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Best format to compress raw T2i footage to for editing?
My videographers shoot with the Canon T2i which shoots 1080p H.264 Format .MOV @ about 330MB/min
My problem is that I need to deliver a final video as quickly as possible. My videographer shoots maybe 30-40 1080p 10-second clips that will eventually be used to create a 3-5 minute video. But after a long day of shooting the last thing we can do is stay up all night to cut and encode. She can’t do it during the next day because she’s out shooting again.
So, I want to outsource the video editing. We simply cannot handle uploading 4GB of footage a day, and downloading 4GB of footage a day for the processor. The final 3-5min 1080p movie exported in YouTube bitrates will only be 200-300MB anyway.
1. What format and bitrate should I have the videographer convert the T2i video into so that the size becomes more manageable and still retain good quality and still be easy to edit and work with in Premiere?
2. My goal is to have those 30-40 clips be a grand total of 300-400MB. The final movie being 200-300MB.
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21 Replies
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[Victor Lin] “1. What format and bitrate should I have the videographer convert the T2i video into so that the size becomes more manageable and still retain good quality and still be easy to edit and work with in Premiere?”
The format already is highly compressed and light weight. You want to go MORE? I don’t think you can and retain quality. H.264 is darn light. I mean 4GB of footage a day is NOTHING. I guess you haven’t dealt with Uncompressed HD…or even the compressed editing formats of ProRes or DNxHD, that are about 3-4 times larger than H.264.
I just edited a video shot with my T2i…using the native H.264. PPro 5.5, and CS6 (testing that) handled it great.
Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def -
[Shane Ross] “The format already is highly compressed and light weight. You want to go MORE? I don’t think you can and retain quality. H.264 is darn light. I mean 4GB of footage a day is NOTHING. I guess you haven’t dealt with Uncompressed HD…or even the compressed editing formats of ProRes or DNxHD, that are about 3-4 times larger than H.264.
I just edited a video shot with my T2i…using the native H.264. PPro 5.5, and CS6 (testing that) handled it great.”
It doesn’t matter if 4GB is “nothing.” The fact of the matter is that it is too much to transfer over the internet on a day to day basis between my videographer and the processor. Depending on the number of shoots she does, it can easily balloon to 16GB a day. I can’t seriously expect my videographer to upload 16GB each day and for my processor to download 16GB each day.
We need something smaller that is easily transferable.
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[Victor Lin] “We need something smaller that is easily transferable.”
Even if you could somehow make it smaller and retain the quality your videographer would still be up all night encoding the stuff to the smaller format. You could drop the resolution and the bitrate but I don’t think you’d want to do that.
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Well, here’s what I don’t get.
The T2i shoots at 330MB/min. 3 minute’s worth of video clips could be 1GB.
Yet, after all the clips are put together, titles are added, an audio track is added, etc. the resultant 3 minute video is only 250MB. And the quality is fine.
1GB for 3min of original clips vs 250MB for the final 3 minute movie.
What gives? Why can’t I just get 250MB for 3min of original clips, and then come out with a 250MB finished movie?
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Then transcode your source media to the specs of your final.
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“98% of all computer issues can be solved by simply pressing ‘F1’.”
Steve Brame
creative illusions Productions -
Aren’t some formats better for editing than others?
Currently the final format is (from a .mov):
.mp4
H.264
1080p
29.97fps
VBR 1-Pass Target: 12, Max: 17 mbpsIs this a good enough format for further editing?
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1. Proxy Media: Is fascinating. So they send me super highly compressed footage (with the exact same filenames as the original), and we have our processor cut and do everything, then we send over the project file.
BUT: what if there’s processing that has to be done on the original media? We run some of our clips through Mercalli camera stabilizer. We cut, then run Mercalli on the clips, then add the transitions.
2. But at the end of the day it’s still too much work for my videographer to process *anything*. She shoots all day, and then she’s tired, and then she repeats. I don’t want to work her to the bone. Short of having her hire her own in-house assistant (literally in house, processing off of her hard drive) just to do the processing… what else can I do? Plus having local processors brings up huge issues with consistent quality.
In the long run, I want to have a consistent video product throughout the nation. I don’t think I can easily do that with 50 different individual photo processors working locally in whatever region the videographers are shooting. I’d much rather have a central processing unit that all the videographers send their files to. It’s much easier to control quality and much easier to synchronize any changes and improvements that we roll out in the future.
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[Victor Lin] “Aren’t some formats better for editing than others?”
Yes – uncompressed ones, which will dwarf your current source media’s file sizes.
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“98% of all computer issues can be solved by simply pressing ‘F1’.”
Steve Brame
creative illusions Productions -
Not sure why Mercalli is holding you up. If you apply it to a proxy, then it will also be there when you replace the proxies with originals.
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“98% of all computer issues can be solved by simply pressing ‘F1’.”
Steve Brame
creative illusions Productions -
Have you considered FedEx?
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
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