Over the past week I’ve been working on 4k footage and completely revamping my workflow. There is no way my laptop can handle 4k straight up so I’ve been educating myself on using proxy footage, different methods of compression and how exactly the ram preview quality controls work (AE). So naturally, Youtube, started supporting 4k footage the week I start messing around with it. Although not incredibly visually impressive this footage helped me do two proofs of concept. First how to properly do a time lapse and second find the best way to upload 4k footage to Youtube.

First, the time lapse: I used my D90 and a remote timer to shoot 1 second exposures every 5 seconds in my room to create the blurred effect while moving around. In future time lapses I think that (depending on how long they are) will shorten the length between photos and allow for longer exposure times creating smoother video. I also realized that the frame is kind of boring just sitting there and would benefit greatly from some constant movement…the trick is to figure out some device that will move slowly at a constant rate and not break the bank (my bank is currently made of GLASS).

Dealing with 4K footage on only 2 processors and 4gigs of RAM. In the video that I uploaded (as fast as possible – 5hours after I found out) there are no cuts, color correction or motion stabilization simply because I wanted to get the footage up. Little was done from the original shot to the shot on youtube. If I had done more editing or corrections, I would have made sure the raw footage (jpg sequence) was on my local drive, made proxy footage about 1/6 res – (about 1080p quality (yeah wow right?)) and then since there is no rotoscoping done dropped in the original footage for the render.

I was really excited to see that my normal methods of video compression (for the web) worked for 4k video. I rendered the footage at full resolution with max quality using the h.264 F4v codec in After effects creating a ~2gig file. When I previewed the footage on my computer both Adobe media player and VLC had trouble displaying the footage properly – this was not an issue because my target distribution method (youtube) displayed it correctly.

Currently the youtube Embed player does not support 4K video so pleaes watch it on it’s youtube page in original quality:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EBfE3tUQCQ.

As of right now the video is up at 4k but youtube is only allowing it to be viewed at 1080p….I will have a 4k video clip uploaded later.

As always, If you have any questions or want a formal tutorial on how to create and upload 4k video to youtube leave a note in the comments and I will do my best to reply or even write a tutorial.