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Changing 5D footage from LT to HQ in FCP?
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What I am about to say might sound mean. I am not trying to be mean, I am trying to pragmatic and save yourself some unnecessary work. None of this is your fault, and if I leave you with a sour taste, it is not directed towards you, but rather to the format in general that has been so widely adopted by content creators with no regard as to how many problem these cameras can cause for us post guys. I am laughing with you, not at you.
Your footage (as of right now) has no reel numbers and no time codes. This is a media management nightmare, especially for something like FCP. You can add reel numbers in FCP which solves that issue and would allow some level of media management that might work for you, but ymmv.
Also, do you have access to the original h264s? I implore you to run a test, take an h264 an encode one to ProResLT, then one to ProResHQ. The difference will be negligible. This format is so noisy, so highly compressed from the time of recording, that transcoding to a higher bitrate codec from LT won’t do you any good. Use the LT versions and render out ProRes or HQ from Color. That information loss you see is already lost. Adding more mb/sec to it is not going to being it back. The damage has been done.
And buy more hard drives. 100GBs is nothing. Take the whole project in it’s entirety and hook it up for Color. It will be a much less problem free way to go about this, in my humble and sour opinion.
Jeremy
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Jeremy you rock i must say i appreciate your truth…you drop the knowledge.
you bring the truth, i really wish I had asked for the producer to have the editor media manage and prep for color BEFORE getting me involved.
In terms of copying the entire project over i am curious about best practices on my end – i have the space on my internal RAID no doubt about that (8TB w/ 5 still avail )and its fine for me to do while working on it. Would you agree that i can always just media manage the final sequence & color stuff for my own archive on my end so as not to keep any of the extra media?
I believe what you are saying and do not want to run that test because I believe you about quality. I do have the original footage broken into card folders and the editor has told me that he added reel #’s in the FCP browser and re-sent me an updated fcp sequence. I just have to know even if I dont do it – in theory if I WERE to try to reconform to (HQ) after copying over the entire 100GB project, what would be the best way to do this given I only have Reel #’s and no time code?
I really appreciate your time and feedback sir.
best
sean -
Hy Guys!
I’ve found what destroy the Canon Plug In:
The synced clips! Or Merged Clips!
With Merged Clips the plug in get crazy! It doesn’t the job!
With normal clips is perfect!
So here the trick! Any Idea how to convert all the “merged clips” in simple “clips”?
I’ve tried to export as a batch list but when you re-import it lost all the source data.
All the considerations, tips or ideas are very well accepted!
Just a little happier…
Thanks
Paul -
[Sean Kapleton] “In terms of copying the entire project over i am curious about best practices on my end – i have the space on my internal RAID no doubt about that (8TB w/ 5 still avail )and its fine for me to do while working on it. Would you agree that i can always just media manage the final sequence & color stuff for my own archive on my end so as not to keep any of the extra media?”
Well, if you have just the Color redneres, then that’s a totally different subset of media. Yes, you can keep just that part, but you won’t be able to access the orig media anymore in Color. Hope that makes sense.
[Sean Kapleton] “I just have to know even if I dont do it – in theory if I WERE to try to reconform to (HQ) after copying over the entire 100GB project, what would be the best way to do this given I only have Reel #’s and no time code?”
You would have to transcode all the clips to HQ and relink manually.
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[PaUL Alba] “The synced clips! Or Merged Clips!
With Merged Clips the plug in get crazy! It doesn’t the job!
With normal clips is perfect!”Not in my experience. It really boils down to where the original log and transfer took place.
Merged Clips might screw up to, but if you haven’t changed machines or file paths, the log and transfer should work.
Jeremy
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Hi Jeremy,
I’m doing several test!
-When a project need to be recaptured it’s impossible to move in another system.
– In project, with synced clips (merged), batch capture doesn’t work even in the same system.
Sorri I have 300 clips to recapture and actually is a nightmare!
Thanks a lot!
Paul -
I hear you, Paul. It sucks.
Have you looked at Fcp reconnect?
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Jeremy,
FCP reconnect it’ s not usefull in my case.
I need to recapture the H264 clips not reconnect.
I have all my footage across many disk and FCP reconnect looks only in one target destination.
There’s no way!Batch capture has serious problems with the canon E1 plug in.
Actually I’ve decided to do the job manually, and I can’t loose my time anymore.
Many thanks! Best regards to everyone!
Paul -
[PaUL Alba] “I need to recapture the H264 clips not reconnect.”
Right, so you recapture all of the h264 files with the default file names at the codec you want, then you use FCP Reconnect to reconnect your current timeline to the newly captured files (you can even rename them too).
Jeremy
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After reading this thread, I completely sympathize with your efforts to work with the Canon E1 Plugin – it’s less than adequate. But I’m very confused about why you’d want to capture 5D footage at ProRes HQ. The camera only records at 35 mbit/sec, which is well within ProRes LT’s capabilities. You will not get any more information by recapturing. You should either transcode all your originally transferred footage, or just send the ProRes LT out. The color grading application will render in a higher-quality codec anyway.
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