DR-HD100 and ProRes HQ

[Robert Rogoz]

I shot 5 hours of footage with my GY-HD 100 and captured it in ProRes HQ. Anyway, I bought DR-HD100 to continue on with this project. I was testing the unit, it records in Quicktime, and now I have a question. How do I turn this footage From Quicktime (or .m2t) into ProRes HQ files? What is the best workflow? Any advise as always appreciated!

[Stick Tully]

ive had much experience with m2t files. Can quicktime pro do it? or compressor?

[William Hohauser]

Originally Posted by Robert Rogoz

I shot 5 hours of footage with my GY-HD 100 and captured it in ProRes HQ. Anyway, I bought DR-HD100 to continue on with this project. I was testing the unit, it records in Quicktime, and now I have a question. How do I turn this footage From Quicktime (or .m2t) into ProRes HQ files? What is the best workflow? Any advise as always appreciated!

Don't bother transcoding it. Bring the QuickTime HDV footage into your ProRes project, edit as normal and render when finished. This way only the footage used is turned into ProRes. Saves time and disk space.

[Chuck Spaulding]

Originally Posted by William Hohauser

Don't bother transcoding it. Bring the QuickTime HDV footage into your ProRes project, edit as normal and render when finished. This way only the footage used is turned into ProRes. Saves time and disk space.

Is there much benefit to this vs editing XDCAM natively? We're having to encode our 1st cuts (XDCAM EX) to AppleTV so the producers can review dailies at home and we're always looking for ways to cut down our encoding times.

There's a good debate about HDV/ProRes on the LAFCPUG website.

[Mike Barber]

Originally Posted by Chuck Spaulding

Is there much benefit to this vs editing XDCAM natively? We're having to encode our 1st cuts (XDCAM EX) to AppleTV so the producers can review dailies at home and we're always looking for ways to cut down our encoding times.

Not sure how this question fits into a discussion regarding ProRes…

When you are exporting your dailies, are you doing a single or multi-pass transcode to h.264 for AppleTV? One way to cut down on time is to do a single-pass.

[Peter Kraft]

Originally Posted by Robert Rogoz

I shot 5 hours of footage with my GY-HD 100 and captured it in ProRes HQ. Anyway, I bought DR-HD100 to continue on with this project. I was testing the unit, it records in Quicktime, and now I have a question. How do I turn this footage From Quicktime (or .m2t) into ProRes HQ files?

As the proverb says: There are many ways to go to Rome/Italy.

Seriously: You can use m2t files in FCP natively after re-wrapping them into QT/HDV.
This is not transcoding, so the content does not get altered in any way. The app that
does that is ClipWrap which you download from: ClipWrap

Open the re-wrapped QT files in FCP, choose the Easy Settings for your timeline in FCP for HDV. And edit HDV natively. No need to go ProRes during the editing phase: Would be
pure overkill.

Export the final edit into QT/ProRes HQ and merge with your older source material. Done.


If you want to merge the older material (in PR HQ) with the newer right away, import the QT/HDV files in a ProRes HQ timeline and render. Import older material afterwards and edit both.


P.

[William Hohauser]

Originally Posted by Chuck Spaulding

Is there much benefit to this vs editing XDCAM natively? We're having to encode our 1st cuts (XDCAM EX) to AppleTV so the producers can review dailies at home and we're always looking for ways to cut down our encoding times.

There's a good debate about HDV/ProRes on the LAFCPUG website.

Here's my simple edit workflow for HDV.

1) Ingest into FCP as HDV.
2) Edit on an HDV timeline with rendering set to ProRes.
3) Export to SD video DVcam, DVD or webfiles as H264. Export final edit to HD ProRes Quicktime file for hard drive storage.

For complex edits (lots of effects, multicam, etc.):

1) Ingest into FCP as HDV (or ProRes720)
2) edit on a ProRes timeline.
3) Export to SD video DVcam, DVD or webfiles as H264. Export final edit to HD ProRes Quicktime file for hard drive storage.

This will probably work fine with XDCAM as well. HDV and XDCAM both use MPEG2 for compression which creates artifact problems when you recompress the video for effects or color correction. ProRes converts the video to a frame based codec which helps immensely when rendering.

Creating Apple TV files is always going to cost you time. Transcoding HDV, ProRes or any full resolution video codec to h.264 is going to take time, less with the best Mac Pro you can buy. One benefit of ProRes is that FCP can output a decent quality SD live preview over FireWire. You can run this directly thru your DV deck or A/D converter into a DVD recorder and deliver the DVD to the producers. This will only take the length of time of the edit and finalizing the DVD.