My Head is Going to Explode

[Simon Ubsdell]

Please don’t shoot 4K.

You are entering a world of needless pain.

4K looks no better than 1080 in any normal viewing environment.

It is far more heavily compressed (which is mostly very bad news indeed).

And it eats disk space and system resources for no discernible return.

(Sorry, I had to get that off my chest, but if you follow my advice, you won’t regret it for one moment.)

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki

[Joseph Owens]

[Presley Hunter] ” if I have enough hard drive space.”

Going to echo Simon here: You are wasting your time and effort with “4K” as it is compressed in the world of GoPro, especially using a dime-sized lens (unless you are also selling your footage to Ang Lee or JJ Abrams or someone else) because no, for sure you don’t or won’t ever have enough drive space, CPU speed, GPU processing, or sanity left at the end of “When is my highlight reel going to be ready?”

You might also have a better chance of things being in focus. The only advantage the larger resolution format might have is if you are contemplating doing a major amount of image stabilization. So if you think your head hurts now…

And also do recall that Michael Schumacher was wearing a GoPro scabbed onto his helmet when he had his skiing accident. That has not turned out well.

jPo, CSI

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.

[Simon Ubsdell]

[Joseph Owens] “You might also have a better chance of things being in focus.”

Don’t get me started on focus issues.

I very rarely see 4K footage that is anything other than horribly soft.*

Which when you think about it entirely defeats the object of going for all those extra pixels in the first place.

* With the exception of very, very expensively shot material.

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki

[Presley Hunter]

Okay so if I am recording in 1080p will my hard drive configuration be okay or should I change something? Its just very confusing with all this editing mumbo jumbo being thrown around. Besides I need to really learn to edit just in case one of my kids curses out a ref and I need to edit that out of the video. Just kidding my kids are good.

[Joseph Owens]

[Presley Hunter] “Okay so if I am recording in 1080p will my hard drive configuration be okay”

This should really be one of your last concerns (storage capacity); these days anything under a terabyte (at least as I consider it) is a “delivery” drive. I regularly ship out 250 GB SSD drives with a single set of deliverables to broadcasters, who generally want a mezzanine master (the finished all-tracks texted final version) with textless elements, sound stems, captions, cue sheets, QA forms…. etc., etc.. For your purposes, I expect your catalog of source material is going to balloon.

Even with a compact codec – and you will likely be dealing with some kind of H.264 file type, can’t imagine you going with a broadcast format like DnXHD, and you won’t be discarding the material as you go, it will persist over the season for I don’t know how many games. Currently, storage is going for about $50 / TB for external expansion drives. Ten years ago, that was $1K / TB. I will go through 12 TB like water. A three-part series currently in production is now at around 80 TB of raw media (4K source).

The issue you will start having is with sustained data transfer rates between your editing software and the storage. Make sure your attached storage is fast — Thunderbolt seems like the interface du jour that will keep up with your demands for more, more, more. Now, now, now. Also be aware (assuming this is a Windows platform) that attached storage is vulnerable to subtle “mounting” issues as the directory system typically ignores named conventions and goes with the old c:/ d:/ e:/ etc. hierarchy so if you restart the system or remount drives, you may get mysteriously missing media because a drive may be misidentified just because it was re-labelled by the operating system as it mounted out of order. When you build an editing system, it is not at all like building a game platform, you are building a single machine with myriad moving parts.

When you start exporting finished products, keep them segregated from the rest of the media, back the masters up 2 or 3 times. Be prepared to revise and update them regularly. What format and how are you distributing the final masters to your viewers?

What editing software are you launching out with?

jPo, CSI

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.

[Presley Hunter]

I am exporting as 1080p MP4 and using Davinci Resolve for the editing. My main concern was disk configuration and because the season is 10 games plus tournaments I wanted to make sure I had enough speed and space. At the end of the year, hopefully all the kids will have some good footage and I will send the mp4 to the parents.

[Simon Ubsdell]

I would strongly advise against using this as your production codec. Resolve doesn’t like it at all.

Far better to use some flavour of DNx or ProRes if you can.

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki

[Presley Hunter]

Ok will do. DNx or ProRes. I kow Resolve has a few different DNx options should I choose any of them or is there one specific for 1080p?

[Simon Ubsdell]

It depends on a number of factors including your frame rate, which I don’t think you’ve told us.

Best thing is to do some tests for yourself with the various 1080p options and see what the best trade-off is between compression and quality.

My guess is with the amount of material you are shooting you will want to go for the most compression that is consistent with keeping the quality you are happy with but it’s your call.

This list is helpful to give you an overview of how DNx works.

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki

[Marc Wielage]

It’s sobering to reflect that 90% of all questions here boil down to:

1) how can I get inexpensive hardware to provide better performance? [and the answer is often, “get a much more powerful computer”]

2) how can I get highly-compressed source files to play back in real time? [and that answer is often, “transcode the material to a less-compressed format]

3) how do I use such-and-such a feature [RTFM]?