AVC Intra Codec compatibility with FCP

[Russell Lasson]

It’s my understanding that AVC-Intra currently isn’t an editing codec. You can import AVC-Intra to ProRes using Log and Transfer, but from there, it’s all ProRes.

-Russ

Russell Lasson
Kaleidoscope Pictures
Provo, UT

[John Heagy]

You understand correctly Russ. Transferring ACV-I to ProResHQ takes twice realtime using an 8 core Mac, compared to DV100 which takes half realtime.

We’ve done extensive testing comparing AVC-I, DV100. ProRes and ProResHQ using a Sony studio camera as a 10bit uncompressed source. We used Panasonic’s little P2 laptop editor to record the 10bit signal to AVC-I and a Kona 3 for all the rest. We used a custom app that does an inverse subtraction in YUV that produces a flat grey field when both sources are identical. Staying YUV is important as it does not do any YUV to RGB conversions.

The results were interesting. ProRes and ACV-I are pretty much equal with a slight edge to ProRes… ProResHQ was clearly superior. DV100 being 8bit and scaled was the worst compared to the others.

Based on this I see little advantage to editing AVC-I native. Even if in the future FCP could do say 2 streams in realtime, that would equate to many more streams with ProRes.

John Heagy

[Arjun Rao]

Dear John,
Thank you for this information. We have not yet made the change to FCP6 and Pro Res. What would our options be then?
Sincerely,
Arjun

[Rennie Klymyk]

This is interesting. I’ve wondered about the differences of ProRes and AVC-I since Apple introduced ProRes.

Canon, JVC and others still haven’t introduced a solid state camera. Maybe they will license ProRes from Apple and capture natively to it. They could also use hot swap solid state HDDs for storage.

“everything is broken” ……1st. coined by Esther Philips I believe.

[John Heagy]

Hi Arjun,

Are you shooting with AVC-I? I believe the AVC-I plugin only works in FCP 6. The camera that records AVC-I will also do DVCPROHD, so that’s what you’ll have to stick with until you upgrade.

John