The Benefits of Shooting and Editing Photos In 4k

If you have been window-shopping for a camera, you have probably seen “4k video” written all over the products and their labels. 4k stands for a video specification which means “4,000 pixels”. This kind of footage has more detail than anything you have ever seen before. You saw the difference when pre-digital standard definition television moved to HD and Full HD. Compared to standard definition, HD footage is crisp, detailed and it looks very good when viewed on a large TV. The best quality of 1080p HD footage is just 1920x1080 pixels, so you can see that 4k is extremely detailed, because it has twice as many pixels horizontally and even four times as many pixels in total.

4k is the name used to describe different, but in the same time, similar standards. It is likely that you are going to encounter “Ultra High Definition” or UHD, which is the new standard for 4k television. 4k video is set to become the new benchmark for watching and recording videos, and besides that, it has many benefits.

What Does 4k Mean For Video Shooters?

If you are already shooting HD videos, why would you upgrade your camera to a model that is 4k-capable? The main reason is because 4k will future-proof your work. Consumers may not ask for 4k content right away, but in the near future they will, so you need to be prepared. You cannot keep shooting in standard or HD when everyone will want 4k videos within a year or two. No one will want to look at mushy low-resolution content, so if you are a content creator, you need to always stay ahead of the curve with a good but affordable 4k camera. Some of the benefits of adopting to the 4k workflow are:

Better HD Footage — Shooting in 4k will make your HD videos look much better. Many HD cameras give good quality when capturing 1080p videos, but if you use a 4k camera and downscale the quality to 1080p, pictures and videos will look even better.

Crop, Zoom, Pan — 4k videos give you the ability to edit a lot more than compared to HD footage. You can crop up to 4 times on a 4k video and still keep the full HD resolution. All those extra pixels enable you to zoom in, out and pan across an image and still maintain the HD resolution.

Get Still Images from Video — If you are a professional, there must have been times when you shot a video for a client, and then they come back telling you that they need a still image for other purposes. This is where 4k comes in handy, because it has four times more pixels than full HD. From an HD video, you can extract a 2MP still image, and 4k gives you an ability to extract an 8MP image.

Image Stabilization — Those extra pixels come in handy for stabilizing your footage. Editors like Adobe Premiere Pro and Apple Final Cut Pro X since these have stabilization algorithms, but they decrease the resolution by rotating, cropping and scaling your footage to counteract the camera shake. With HD, the video will be less sharp, but with 4k, you have a larger amount of pixels to work with.

You may ask how a video can be useful for still photography. The best way to understand this appeal is to think of it as shooting up to thirty eight megapixel images in one second. This amazing speed can help you capture perfect moments. Rest assured that 4k footage takes up more space than full HD, even up to four times more, so you will need some fast memory cards, with an at least 30MB per second write speed. Like we said in the introduction, HD resolution is great, for most purposes, but shooting and editing in 4k is the future, so prepare yourself on time so that you can always stay ahead in your niche.