Editing long GOP - is it a nightmare?
 

Hey guys, I'm just about to put my cash down for a new EX1 but the one reservation that I still have about the camera is the seemingly horrendous render times etc involved with the Long GOP compression format. Anybody care to share their experiences? In hindsight, would it put you off XDCAM EX in any way? Thanks in advance.

Steve

I had the same question and bought Vortex Media's "test drive" disk with lots of EX files in all different formats. You could test that out on your particular NLE and transcoding software. The way I have my particular system setup with a decent dual processor, 4GB of RAM, and video drive in RAID 0 configuration - it is essentially like editing in DV. I have done up to 3 layers of mp4 files and it will still play realtime from the timeline. The render times (out to say- blu-ray legal parameters) are approximately the same as with HDV but certainly not in the range of AVCHD.

Render times are dependent on the hardware and NLE - much more so I think than the Camera's compression format.
I run an 8-core Mac Pro with 16G Ram and huge amounts of free disc space on my raid. There are no render times. I edit with XDCAM EX 1080/24p timelines and there are zero render issues and no playback lags.

Would you say that a Raid hard disc set up is essential then to problem free performance? I don't currently have this on my mac... thanks

Steve

No, it isn't essential. Even USB external is okay but I would recommend at least firewire 800. Render times are going to be more dependent on processor and RAM. 4GB or so is fine. Any Mac Pro or Macbook Pro should edit XDCAM HD easily. For basic editing, there should be very little rendering required.

If you use FCP then make your sequence XDcamEX and then set renders up as Prores422 or Prores422HQ this gives you a fast workflow and no loss of quality with transitions etc. It all plays back great.

If you jump into Color for grading render back as Prores422 or Prores422HQ.

Unless you are going to be mastering back to XDCAM, in which case you may as well keep everything as XDCAM to avoid an extra compression stage getting your renders back from ProRes to XDCAM.

I edit in Avid Media Composer on a 3.0 GHz Dual core PC with very nice performance. However - I would not recommend using external firewire/USB2-drives. I have an internal software raid with 2 Samsung 1 TB-drives striped. They give me a 140 Mb/s datastream compared to 35 Mb/s for an USB2 drive. Fast drives are really essential for fast response times when moving through your timeline!!

I film rugby in 720p/50. Typical timeline length is 1 hour 10-15mins. Consists of slomo try replays, 2 tracks of graphics and the raw footage. Takes my PC around 15 -20 minutes to render to mpeg2 for dvd use.

Its 2 Quad core I7's (effectively 16 cores), 12gb ram and 3tb raid using Edius 5.1. No probs with real time playback or anything like that.

Stuart

Thanks guys, this has put my mind at rest.

Steve

I actually like to set my Sequence settings as ProRes422. That way you can export a Quicktime Reference file quickly. I do a render at lunch, at the end of the day, or any breaks. Then everything gets transcoded to ProRes422 for better realtime effects performance.

34 minute fan film we did (1920x1080x30 mxf) took about 2:30 hours to render in Vegas 8.1 but we changed the colors and applied a scratchy film effect... computer specs in my sig.