DSLR Expert Breaks Down Using 4K Video into 1080p
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- July 2, 2014
By James DeRuvo (doddleNEWS)
If you’re still in the learning stages of shooting video with DSLRs, I heartily recommend Dave Dugdale’s Learning DSLR Video over on YouTube. He’s completely dedicated to the category and is constantly testing out DSLR shooting techniques. And when he got a chance to test the Panasonic GH4, he immediately thought about how it could impact his workflow? What he discovered is that it may be one of the best HD DSLRs on the market.
I like to test things myself, and I don’t own a 4K monitor. I can’t see 4K. So I’ve been publishing everything still in 1080p. And there’s definitely advantages of doing that. – Dave Dugdale
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Working with the Pansonic GH4, Dave first downscaled the 4K video to 1080. He did this by going into the sequence settings for his clip and changing the resolution to 1920 x 1080 in Adobe Premiere Pro then downscaled the footage for him and the result was that there was little in the loss of detail.
“All you have to do is change the sequence settings,” Dugdale says in his video, “and zooming in to 100% you can really see the difference in detail.” The detail is more noticeable in 4K natively, but only when you zoom into it. The GH4 isn’t a game changer, it’s a BRAND changer. A lot of people are going into the GH4 and leaving Canon behind.”
Then, Dugdale decided to remain with the 4K workflow and then just publish to 1080p. What would happen then? Dugdale found he couldn’t tell a difference at all. There was no image quality loss or even dropped frames. Now Dave has the advantage that his PC is stacked with 32GB of RAM, so you have to have a beefy machine.
But the advantage is really there to shoot in 4K and then publish in 1080p. The only problem he found, is that if you do color correction in Adobe Speedgrade with some vignetting, there was a few dropped frames. But straight color correction, and back to Premiere Pro, you get a tremendous amount of performance. “I would definitely take 4K and put it into a 1080 timeline,” Dave concludes, “but you definitely need a beefy machine…?What do I think? I think in terms of image detail, the Pansonic GH4 is over the top compared to the Canon 5D Mk. III. It blows the doors off it.”
So, for the next few years, until 4K TVs have saturated the market, shooting in 4K and publishing to 1080p is a sound strategy for getting all you can out of your video performance. And since you have the 4K source files, you are future proofed when it does.
How much of an impact is it having on Dave’s DSLR work? Well, he’s selling all his Canon gear, and he’s going all 4K, through not only the Pansonic GH4, but also a Sony A7s. And he’s not looking back. You can check out his complete review of the GH4 below.
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