Presenting the Olympic Flame in 4K 60fps … from 2012

Every four years the Sydney Olympic Cauldron lights up again in a lovely sympathetic gesture to its newest sibling somewhere else in the world.  I had just bought a 4K camera and the day I chose to go down to the Olympic Park, everything went right in terms of photographic composition.

Then I spent the next 4 years editing it, on and off — here's why:

Yes that's right, 6 terabytes of work space for 2 hours of footage

This was the effect of running a spot of motion compensation on some clips.  The camera I got in 2012 — without spending more than one fortune — was only able to record 1080p60 onto four separate SD cards that each took a quarter of the image.  The HDMI standards didn't exist yet so it also has four mini-HDMI outputs for the same purpose.

The other labour-of-love pain was that the nature of 4K was so "good" that anything bad was magnified so much.  No imperfections could pass, and they were more visible than ever.  To give you an idea, even with a tripod, not only could I clearly detect every single time I pressed a button, but the wobble would resonate for another 10 seconds until it finally, relentingly, dissipated.

This made for a lot of tedious frame-by-frame sifting and culling.  Never has so much "good enough" footage been left on the cutting room floor.  Two hours of filming came down to 39 minutes of "good enough for 4K".  I'll post that next on Vimeo next week.

Speaking of Vimeo — it is back as my favourite.  Unlike YouTube, since December they've been able to display not only 4K at 60fps, but also make the performance hit the full frame rate on a mid-level machine in a browser!  So, please enjoy …

[4K60] Sydney Olympic Flame on Vimeo.

A tribute to the flame: Every 4 years the Sydney cauldron is re-lit during games time in another country.

3840x2160 60fps

JVC HMQ-10 and Final Cut Pro X