 Let me start by saying this video was a metric ass ton of work. I mean not for me mind you, Ed did all the heavy lifting. So make sure that you show him some love by liking the video or following him on Twitter or something because his findings are absolutely fascinating if you consume or create video content on the web. Welcome to 4K, better video quality or a big fat placebo. Intel's bringing DDR4 to the mainstream with their all-new Core i7 6700K and Core i5 6600K processors. Check out the link in the video description to learn more. So Ed's investigation into 4K video quality was actually inspired by a Panasonic camera known as the GH4. At a mere $2,000, trust me that was amazing when it came out, the GH4 could shoot 4K to an internal SD card at a bitrate of 100 megabit per second. And you can learn more about bitrate and why it's important here. Which for the first time put 4K video production, like pro-grade production, in the hands of regular consumers who happen to be in the market for what is also a fairly capable mirrorless stills camera. Ballin', right? We sure thought so. We picked one up pretty much right away and the vast majority of our b-roll has been shot on the GH4 for months. With us going as far at one point as to shoot 4K on our A-cam, a Sony FS700, 4K on our B-cam, the GH4, and edit on a 4K timeline with a native export of 4K video that we upload. But this proved to be very challenging at the time. The FS700's high bitrate 4K footage was a total bear to work with. The file sizes were huge, putting significant strain on our networking infrastructure when multiple editors were working at the same time, and we experienced other workflow interruptions ranging from poor editing timeline, scrubbing responsiveness, to annoying file splitting during long clip recording, to even export errors when rendering out the final videos. So we went back to 1080p, downscaled from 4K using our external recorder on the A-cam, since the FS700 sensor performed so well at resolving fine details, regardless of the output file resolution anyway, and continued shooting b-roll at 4K natively on the GH4, since while that does slow down the editing timeline, it's not in a manner that completely cripples the productivity of our editors, like the 4K native FS footage did. So what you've been seeing out of us since then, this is really important, is a 4K timeline with down sampled 4K footage off the FS700 that is then re-upsampled back to 4K, and native 4K footage from the GH4 that is then exported at 4K when we create the file to upload to YouTube or Vessel. Fast forward almost a year, and we were moving into a new office and rolling out three new servers, a rendering server powered by two Intel Xeon E5 2699v3 18 core processors, a high-speed SSD based 20 gigabit network storage server, and a 100 terabyte plus archival storage server. These potentially addressed almost all of the previous issues, network performance, file size, and rendering horsepower. Not to mention that Adobe hasn't been sitting on ass for the last year, and Premiere has improved a fair bit as well in terms of how it handles high bitrate and 4K files. So it was time to evaluate whether it was worth it to go native 4K again as part of an investigation into how we could use our 36 core video crunching server to improve our workflow. So we started by taking a closer look at some of the 4K footage that we'd shot recently on the GH4, comparing the visual quality of the native 4K footage, and then that very same footage down sampled to 1080p with a variety of codecs, trying to figure out how to get timeline performance perfect. And the results shocked us. When viewed on a 4K monitor, they were indistinguishable from each other, and in fact, even when compared using overlaid still captured in Photoshop, and by setting the blending mode to difference, they were nearly identical. So then was there any point recording in 4K at all? We needed to dig deeper. So we specifically recorded identical clips at 4K and 1080p natively on the GH4 camera and compared those against each other, this time with the 1080p footage up sampled to 4K. Same result. Down sampling 4K to 1080p, up sampling 1080p to 4K, they just all look the same. So we broke out the big guns and used our proper professional grade camera, our Sony FS700 to do the same comparison. Now we can see the difference watching the files over our own local network between the upsampled and the native 4K footage, with the text on our figurine appearing to be more in focus when watching back the native 4K file, even though the camera and subject were not moved in between shots. But what does this difference translate to in terms of a real-world benefit? We all know that YouTube has had a 4K option for quite some time, but should content creators even be worried about shooting and editing in 4K? Should they export in 4K for their upload? Should you the viewer select 4K when watching? We have all those answers, but buckle in because if the rest of this video sounded pretty technical, this is probably going to be a little worse. I'll start with the answer for the content creators, since this affects the content consumers as well. Regardless of your camera, working on a 1080p timeline with 1080p footage will not result in a degraded experience for your viewers. Thanks to the video processing done by YouTube, the benefit of your fancy camera is basically limited to better performance on a green screen and better color grading and punch-in options in post-production. Something that is arguably much more important to the appearance of the footage than sheer resolution anyway, so I'm not poo-pooing fancy cameras. But we also discovered that up sampling to 4K for your final export is worth the extra file size and the extra rendering time, because when YouTube detects a resolution of 4K on their side, they will offer a 4K viewing option to the viewer that features a higher playback bitrate and therefore sharper image quality on both 1080p and on 4K displays. Which leads us finally to the answer for consumers. Conventional wisdom would dictate that watching content at the native resolution of your display is ideal. This is something that most of our viewers seem to be aware of based on these poll results, but if you have the internet connection and bandwidth cap limits to handle it, this is not the case for online video or at least on YouTube. Watching at 4K on a 4K or 1080p monitor yields a noticeable visual quality improvement, regardless of whether the video was natively shot at 4K or up-sampled thanks to YouTube delivering the video to you at a higher bitrate. Which leaves us finally with a last message for the content creators out there. If there's anything to take away from this video, it's don't get too focused on 4K or resolution in general. In the same way that a 4K recording phone is not a professional video recording device, entry-level 4K cameras are not equal to their 4K pro-grade brethren. But don't worry, most pros are just using their 4K gear to have more flexibility during the creation of their 1080p final product anyway. So if you're producing web video, you may actually be better served by a superior 1080p camera at this time because lenses, encoding settings, codecs, camera sensor size, and sensor quality all impact the finished product. And on that subject, stay tuned for the results of our investigation into editing codecs. It's gonna be at least as interesting as this one, especially for you video editors out there. Thanks for watching guys. If you disliked this video, you know what to do. But if you liked it, please click that like button. Maybe support us by buying a cool t-shirt like this one, changing your Amazon bookmark to one with our affiliate code. We have the instructions for how to do that in the little i in the corner or even by supporting us directly through our community forum. Now that you're done doing all that, you guys are looking for some more videos to check out. Boom! You should check out our recent video on the Acer 34 inch curved gaming monitor that I absolutely freaking love. We just did that one and it's not 4k, but whoo, is it ever sexy? See you guys next time.