Premiere Pro CS4 and 7D Footage
 

I use Premiere Pro CS4 to edit my 7D Footage, but I convert my H.264 compressed 7D footage to MPEG-2 using Media Encoder.

MPEG-2 (for 1920x1080p) and MPEG-2 Blu-Ray (for 720p 60p).

A couple of questions:

1) Is what I'm doing the best way to go? Is there a better workflow?

2) I noticed that converting 720p 60p footage to MPEG-2 (.mpg) does not work. I have to convert it to MPEG-2 Blu-Ray (.m2v & .wav) for it to convert. Is this a problem that is isolated to just me or are others experiencing this problem too? I have not yet tried this on other systems.

Any help that you can provide would be greatly appreciated. I'd like to know if what I'm doing is the best way to go at this time or if there is a better way. Once I'm happy with my workflow, I'll be creating an article to help others with the same question.

Thank you kindly for your time and help!

Pat

Well the quality will drop when you encdode to mpeg2. I would just edit it natively and render them all in the timeline itself.

True about quality loss. I would keep the native format I could. Have u tried editing 7D's .h264 on Premiere Pro? If so what specs do you have?

I have a 955 Phenom 2 AMD quad-core system on Vista 64. It's a powerful computer but it bottlenecks when I try to edit the original clips.

For Premiere CS4, it appears that the only thing to do is to batch convert the clips to a premiere friendly format, edit with those, then replace the clips with originals when edit is complete.

A long and messy process.

I think most Canon 5d2/7d users with Premier Pro CS4 would be using NeoScene from Cineform to transcode the raw files into something more easily edited.
Neoscene is a cut down version of their regular HD product, specifically re-written I think for Canon H264 files and has recently been improved to accept the new 7d frame rates.
I use it with a 5d2 and it makes the files very easy to edit. File sizes are larger once it's stripped away all that H264 nonsense and it alters the 30frame files to proper NTSC 29.97 by a very small speed change and tweaks the audio to match.

dang I'm on holidays away from my PC for a week. I checked out the Neoscene page. Can anybody tell me if it'll convert a 720p60p MOV file from 7D to a 720p60p Cineform MOV (same framerate,etc?) It supports batch conversion right? If it supports both FullHD 24p, and 720p60p then that makes this worth looking into. I hate how Media Encoder kinda works but not really and I hate going from H264 to MPEG-2

Not sure if this helps, but I've been converting the footage to Quicktime Photo JPEG for offline editing in Premiere CS3. I used MPEG Streamclip to batch convert and then pulled in from there. Made the editing way easier and then I was able to online later by unlinking and relinking the files in PPro.

I have 3ghz core quad and yes, editing the originals is a bit of a pain, but I just render the timeline. I bring all my clips into the timeline and render them once. Then just edit using those clips.

The problem with working in native or Mpeg formats is that both are GOP compression...
So when you bring a compressed source onto the timeline of your NLE for editing the NLE
has to uncompress and then re-compress the source... this can lead to damaging the original source material...

Cineform takes the long GOP compressed source and un-compresses it and converts it into
a wavelet format that has very little compression, thats why the files get larger during the
conversion... and this also makes the files much easier to edit with... there is very little
degradation for multi edits because the footage does not have to be un-compressed and
then re-compressed over and over again...

All of the Cineform products will handle the Canon footage, Neoscene is just a converter,
as good as Neoscene is, the other products have the ability to enhance the footage in many different ways...
The higher end products tend to convert the footage and treat it almost as if it were
RAW video footage... you have much more options to convert your Canon footage.

Ray,

The problem isn't de- and re-compressing long GOP stuff from a quality aspect. The problem is that in long GOP content the frames aren't independent. To show some random frame, the NLE generally needs to go back a few frames to get an i-frame, and then it applies change after change to get at the frame that it's trying to display. It works great for decoding linearly, but it's terribly inefficient for random access editing.

So, long GOP doesn't hurt quality. In fact, it can help get more quality in a limited number of bits. The problem is that long GOP slows down random access editing.

And, yes, the frame size of an intermediate format is larger than the long GOP acquisition stuff. First, it needs more space since it has to encode each frame from scratch. Second it needs more space since you want excellent quality so you don't harm the quality any more than absolutely necessary. In fact, staying with the original long GOP media avoids and transcode and theoretically has higher quality.

Wavelet encoding is popular because it lets you scale the video easily. You can get a half size preview by only accessing one quarter the data of a wavelet file. With MPEG, you have to access and decode the whole thing and then scale to preview size.

So even though intermediate files are big, take time to generate, and put your video down one generation, the improvements in editing speed on a practical system make it all worthwhile.

Here's a thread from the Cineform forum... this might answer some questions... or you can
add some more questions to get more info...

http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/cineform...orm-files.html