clip inside the HD frame, but you can still use Adobe Motion effect to scale and pan in the image as Jon said – maybe you want to zoom in closer to highlight something in the image. Premiere will use the extra pixels available in the 4K source to provide a clean zoom in HD. As long as you don’t zoom (scale) past 100%, no quality loss. In fact, you can go above 100% and still look good, up to you how far to push it.

  Sometimes easier to cut source clip into pieces and apply different scaling to each piece than to struggle with keyframes. Meaning, when you want to go from original “wide” view to a closer blow-up, use the Razor tool to apply a CUT in the clip. Now each “piece” of footage can have different scaling applied without keyframes being needed.

  I shoot stage events on a wide angle using 4K, then edit as 720p and can cut or dissolve from a wide shot to a medium or close-up and it looks like multiple cameras were used. The quality is excellent since no pixels are being blow-up/duplicated using the higher-resolution source video.

  When done editing the 1080p Sequence, export as 1080p.

  Thanks

  Jeff Pulera
  Safe Harbor Computers

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