• Sony Cameras

  Native ex1 footage in Premiere cc , exporting tests, and various picture profles tested.

  Posted by Tom Laughlin on October 3, 2014 at 3:22 pm

  CODECs: Is there an advantage to taking ex1 or ex3 footage ingesting it and transcoding it to ProRes, before you start editing ? Is it a better codec going from MPEG to ProRess, does it affect picture quality or gamma, other than inflating the file sizes?

  EXPORTs: My usual workflow is editing the files copied straight off the card. I use clip browser, copy the card, import the bpav into premiere and I’m off editing. Premiere is pretty good about matching sequence settings, but I do get a lot of concern when it’s time to export. I usually dial in the same settings myself, same codec, frame-rate, etc, then export. I do not trust the “Match Sequence” export setting, this weird I-Frame MPEG setting, it also by default has the quality set at 50%, rather than 100% when I manually dial it in.

  PRO RES: I’ve also tested a clip where I changed the export from the native xdcam ex 35/vbr to Apple pro res, and it often times, looks better as a final export. For web and youtube, I’ve often given clients a pro res file to upload to YouTube versus an export that was matched settings. I’m still not sure why the pro res exports tend to look a bit better, in some cases…

  PICTURE PROFILES: I also just finished trying out several picture profiles, marvel, Philip bloom, Allister Chapman’s, the vivid, the BBC, and Doug jensen PP. I loved Doug’s in first place for me, then Philip Blooms’ 2010 pp, and then BBC. The others, were not that impressive to me at all.

  Any thoughts on these various questions and topics?

  Tom Laughlin
  Producer/Editor
  Digital Chop House
  Salt Lake City, Utah
  http://www.digitalchophouse.com

  Ian Cook replied 11 years, 7 months ago 2 Members · 1 Reply
• 1 Reply

• 

  Ian Cook

  October 3, 2014 at 4:35 pm

  Re codecs, ProRes will always perform a bit better than MPEG on an FCP timeline. It’s an I-frame Apple codec. It also goes up to 12 bit 4444. If you start with XDCAM you might transcode to ProRes for performance reasons, not for any bump in picture quality. Whether the file looks marginally better when transcoded to PR can be debated but for the most part you are taking the same picture information and re-emcoding it. You can’t make up color and luminance that weren’t there to begin with.

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