A patch for Studio 17 was released yesterday (16th January) although apparently none of the moderators were told about it.
It claims to be the patch that implements 4K in Studio, a feature that was promised in the pre-sales information to be available in a patch in "December 2013"
I've been testing this new patch and my initial impressions are that although it may pay lip-service to the concept of 4K, it's not offering any practical way of editing the footage.
I have a number of sources, most of which are the 12.5 fps video from my GoPro Hero 3+ black edition, but also a number of 24 fps clips downloaded from the internet. I have another program that also has 4K features, Magix Movie Edit Pro 2014. While MEP can preview and play back the clips natively in a somewhat jerky manner, if I use proxy files, or ask the program to preview render the footage, playback is very smooth.
In Studio 17.1, testing has shown that very lumpy playback is sort of possible of 4K. GoPro footage is now recognized even though the bitrate is misreported. So in this regard, S17.1 and MEP 2014 are working in the same way.
However, when I preview render any 4K footage on a S17 timeline, the result will still not play back smoothly at all. Examination of the preview files show that they are 80Mbs mpeg-2 files (S17 uses 25Mbps render files for 1080p HD)
So, you can't actually play back 4K smoothly in PS17.1. I don't know if this is a function of the high bitrate of the preview render files, or another problem with the program, but I would say that reasonable real time playback was a prerequisite of editing.
As for export, there appears to be two presets available. Both are highly problematic, often resulting in files that aren't named correctly (the random sequence of numbers occasionaly seen with MP4 export), or export causing the program to stop responding. When a successful export is made it appears to only have a bitrate of 22Mbps - lower than the bitrate for normal HD even though the files should have 4 times the amount of resolution.
I'll continue to test this feature, but my conclusion is that the 4K features in S17.1 are impractical to use, highly unstable and even when they do work, of unacceptable quality.
If anyone else was hoping to use S17 for 4K experiments (I bought my GoPro in anticipation of this feature working) then can you help me compile evidence that this feature still is completely unusable over two weeks after it should have been implemented? I think we are due a refund....