Sony Alpha 1 8K video into Premiere Pro

The reason the ProRes plays back better is ProRes is an intraframe codec, meaning that every frame is a complete frame unto itself, just compressed a bit. So the camera has no decoding to do with it, actually. A LOT less work to play it back than a long-GOP format. And the file sizes on disc don't matter that much.

I'm not familiar with the Sony A1, I shoot a BMPCC4K personally. So I looked up the specs. Nice specs, yeah.

Still curious about the full range though. From the tests and demonstrations I've seen from both colorists and the color space experts from LightIllusions.com, it doesn't get any more 'tones' in the files. At least, with any rig I've seen tested. Just encodes them differently.

Not saying that's the case here, just haven't seen one that isn't. They've pushed the specs out quite a bit with that rig.

The whole full/legal thing shouldn't still BE a thing, but ... the specs for the Rec,709 standards have been what they are for years. And within that, again, RGB media (typically 12-bit) is expected to be recorded in full, YUV is encoded in legal, but both are displayed as 0-255. It's simply an encoding process.

So ... is that something you've set on the camera, to use full? I know it is available on some rigs now.

And does it actually carry any more data of zones to the card from a limited setting if available? Just curious, as always ...

Neil

You have 8k LONG-GOP footage, and wonder why it has playback issues?

I can't imagine something harder on your system, and the RAM isn't the issue. It's long-GOP, which means it actually records a 'full' or "i" frame every 9 to whatever (I've seen up to 40 frames apart) frames, and all frames in-between have to be computed from a set of data. As for the p and b frames in-between, all is has is a chart of the pixels that will change before the next i frame (p frames), or that have changed since the last i frame, or ... both.

The cameras have specialized chips that are built to do this sort of encoding to specific parameters. Unless your computer has the decoding chips pretty close to the ones used by the camera, it's a heckuva slog to compute.

As in, 1920x1080 is normally doable, on a good system, but UHD/4k will drag you down.

You've got 8k here ... um, joy.

By the way, noticing this is YUV (technically Y/CbCr) ... it's showing as full range, and the 'standard' is that YUV media is encoded limited, RGB is encoded full. Which doesn't affect how many 'levels' of data are captured or displayed, simply how they're encoded to the file.

What's the capture rig for that media?

Neil

For that sized footage you may want to use Proxies.