• Panasonic Cameras

  Transcode to Pro Res or Pro Res HQ?

  Posted by Brian Davison on October 19, 2008 at 9:49 pm

  Hi there. I’m shooting with the HPX 3000 at 1080p 24, is there a benefit to transcoding to Pro Res HQ rather than plain ‘ol Pro Res when I’m ingesting the AVC Intra footage into FCP?

  Thanks!

  Brian Davison replied 17 years, 10 months ago 3 Members · 4 Replies
• 4 Replies

• 

  Richard Harrington

  October 20, 2008 at 1:16 am

  Technically yes…

  but you may not see it unless you are using a very high quality delivery method.

  Tell us more about footage and workflow

  Richard M. Harrington, PMP

  Author: Photoshop for Video, Understanding Adobe Photoshop, and ATS:iWork
• 

  Brian Davison

  October 20, 2008 at 2:26 am

  Richard, thanks for responding. It’s going to be edited online and the layback is going to be to either hdcam sr or D5.

  As to the footage, it’ll be a mix of interview and action footage.
• 

  Gary Adcock

  October 20, 2008 at 12:27 pm

  [Richard Harrington] “Technically yes… but you may not see it unless you are using a very high quality delivery method. “

  Hey Rich
  While technically, yes you should get better quality, Software conversions to ProResHQ are fraught with playback and encoding errors. In my testing of software conversions, the HQ version failed or reported dropped frame errors due specifically to the encoding and decoding via CPU. That very same file converted to the standard Non-HQ version played without incident in all cases.

  It was explained to me that with a software conversion to HQ. the CPU is trying to encode and playback the entire 10bits of data, but since most all camera formats are only 8 bit the processing has to fill-in the missing data to complete the file. That bit depth conversion from 256 (8bit) to 1024 (10bit) requires a massive amount of CPU power-almost as much on the decode as encode.

  Whereas using the standard version of ProRes the data is not extrapolated into the higher bit depth but rather allows that original camera data to “float” within the 10bit color space. This allows for lower playback and processing requirements while still maintaining the quality needed for a 10bit data stream.

  gary adcock
  Studio37
  HD & Film Consultation
  Post and Production Workflows

  Inside look at the IoHD
• 

  Brian Davison

  October 20, 2008 at 5:13 pm

  Gary,

  I may be wrong, but I think the HPX-3000 with the AVC-Intra codec captures at 10 bit, so I wouldn’t be running into that particular problem, yes?

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