Here's a magazine article for you (You'll have to register with the website to read the damn thing!) on the subject of 4K for corporate -
http://www.avinteractive.com/features/4k-begins-dawn-business-market-02-03-2015/
It's a bit of a 'puff-piece' but outlines the problems.
If you are using a Power-Mac, you'll just have to edit and do all the other post tasks in SD and then render in 4K overnight! I can't see an iMac wrangling 4K. The one thing I have found out, is that you need industrial processing power to render 4K - despite all the claims made by manufactures who have just thrown in a 4K video card!
It all depends on which programme you want to edit in. Vegas is PC only, FCP is Mac only of course. There are some killer plugs for Vegas for things like film-look and real (i.e. morphed) slo-mo - which is important for corporate, when it comes to showing manufacturing processes. It might be worth while holding back for a while, before spending money, as developments in 4K and processing power is happening at breakneck speed. I shall be attending the IBC in Autumn before I come to any meaningful conclusions.
Domestic take-up of 4K is being (deliberately?) held up by the broadcasters, as they have invested heavily in HD, so having to rip out all those cables, servers, switchers, light-pipes and screens and buy several hundreds or even thousands of cameras is their horror scenario! Much of the BBC regional production capacity is still in SD! Just think of the satellite fees for a multi-screen sports event in 4K!
But for corporate, I think it makes brilliant sense! I was talking to a Texan builder of starter homes and they have their own in-house 5-man production team for making videos for fairs and websites, YouTube, etc. and they will be re-equipping with 4K this year and they just went HD two years ago!
The folks at Scan sent me the following message, following an enquiry by me -
One of our sidelines is digital signage and one of our team in house designs and manages digital content creation and we have a customer currently that requires 4k content ranging from 30 seconds to 5 mins long. Up until this contract started, our guy was still working with an old i7 960 setup (first gen i7) and as soon as it came to working with 4k, whilst he was fine doing draft editing, as soon as it came to rendering out, you were looking at it being a few hours for even 30 seconds worth of work.
Setting up a scratch drive, raid 0 SSD with a pair samsungs Knocked about 15% of that off. We threw memory at it, maxing the board, maybe another 5% and then then tried a random highend Quadro card we had floating about (£3500 of card that it was), the CUDA accelerated features helped to pre-render the video output and some effects but little else and it hardly dented render time in real terms leaving. Lastly we upgraded the CPU to a last generation 6 core, render time dropped by 60%.
Dedicated high bandwidth scratch drive solution, enough memory that it doesn't bottleneck and throw in the most powerful CPU you possibly can. CUDA/Open GL cards seem to have a limited amount of benefit in most circumstances, but obviously check any plugin's that need to be supported and see if any of them boast life changing benefits.
The more cores you throw at it, the quicker it becomes, hence why our 4k box is using a pair of bank breaking Xeons. You can handle it on a far less powerful machine, but it all depends on how much your time is worth. If the render out on a 10 min clip is 2 hours and if the difference between 2 hours and 1 hour is another £1500 at the time of purchase, I dare say it'll pay for itself very, very quickly.
