Pro res 422 HQ and long exports
 

Since I use a lot of HDV and XDcam I have set my sequences to Pro res as well as the render. Everything works great except for when I compress it for delivery. Sending my sequence to Compressor for MPEG 2 compression leaves with 40 minutes to compress a 4 and a half minute sequence. Right now I am compressing the same sequence to H.264 2 pass out of Final cut itself and it says there is 3 hours left and its been half an hour so far.

Is it odd that it takes forever to compress pro res? I am starting to think that it is transcoding the sequence back to long gop which is why it is taking forever. If so is the real advantage of the pro res sequence work around just faster renders but way long exports?

Of course like usual I could just be doing something wrong.

As I understand it when you export FCP goes back to the source files (not the render files) so as not to add an unnecessary layer of video processing to the mix (XDCAM -> ProRes -> MPEG2 as opposed to XDCAM -> MPEG2). Setting your seq to render in ProRes is more useful if you are sending a baseband video signal back to a deck for recording.


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Ya I wanted to stay in pro res since I plan on sending it out to HDCAM and doing color correction on a symphony nitris. I will most likely just finish in color however, it will still go out to tape at some point though so the sequence settings isn't a total waste. I guess when delivering to dvd or internet its best to just stay native.

If you want to finish in Apple Color you'll need to transcode your edit into ProRes because Color only works w/select codecs and GOP like HDV or XDCAM don't make the list.

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Thats good to know. Right now I made a new sequence that is set to xdcam instead of pro res and it is conforming to MPEG 2 as we speak. Hopefully this will give me a faster export since it didn't look like it was going to finish today and it kept making sorenson squeeze 4.5 freeze up.

Update- This whole time I have been trying to export H.264 and now that I have switched to using Mpeg-4 it actually appears to be working in a reasonable time frame.

Second Update- With the switch tho Mpeg-4 I got a quicktime in about 10 minutes. So maybe something is just wrong with my H.264 since conforming the second sequence to Mpeg-2 took two minutes not two hours.

What is the difference between MPG4 and H.264?

First off H.264 can do 2 passes and variable bit rate. I'm not sure on all of the technical jargan but H.264 is rather new and tends to give me good results.