Editing 4K from a Sony FS7 or equivilent on a Macbook Pro

[Ivan Myles]

What is your storage setup with regard to internal/external, SSD/HDD, and JBOD/RAID?

Even with fast storage your system will likely be strained at 4k, but I will leave it to other posters to provide more definitive comments.

[David Roth weiss]

Unless you upgrade your software to the last release of CC 2015 you will have to transcode your 4K footage from the Sony camera, because XAVCi was only optimized for Premiere in the new release, and all previous releases had huge issues playing back XAVCi without dropping frames.

Beyond that, you will need a beefy RAID – whether you’ll need a 4-drive or 8-drive RAID I can’t tell you now, as I have yet to run the numbers using the new release of Premiere CC.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist & Workflow Consultant
David Weiss Productions
Los Angeles

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[Alex Newton]

Ah, that’s good to know, thanks David.

Do you know if I’d likely experience the same problem with Canon Cinema Range 4K cameras and/or the Blackmagic Design camera?

[Al Bergstein]

Along with the other good advice, here’s something to think about. I have a MBPro with the latest Adobe software, i7, 16 GB RAM and a 2MB graphics card, (mid 2014 MBPro 15″). I haven’t edited Sony’s 4K but this machine struggles to keep up with the 4K from my GH4. So my thought is that you will likely not be thrilled with the performance you get from your machine. I also have a C100 and yes, it works fine for editing 1080p, as yours does. But you should, as mentioned, upgrade your Premiere. I’m running the latest version.

At present, I’m just getting by with the fact that when the footage has to be loaded into the graphics card cache which is likely causing the stuttering of the footage the first time, it is really noticeablly slow. It does seem to flow better once it has been loaded into memory. I also use both esata RAIDs (that go through a box that converts the flow to TB) and native TB. I’m not using SSID drives for my editing work yet. It could help also .

My guess is that to really edit 4k without seeing a lag, all of us are going to have to upgrade to faster processors than the i7s and 4GB faster graphics cards. I see that the Windows world has Xeon processor laptops by Dell and HP, but they are not much cheaper than buying a MacPro when fully configured.

So I think you are at the bare minimum to edit 4k, and probably should upgrade your laptop and Pr or proxy your footage if in a hurry.

Al

[Alex Newton]

Hi Al,

Thanks for your reply.

As you say it sounds like without creating proxies I’m going to struggle to edit 4K sufficiently with my current setup.

Out of curiosity, and this question goes out to Ivan and David too (thanks for both of your replies btw), if I do creative proxies of the 4K footage and then relink the footage once I’ve done the edit, am I going to have problems with XAVCi as I’m using CS6 even though I’m only doing the final export with the 4K footage and not the edit itself?

Thanks,

Alex

[Al Bergstein]

I don’t know the answer but the CS6 software has not been updated with features in quite some time. I would be worried you would.

Al