working with 4k footage? (on a machine that doesnt handle 4k)

[djmattyz]

i have been asked to do some VFX work on a film

thing is they are working on 4k footage,  and my computer would probably burst into flames if it saw 4k footage

its just about ok with HD 

the editor mentioned the possibility of workin on HD and him relinking the 4k footage on his end when i send it back to him

any of you guys know the feasability of this?

most of the work i will be doing will involve masking out puppet strings, and im concerned that there would be unpredictable results if we were to relink 4k footage after editing the project using HD footage...the masks could go haywire etc.

any suggestions on how i might deal with this?

[Mylenium]

Impossible to say. You have not provided exact system specs or info about what footage types are involved.

Mylenium

[djmattyz]

the footage is  shot on a panasonic GH4  at 4k raw  (ill enquire to find more specific details)

my computer is a toshiba sattelite i7 2670-qm  2.20ghz   8GB ram

64 bit operating system

windows 10

adobe suite 2017

[Mylenium]

Convert the Raw footage to an intermediate format liek a TIFF sequence. Even at full res this is much easier to process than the actual Raw footage. As far as I can see, that is pretty much the only bottleneck here. Working with only 8GB of RAM won't be a walk in the park, but it's perfectly doable once you eliminate the memory- and processor-intense part of decoding Raw for every frame.

Mylenium

[A.I.1]

Why not just do a quick test with some test 4K footage to see how well/fast (or not) it handles it. I think if it's only I-frame type encoding (rather than having I, P and B frames) even slower processors should be quite fast I think at getting each frame from the footage (I'm sure having enough RAM will help too). edit: this was written before seeing the above post.

edit:

So what I think is, if it takes too long (processor-wise) to access each frame if the footage is at 4K, get it rendered, if possible in an I-frame only type way/codec before working on it in AE. I'm guessing that should speed it up once you have that converted file. Rendering might still take some time in 4K (but maybe you can send it back for rendering).

[Horshack · Accepted solution]

https://helpx.adobe.com/premiere-pro/how-to/proxy-media.html

https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/using/footage-items.html#placeholders_and_proxies