4K* video content has been around for a while now and more and more content is being released in 4K. It’s even being used as a bargaining chip in the streaming wars with Disney+ holding exclusive rights to show Star Wars, Marvel and other Disney properties in 4K and Netflix charging a premium for users to access 4K versions of selected shows/films on their service**. 4K video looks incredible and since a recent TV upgrade I keep find myself thinking, “how can I create my own 4K content?”.
The obvious answer is to film new content in 4K using my smartphone. I’m rocking an iPhone XR which can film in 4K at 24, 30 and even 60fps which is nice… but I had another idea… Over the last few years I’ve used my Sony a5000 to capture timelapses in a duel format, 1080p video and 5,456 x 3,632 size stills. These stills have a greater pixel number than 4K video so I thought I could use the still’s versions to create a 4K clip.
To output from iMovie in 4K you need the project to include 4K video footage, just inserting photos with greater than 4K resolution doesn’t activate the option. This was frustrating because until I came across a post online stating this I thought it may be a software or hardware limitation on my computer, however it’s just a quirk of iMovie!
Once the photos were in I set them all to the same duration and cropping. I then deleted the 4K clip which was used to provide the 4K resolution option in the export and voila I had a 4K timelapse. The frame rate was too slow because the minimum duration video clip was 0.1 seconds (10fps) so I reimported, increased the speed to create frame lengths of 0.04 seconds long (25 fps). The final result can be seen below, and because it’s a youtube clip you can see it in a variety of qualities. For the intended quality view on a 4K screen with access to YouTube in 4K***.
*In the post I am using 4K to refer to 3,840 x 2,160 size images, which is displayed by UHD TV’s
**List of Disney+ 4K content can be found here: https://www.finder.com/list-disney-plus-4k-uhd-movies
***That means using Google Chrome and not Safari on Mac’s and for YouTube on TV’s or set-top boxes check the requirements for full 4K video viewing