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“speediest” codec to render to?
i’ve got some HDV footage that i put on an HDV timeline (FCP6) which seems normal enough. i send out previews of this show from the timeline to the client via the internet. my current workflow is thus:
export/render out a QT movie of the timeline using “current settings” in the QT requester, then take that QT into compressor and render out an mp4 file and send it via “yousendit.” (i used to just go to Compressor from the timeline until some of you smart guys told me THAT was part of why my Compressor projects were taking so long: Compressor was doing more work than it needed to and is not very efficient at it. quicker to make a single QT then send that single file to Compressor. seems to be working purdy good this way.
my question: knowing now that HDV is a rather complicated codec for the computer to mess with, would it be faster to render my QT into a different codec? like DVCPro HD? or something else? just wondering if i should stay out of the HDV realm as much as possible?
let me know if any of you know on that one. thanks again…
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3 Replies
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Mortimer,
There is a really really lot on this exact here and in the HDV forum. To answer your question though, the “simplest” workflow seems to be to use a sequence setting you like as far as quality and let FCP6 work the native HDV files in it. Yes, you will have to render, but in total you will only be doing this once. That is the ideal situation.
If you capture to say DVCproHD, you will be getting one hit, then when you add effects you will get another. I’m anal so I use the first method, recommended by Graeme Nattress among others.
It is also the cheapest method, as no expensive cards or boxes are needed, just FireWire.
As far as “quickest codec,” I don’t know if any are quicker to render, but you are saving a conversion step and a render, always worth it to me.
I usually work in a ProRes timeline, seems to work fine and goes out to dubs just great. 8 bit works too.
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Hi Mortimer,
I don’t work with HDV, but as Chris says, the less expansion-compression processes that you make your footage go through, the best. If you can do everything in one step I think is worth the annoyances of the workflow.
Rafael -
You’re definitely correct on the render thing. FCP is across the board somehow inefficient in rendering in so many ways. Recently, my latest discovery was with Motion projects.
I had a simple text build from motion in my timeline. It sat on layer 1 and thus didn’t overlay or combine with anything else. To render within the DV timeline (it’s a dv motion project as well) it took 8 minutes. That’s just ridiculously slow I thought. I opened Motion and simply rendered the project there to a DV file. 1 and a half minutes. That’s a pretty horrible difference. They should be using the same render engine but it’s always been this way.
And if you are doing an overlay, it’s quicker to render in Motion to animation + alpha and render again in FCP to combine the alpha movie within your timeline. The whole round trip to motion convenience is actually just a time killer.
I too have found the same problems with Compressor. Export directly to compressor and things will take 30minutes, while exporting to self contained QT and render in compressor takes 5-10 minutes. PLUS, it doesn’t hold up editing.
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