Why 4K?

4K video means that the maximum width of the videos are around 4,000 pixels wide (a good width, even to blow up stills and print them).

Why shoot 4K? Well let us consider all these uber mega screens we see at Costco. As time goes on, screens will keep getting bigger, people will spend more and more time at home streaming YouTube and other random things, big screen TV’s will continue to get cheaper, which means:

More and more people will expect and demand 4K video substance!

The biggest issue right now

The biggest issue in America right now is this:

Download and streaming speeds are very good and fast, but upload speeds are horrible and horrendously slow.

For my home connection, I got a new Verizon FIOS GigaBit speed internet (80 bucks a month) which seems to be fast enough for 4K videos I shoot. For example a 4K 60FPS video I shoot on my Lumix G9 (10 minutes) is roughly 10 Gigabytes. On my connection it takes me about 5 minutes to upload, but any ‘middle tier’ option might take you up to 3 hours!!! Which means:

4K video cameras *WITHOUT* an uber fast internet wifi speed connection at home are useless.

In fact I believe that we future digital and internet entrepreneurs; high speed wifi is one of the best investments you can make in yourself and business in order to gain a great competitive advantage, or at least advantage yourself.

Extracting stills from 4K videos

I do this the ghetto way: I play my videos full screen on my laptop, and then do the MacOS screenshot shortcut (command + shift + 3) to do a full screenshot. Also I hacked it to have my screenshots automatically turn into JPEG images (much smaller) than the standard default PNG files (too big). Instructions here.

Open up terminal and then type:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type jpg

What my desktop looks like:

Big screens vs small screens

720P export of the same video on YouTube far above

Truth be told in todays world with smartphones and such, 720p is fine in terms of resolution. What you can do in Mac is open up your video in QuickTime, and export your 4K video file into 720p as well.

Comparing the video file sizes:

6.48GB for a 17 minute (exported) 4K file.
1.44GB for the same, but in 720p.

In praise of iMovie

Just drag and drop all the video files to iMovie, and export them as a 4K file– this works soooo tremendously well! No need for Final Cut Pro in this end.

At the moment it seems that YouTube has a monopoly on video; best upload your 4K videos there.

Videopress.com via the wordpress.com ‘jetpack’ plugin offers unlimited 720p video uploads so this has been my strategy: