Even if you're not ready to display in 4K, shooting in 4K Ultra HD makes certain editing techniques easier. You'll have the luxury of shooting your subject from farther away; you can then crop the footage to a perfect size without losing any of the crisp detail. Image stabilization software tends to reduce your resolution as it adjusts for camera shake — cropping, rotating and scaling your footage. When you start with the super high resolution of 4K Ultra HD, this inevitable loss of resolution is much less detectable.

Check out this series of videos from Sony to learn about the products and techniques Gabe Rogel uses to capture stunning 4K videos of Tia Blanco, a pro surfer and Sony's Action Cam athlete.

Drones can capture footage from the most unique angles, so why not make that footage the best it can be? The breathtaking footage you'll get from overhead can't help but impress friends and family. You can find drones with 4K Ultra HD cameras already included, or choose one with an appropriate stabilizing gimbal to attach your own camera or action camcorder.

4K Ultra HD technology packs four times the pixels of regular HD. And while you may just be thinking of buying a 4K TV, you can future-proof your personal video and camera footage by recording breathtaking shots in 4K now. When you invest in a 4K camera, your footage is at such a high quality, editing video and extracting the perfect still photo is easy.

4K Ultra HD provides four times the pixels of regular HD, but it also requires four times the storage. Your memory card also needs to be have fast, continuous write speeds — at least 30MB per second. To get this speed, SD cards need a UHS Speed Class 3 (U3) rating. If you need to upload and work with your files quickly, you might also want to look for cards with fast read speeds. A word of caution: If you try shooting in 4K using cards that don't meet the minimum speed requirements, you may experience dropped frames, recording errors and lower-quality video with additional noise.

If your primary hobby is still photography, 4K Ultra HD video can exponentially increase your opportunities for fantastic photographs. Most cameras record 5–8 frames in a second, while 4K cameras can record at 30 fps. What does this mean for you? With a 4K camera, chances of getting that perfect still photo from live action footage increases dramatically. Some DSLRs let you choose the perfect shot out of playback mode or mark the shot while recording.