This tour of the UK studio is our first published 4K video thanks to the loan of a PXW-Z100 from Sony UK.
This was shot to test the 4K workflow from camera to YouTube. We did not light the gallery so some of the video is a little on the dark side!
Note: We do not have a 4K monitor so we were using our existing HD editing setup!
Workflow:
- Video shot on PXW-Z100 onto a 32GB XQD memory card. First lesson – 32GB will only record about 14 minutes at 4K resolution!
- Transferred to Mac Pro (old style 12 core) via USB 2 cable. Second lesson – this takes time as Mac Pro only has USB 2! Get a USB 3 card and a Sony XQD card reader to speed this up.
- Install the Sony XDCam driver for OSX. You need this to be able to recognise the files and import into Final Cut Pro X.
- Import the clips into FCPX and create Proxy files.
- Edit the video. No performance hit noticed over standard HD editing.
- Third lesson – if you have existing graphics for HD video (Lower Thirds etc) you need to create 4K versions!
- Export the video using ProRes LT. This took longer than normal for a 16 minute video due to the file size – 40GB!
- Transcode the video to a smaller file size for YouTube Upload. Our program of choice is Telestream Episode but this does not (yet) have 4K support so we used Sorenson Squeeze with a 20Mbps bit rate.
- Upload to YouTube
- Wait for YouTube to Transcode – around 2.5 hours.
Done!
Overall this was much simpler than expected and I was surprised to be able to do this so easily with our current editing system.
Thanks to Sony for the loan of the PXW-Z100, this is an amazing camera!
