Seasons Greetings,

Sorry if this has been answered already, but in lieu of digging through the search archives, I figured I would ask first.

When editing .h264 files from the Canon 5D, is it still optimal/advantageous to convert them to cineform files when editing in Premiere CS5.5?

I am building a new system and so I was wondering if I needed to install cineform as well.

Thanks for any help in advance, I appreciate it!

Conversion to Cineform is advantageous on weak / slow systems. On fast systems there are only disadvantages. The conversion with quality loss, the extra time and the extra storage required.

Perceived quality is actually improved using CineForm conversions, see

CineForm Insider: Why use an intermediate for DSLR video? (http://cineform.blogspot.com/2010/11/why-use-intermediate-for-dslr-video.html)

and the FirstLight workflow is loved by many. We have most from a performance only solution (5+ years ago) to add a quality and enhanced workflow solution.

Thanks David for the response, one more question, which still pertains. I actually placed a deposit on the Epic-X last week but I haven't really researched how to post the footage yet.

Do people convert the red files to cineform to post in premiere?

We haven't done that much with Red workflows as it is a small market for us, but there are users that do convert R3Ds to CineForm RAW and post in Premiere at 4K or 5K. We provide bare-bones utilities to convert R3Ds, but nothing fancy.

Actually, so-called "native" editing is disadvantageous even on an extremely fast system. That's because all; NLEs - CS5.5 included - actually recompress DSLR video on the fly whether you like it or not (and some also perform too many conversions in the color space). It's this NLE-forced recompression and color space conversion that degrades image quality. (Adobe Premiere Pro always recompresses everything that goes through it since it currently does not offer a no-recompress mode at all.) Perhaps that's why every single one of the videos that went through Premiere's "native" AVCHD support was so much poorer in image quality than those exact same clips that were transcoded to Cineform.