• AJA Video Systems

  best codec for my purposes

  Posted by Christopher Smith on June 27, 2009 at 12:24 pm

  Hello,
  I just installed a SD-SDI switcher in my studio that is outputing SD 525/60. I have that running into an AJA I/O HD into my macpro running FCP Studio 2. The plan is to capture my live switches directly into FCP so I can do cleanup edits and then export to m4v. What is the best AJA codec to choose that won’t eat up a crazy amount of hard drive space? I currently have it set at AJA 525/29.97 Apple Pro Res HQ. The video I captured looked great. I don’t have the audio hooked up yet so I’m not sure what the audio syncing is like. Are there any other codecs that I should be using? The future plan is to switch to HD which the switcher and the I/O will do but for now we are on SD. Is it possible to use a standard DV codec in FCP with the I/O? I haven’t tested that yet.

  Just a little background in case you are wondering what the heck i’m doing. The main reason for getting the system was that the switcher we bought will take computer images in directly without a scan converter and they look awesome. The I/O box was to get the SD-SDI into FCP via firewire. The switcher handles SD and HD and we plan on moving to HD in the future. We record distance learning courses which consist of a talking head,a lot of ppt, excel, and interactive white board material so a clean computer image is important. This system will achieve that. Everything gets exported to m4v and gets set up in an rss feed for the students to download. Anyway, that is why we have some high end stuff and are currently still exporting a lower end signal.

  So, any help with choosing a codec that will give us a good quality image for m4v export but still not kill a crazy amount of hard drive space would be helpful.

  Thanks,
  Chris

  Christopher Smith replied 16 years, 10 months ago 2 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

• 

  Bob Zelin

  June 27, 2009 at 11:53 pm

  as you experiment, you will find that the AJA I/O likes ProRes422 very much. You will find that you will have less issues with ProRes than say with DVCProHD. If ProRes422HQ is too much bandwidth, ProRes422 requires less bandwidth.

  Bob Zelin
• 

  Christopher Smith

  June 28, 2009 at 1:00 am

  Thanks Bob!

  Christopher Smith
  Senior Broadcast Specialist
  Warrington College of Business Administration
  University of Florida

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