Offline/Online 4k workflow

Hi all! I'm in the process of figuring out how powerful a system I will need for a dedicated 4k editing station. I was wondering however (in my noobness), is it really necessary to beef up a system to handle 4k natively i.e. "Online" when you'll mainly be working with proxies? Since I'm new to 4k, I was looking for feedback as to what absolutely *must* be done in a native environment in a 4k workflow? What cannot or should not be done via proxies?

- Color Correction?
- Compositing/Green Screen?
- Previewing finished 4k look in real time?
- Image Stabilization?

Any feedback highly appreciated!

Kate, I think you can do everything except the compositing/green screen while using proxies on something like a new iMac 27" with maximum specs. When you want to render your deliverables or master, you will revert to using your original 4K files and that is going to take much longer. For composites, I'd work with it on a 4K timeline and you likely won't see real time on the iMac, but is the lack of real time a deal breaker?

This post might get more responses in one of the other forum sections such as Post Production.

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I found that the new iMacs with maxed out specs handle UHD ProRes in full res, pretty smoothly. I haven't tested any 4K raw files but I can't imagine they'd be too much worse. Maybe a little slower.

Dustin, since it looks like the 'newer' Mac Pro will not be released until late 2016 or likely 2017, I imagine my next computer will be a maxed out iMac 27". I may need to do everything in DaVinci Resolve with proxy files after rendering ProRes from 4.6K raw 4608x1920. Sure would be good if the iMac performed well with that 2.4:1 window since it is not much larger than UHD.


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Ya let's hope. Hopefully the 3:1 compression will help....even tho that's still pretty raw

Compressed raw needs to be uncompressed before you do anything else with it in Resolve, so it makes the processing workload greater. Still I think the savings in storage are worth the extra processing. Would be an interesting test though to see just how much extra time 3:1 and 4:1 visually lossless compression costs. The mathematically lossless raw likely has virtually no impact on processing time as those algorithms can sometimes keep up with simply reading and writing the records from and to storage.


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