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System recources for 2h video [URGENT]
Hi
The thing is, I got a job for creating 2h of video for TV broadcast. I have to deliver it to the TV station ready for broadcast. If I do i well I get more of projects like this (I hope). This will be an advertising video with edited clips I will get on DVD’s and animated telephone numbers, flags, etc, on sides of the video.
By now, I’ve done only short clips and I had enough of system resources for that. Mz question is:
1. In what quality do I have to rip the DVD’s to acomplish broadcast quality and still have reasonable file sizes. I don’t want to have 500G of movies to edit.
2. What system do I need (here i mostly ask for hard disk)?
2. After editing in AE, how should I render (pack) the project so I can deliver it to the customer?
Much thanks in advance
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10 Replies
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1. I’ve used MPEG StreamClip to convert vids from DVD to Quicktime in the Photo-JPEG codec. Coverting to Animation codec would give higher quality, but also larger file sizes. It depends on how much stuff you have. Do a test, find its file size, then multiply by the amount of video you have to get an estimate of the amount of disk space required.
2. Regular modern-day hard drives can play back P-JPEG in real time if they’re not too full and fragmented. As for size, see above to get an estimate.
3. It all depends on the needs of the technical person receiving your material. You say your material is going to the station, so call them and find out what format they want: Beta SP, Digibeta, DV? Hook up with a post house that has the gear to make sure your transfer to tape goes smoothly. Ask the editor there what format he/she wants. Avid? Animation codec? TGA files? On a portable hard drive, CD or DVD? Frame size? Ask the editor receiving your stuff. Always.
In other words, don’t be afraid to ask the people involved after you in the pipeline. I ask all the time, and make no assumptions. Some houses are Avid, some are FCP, some are Media 100.
As I said, hook up with a post house. You don’t want the station sending back your footage because it’s not properly prepared (“safe”) for broadcast.
Steve
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1. The problem is – I am the post house. My client expects that I deliver my work (his 2h ads) to different local TV stations. I have to take care of the entire process from DVD to 2h film to TV broadcast. How?
2. I see MPEG StreamClip is for Mac, but I use PC. Client will invest in buying me a Mac if the project is success. So I’m back at the beginning, at ripping 🙁 I did a test as you suggested and the results are catastrophic. I ripped 20 sek in uncompressed avi and the file size iz 8GB, for 2h movie that would be 2880GB. What are your experiences in file sizes if you rip with P-JPEG codec, let’s say 1 minute?
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MISTAKE!!!!
File size is not correct in previous post. 10 seconds are 320M, so 2h is 230GB. Still too much. If I have 6h of footages to mix and edit I would need 700GB + 250GB for final project. That’s not possible. What should I do?
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I don’t have access to some D1 files (720×486) in PJPEG, but a 640×480 :30 comes in at 65 MB, which might be 150 MB/minute for your situation. 6 hours would be 54 GB if I’m not mistaken.
Avoid uncompressed. I haven’t checked the data rate on Animation codec, but it would be in between.
1. As I said: hook up with a post house. Eat the cost if it’s not in the budget. When I did my first broadcast spots, that’s what I did. You can’t afford to screw up, so hire a pro. You edit, you design, then you render to a digital file on portable hard drive or DVD-R. Then you give that to the post house, then they bring it into their system, check it on the scopes, lay down bars and tone, add a countdown, and lay it off to BetaSP or Digibeta.
2. There are a number of DVD-ripping apps out there for Win. DVDXcopy is one, but it costs money. Try Googling DVD, rip, Quicktime, and checking the COW DVD forum, and searching the COW.
I can’t stress this enough: hire a post house.
Steve
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Thanks a lot. I already phoned a post house and they will tell me what to do after I do the animation. Still I need some ripping tips. I have DVD ripping software but what codecs and what quality should I use. If I could get 6h in 65G, that’s great. I guess if I rip it to JPG or TIFF sequence will be ok, since I don’t need the audio?
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You keep referring to this as a 2 hour long piece?? Are you planning on actually editing a 2 hour long piece in After Effects.
Also, on the DVD issue, remember that the video is compressed on the DVD to start with….so do as little compression as possible when you rip…otherwise the quality will start to really suffer.
Also,…once you do produce this 2 hour piece, you will need ALOT of hard drive space to store the final piece on.
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[Jeff Dobrow] “You keep referring to this as a 2 hour long piece?? Are you planning on actually editing a 2 hour long piece in After Effects.”
Heh … good catch, Jeff.
b_, as Jeff suggests, AE is an awful editor, because it’s very slow. It has to render every frame, and its workflow is not designed for editing long-form. After you rip, assemble the piece in a non-linear editing app for cuts and timing, then render/export the clips that need to be treated in AE. Do the magic, then render them back to the NLE and print to tape or whatever.
Jeff is also right regarding compression — my bad for not mentioning it. Look at the DVD footage carefully, making notes as to what has to be affected in AE. Rip the AE stuff to the animation codec for highest quality, but rip the other stuff to something like Photo-JPEG to save space and allow real-time playback (for speed of workflow) in your NLE.
You’ll need high quality for the AE stuff, since it gets rendered and recompressed as it passes from app to app. However, for the material that will not be affected in AE and will only be recompressed once, I’ve found PJPEG to be adequate when ripping shots that weren’t pristine to begin with. My assumption? 🙂
Does that help?
Steve -
Well, I find your approach a bit strange, b_alen, to say the least, and if I were your client, I’d be very dissatisfied if I found out – it definitely is going to show in loss of quality in many places. Like the others said, you should resort to cooperating with some decent post house. More specifically, you should not try to re-render any of the footage, if not need be. So you should only extract the snippets that you need to touch-up at maximum quality (uncompressed, Animation CoDec or similar lossless CoDecs) and leave the rest untouched. Presumably this approach will also resolve some of your resource problems, unless your “snippet” is the entire 2 hours. The rest you can extract at a lower quality for preview purposes only. Still, if you can, try to get a hold of the original tapes rather than ripping. Then you could have them digitized on an editing system and render out your AE stuff with Alpha channels and have it overlayed on the edit suite. This is much, much cleaner. If ripping is your only option, buy some cheap hard discs and store your stuff as described above. It will be a major pain, though, to work with the uncompressed files inside AE all the time.
Mylenium
[Pour Myl
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Why don’t you just capture the DVD as a “non-controllable” device and use the DV or whatever codec with your NLE? It would be much quicker/simpler than “ripping” the DVD.
And if you don’t have a capture card, just get a hold of a DV camcorder, run the DVD player thru it, all the while capturing via Firewire. I don’t know why you would even consider your original approach.
Plus, 2 hours of DV footage is NOTHING in regards to storage when compared to uncompressed codecs.
Good luck!!
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I must thank everybody for such qick response. As you guessed, I’ve never done such a ‘thing’ yet. All I’ve done was short clips, usualy for CD presentations or web and this client wanted a 2h TV broadcast project. How could I say no?
Thank you for warning me about editing 2h in AE. What was I thinking. It would be a disaster.
1. Ripping / firewire capture. I still don’t understand what you were saying, but I will try all of the approaches you mentioned and will see the results. I will experiment a bit.
2. Anyway I will first edit all of the original 2h footage in Premiere. Then I will find where to do the magic and edit just those parts in AE and then put them back in Premiere. Then I will render the movie in very bad quality from Premiere and put it in AE just for syncing and there I will do the telephone numbers animation and other extra object. At the end I will render these extra stuff with alpha and complete the job in Premiere. What should be the render settings for final stuff? Should I use codec or print to DV tape?
3. Hopefully the final project will be less than 200G and I will take the disk to post house so they can finish the job for TV.
Thanks again
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