I have only played with HD, ie, burning video to DVD. But I have used the AC3 stereo capability a lot with SD DVDs. It has some very powerful audio processing capabilities.
Slide shows are nice too with all of the blending, cropping and mixing! Haven't created a 5.1 surround sound video yet. That would be cool.
Anyway, I had a side business of converting media to DVDs — wedding videos, audio tapes, special occasions, religious shows, VHS, 8mm, hi8, min-DV. I also created video slide shows and then played them for family reunions, 50th anniversaries.
4K raw video — MPEG2? do you render it to an intermediate format first? That was a nice feature. Took a little extra time but it made it a heck a lot easier to edit.
The rendering time is probably still a killer. Especially with HD video. But being able to distribute the render across multiple computers and a network was very nice. I used that a few times. Follows the law of diminishing returns though because of network latency.
Anyway, I mostly use it now for family videos and rendering to HD wmv which plays very nicely on my HD TV via the USB port.
I render directly from 4K to 4K in MP4 movie format- XAVC 4K 3840x2160 Long GOP 29.97. The stock agencies I submit to like it.
A few years ago I tried offering conversion of old format video to DVD or something else digital. I got one whole customer.
I have a 3GB video card on a Dell PC with i7 and 12 GB of RAM. It was bought to handle higher end video. Dell had a sale a while back and I pulled the trigger. It’s been a solid box.
A typical render of a 4K clip that is a minute in length usually takes 5 or 6 minutes.
HD in what frame rates I’ve used, a minute or two tops for 1 minute or less in length.
I rarely use HD. Sometimes I forget to switch modes on the Lumix for video. It will record in other modes but in HD 60 frames. It cleans up nicely.