4:2:2 From EX1/3

[Jerry Matese]

Is there a compressor setting that would yield the following?

Injest 1080 30p 4:2:0 MPEG35 from EX3, drop it into a hot folder and end up with 480p 4:2:2 16x9 ProRes HQ ready to go in a SD timeline for the best quality and miniman rendering. Can the setting merge the alternating color from the 1080 frame which is more than 2x the resolution. Looking for a final resolution that is optimized for 16x9 DVD progressive. Are there compressor setting to facilitate this?

[Tim Dashwood]

You don't need compressor to do this. You might as well use FCP's Media Manager.

First create a new sequence preset by duplicating the Apple ProRes (HQ) NTSC 48Khz setting and then modify the field dominance to "none" (which is the same as progressive) and checkmark "Anamorphic 16x9." Change the name to something like "Apple ProRes (HQ) 480p Anamorphic." Click OK.

Now select all the 1080p30 clips you have ingested and open Media Manager. Select "recompress" and choose your new Apple ProRes (HQ) 480p Anamorphic setting.

That's it.

When you are ready to edit create a new sequence and use your new sequence preset.

[Noah Kadner]

What system are you on? I can do native XDCAM HD editing right out of the box on my MacBook Pro 2.6 Ghz. And then I do a final output of my edit on an SD timeline or just straight out to Compressor. You save a lot of time and hard drive space in not making those SD versions. You also wind up with an HD master in a world where an SD-only master is becoming increasingly undesirable.

Noah

[Robert Lane]

Noah's advice is solid; you never want to transcode your camera originals down to SD for editing; edit in the native XDCAM codec (or transcode to ProRes 422 if you wish) then use Compressor to encode it into whatever the final output is supposed to be. If you throw away information *before* the edit process you can't get it back unless you re-ingest all the footage.

Keep in mind that dropping XDCAM into any 4:2:2 codec isn't going to get you higher quality; there's no way to make up for that "0" in XDCAM/HDV, the information just isn't there. XDCAM is as good as it's going to get once it's on the recorded media.

If ultimate quality is what you're after out-of-the-camera then you should be considering an HD-SDI workflow, but that is cumbersome and expensive even with current technology.

[Jerry Matese]

This work will never be used in hd and we are trying to minimize render time. We are on FCP 6.03