I am mainly a DP who does a little editing so I don't know the answer to this:

If the rest of the video was shot in AVCHD at 1080/30 on a Canon C100, should I shoot the Osmo in 4K 30 or in 1080 also? Would I have to degrade the Osmo's 4K resolution in post to match the 1080? The Osmo is presently set at -2 for sharpness.

Thanks,

Ned
Chicago Videographer
www.nedmiller.com

The final video you would create would likely need to be 1080 or 4k.  But video that is downscaled from 2k or 4k to 1080 looks better than video originally shot in 1080, so I'd say just downscale it.

For me though, I usually prefer shooting in 1080 60fps so that you have more options to slow down the video if you need to, but that's just because I'm shooting real estate with no people in it.

Hello mi just picked up my new osmo!!!  I shot a quick video in 4K/30fps and another in 1080p/60fps. My iMac was very jittery with the 4K footage. It doesn't seem to have issues with my phantom in 2.7k. Should I just stick to the 1080?

Madmaxxed Posted at 2016-5-17 00:18
Hello mi just picked up my new osmo!!!  I shot a quick video in 4K/30fps and another in 1080p/60fps. ...

"...My iMac was very jittery with the 4K footage..."

That's just your iMac. If you have an older and slower iMac, the video may well not be able to run smoothly in 4K. Which resolution you use depends on what resolution you need. Using 4K, though,  gives you much more freedom in post-processing e.g. in editing.

I'm just afraid of filming in 4K and have wasted footage. What editing tools are you using?  

So the consensus is, shoot in 4K and make it match in post? Would that be de-sharpening in FCPX or what would make 4K match 1080 in post?

Thanks for your advice.

Ned

Chicago DP Posted at 2016-5-17 20:54
So the consensus is, shoot in 4K and make it match in post? Would that be de-sharpening in FCPX or w ...

"should I shoot the Osmo in 4K 30 or in 1080 ?"

The short answer is: it doesn't matter.

The long aswer is, shooting in 4K gives you the option to crop the image if needed without losing resolution (when the intended output is 1080). TV location shoots do this all the time to get close up of person's face in interviews without anyone knowing it's a crop of the medium shot.

Editing in 4K is very demanding on your computer, unless your editing software supports proxy editing - where you edit with smaller versions of your 4K clips. When finished editing, the edits are applied to the 4K clips for final output. Not all editing software supports this.

The other way is to shoot in 4K, and then immediately resize the footage to 1080 before editing. This way, you will get slightly better image quality. Again, you need to know how to do this properly to get best results. Make sure to apply sharpening as the last step after editing.

I think maybe just shoot in 1080, and enjoy the extra room on your SD card! If you think you'll need to crop the image, then shoot in 4K.

Madmaxxed Posted at 2016-5-17 02:13
I'm just afraid of filming in 4K and have wasted footage. What editing tools are you using?

I use FCP X.

I moved over to 4K with the introduction of the Sony AX100 some 2 years ago, and would never consider using anything with a smaller image size.

On an older iMac, or one with less than optimum configuration, I would consider using proxies for editing, and switching to the originals when generating the output.  It depends on your configuration.

On a modern iMac with 32GB memory, 1TB flash storage (system drive) and a reasonably fast external drive I find that I can edit 4K without the need for proxies.

Although I edit on a 4K time-line, I output to a smaller size. In 4K you can afford to lose a lot of pixels and still look good.

If you're worried about using 4K I would suggest shooting in 4K and using a utility to convert your clips to ProRes (or similar low-compression format) and 1080p and using those.

That gives you 1080p for your immediate use, and 4K images for the future.

Sp Len, you wrote:

If you're worried about using 4K I would suggest shooting in 4K and using a utility to convert your clips to ProRes (or similar low-compression format) and 1080p and using those.

You mean something like Clip Wrap? Will that give me a better image than if I shot in 1080 originally?

Thank you,

Ned

Chicago DP Posted at 2016-5-18 01:12
Sp Len, you wrote:

If you're worried about using 4K I would suggest shooting in 4K and using a util ...

I've never compared a clip shot in 1080p with a similar clip shot in 4K and then transcoded, so I really couldn't say.

Before I considered transcoding footage into a smaller format, I would be inclined to see how 4K performs on your machine, and then with 4K proxies if necessary.

If I had to use a smaller format for editing, I'd probably use Compressor to do the conversion.

A lot depends on your machine configuration.

rpknowles Posted at 2016-5-16 11:38
The final video you would create would likely need to be 1080 or 4k.  But video that is downscaled from 2k or 4k to 1080 looks better than video originally shot in 1080, so I'd say just downscale it.

For me though, I usually prefer shooting in 1080 60fps so that you have more options to slow down the video if you need to, but that's just because I'm shooting real estate with no people in it.

That was exactly my thought rpknowles! I just made a deal shooting realestate with a drone outdoors, while using an OSMO+ indoor - and  was wondering if 1080p wouldn't be enough at this point in time. Thanks for confirming that's durable.

I've been shooting "oversize" for many years.  In the early days of HD I would shoot in 1080 and finish in 720 for exactly this reason. I love the flexibility it gives in post.  As mentioned above, shooting in 4k and editing in 1080 allows you to resize and reframe the image if desired.  You can blow up a shot to 150%+/- and still retain a clean image.

If you're using Final Cut Pro X and you select 'optimize' on import, your footage will automatically be transcoded into ProRes 422 which helps playback performance immensely. It's a fast clean looking codec. I've cut multicam shows with 5 streams of 4k playing back simultaneously on my iMac with no problem (but you do need a raid setup).  

I'm going to geek-out on you here for a minute ....

Trying to edit in AVCHD or other flavor of h.264 without transcoding is going to tax even the fastest machine.  Huge number crunching by the processor has to happen to do the decode part of that CODEC on playback.  It's great for acquisition and final distribution because file sizes are small, but terrible for editing for this reason.

If you're talking about using footage from the same camera, in my experience it makes no qualitative difference if you shoot in 1080 vs shooting 4k and then downscaling.  But with some cameras their 4K looks dreadful while the 1080 is passable coming off the same chip. Which undoubted is affected by recording bitrate.  With the X3 camera on the Osmo .... 4k = roughly 8megapixels per frame spread across 60Mbs.  1080 = 2megapixels crunched into 45Mbs.  I'm no mathematician but it looks to me like you're going to "better" resolution recorded by shooting 1080.  The X5 has similar bitrate to the X3.  X5R goes 1.6G in 4k. 500M in 1080p.

I've mostly been shooting 1080p on my X3 to get a longer clip run time (8min max vs 14min max).

This whole debate also depends on what your end use is. If you're going to the web in the end, then it truly doesn't matter.  Any marginal qualitative difference will be crushed out of the footage by web encoding.  If you're shooting for broadcast, I'd question if the Osmo X3 was the right tool for the job. X5R (or X5) might be a more appropriate choice.

As far as matching an Osmo X3 to a C100 that's a tough one.  Osmo falls apart pretty quickly in color grading. You might get away with it depending on the scene.  It's asking a lot of any 1/2.3" chip camera to go up side-by-side against a Super35 sensor.  Again if you're using the X5 or X5R with the 4/3" chip they would theoretically fare much better.  I've not used either so can't speak to their look.

An eye-test is always the best test in the end IMHO.