-
Best quality/workflow for software conversion HDV to ProRes?
The problem: I shot 20 hours of HDV 1080i60 for a pro bono job. I am not meant to do the post, they’re working on a serious post house to do it (pro bono) but in the meantime I agreed to transfer the footage, and suggested that if they bought a drive I’d take it straight from HDV to ProRes over Firewire (I don’t have a capture card). In the meantime the producer wanted a quick dirty edit for an event, so I ended up capturing everything as HDV (I didn’t have enough drive space available for ProRes), created an FCP project and edited that in HDV to ProRes render. They will not want to use any of my editing (but they may like my logging notes).
Now they have bought a 2TB G-Raid drive and I’d like to give them the material 3 ways: as ProRes 422, as Quicktimes so they can look at it, and as the original HDV (since it’s there anyway). To get the best quality ProRes must I go back to the tapes, or can I re compress through Media Manager, or should I batch process all the clips through Compressor? Any other thoughts? Quality won’t matter for the QT files so I’m thinking I could do that with Media Manager (not real familiar with it though), but if it has to do everything at once it might take for ever on my dual core machine.
The ultimate goal (hope) is this goes to national TV. I shot with a Canon XLH1, I am using the latest (3) FCS but work with an iMac. I’d like to keep my time down, but more importantly let the computer do its processing overnight.
Thanks,
Jeff Mueller
http://www.ApertureVideos.com
Santa Barbara, CA -
2 Replies
-
If the post house uses FCP then there is no reason to do any transcoding. Most of my clients capture HDV as HDV, not converting to ProRes via firewire as this doesn’t copy source timecode over.
The HDV timeline goes to Color as HDV for grading and the final out of Color is rendered as ProRes422 which is sent back to FCP. So you end up with the final cut plus handles rendered as ProRes 422 in Color which does a great job of the render.
Talk to the post house and see what they actually want. Otherwise batch through Compressor will do a better job than Media Manager
-
Thanks Michael, good points. Don’t know yet who the post house will be. I opened my mouth about how great ProRes is so I may go ahead and give them a ProRes version through Compressor, but I will definitely also give them the HDV project in case they want to work the way you describe.
Jeff Mueller
http://www.ApertureVideos.com
Santa Barbara, CA
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up