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Checing on 5D workflow
Hi –
I’ve been searching the forums for a while and have found a lot of good info for putting together our work flow – thanks everyone! I just want to do a little double check to make sure I’m getting it right.We’re shooting a feature doc for broadcast – the station requires HD delivery. The majority of footage is being shot on the Cannon 5D Mark but we’ll also be using a lot of archival that will be coming in on various formats. The budget is small and so we’re trying to find the best editing format that will save on drive costs but not cause problems at the end.
Seems like the best plan is to convert the 5D footage to ProRes 422 and edit in a ProRes 422 sequence. Then when it’s time to finish, export a ProRess 422 QuickTime file to do grading and final output at a post house. Does that sound right? We’ll be waiting till picture lock to buy the full res archival. we’ll probably capture it at the post house, then cut into the quicktime there – I assume in a ProRes 422 or 10-bit uncompressed sequence.
Follow up questions are: should we go to ProRes 422 HQ instead? Will we really save that much drive space by using just ProRes 422? Also, what about working with Proxy files? That seems like it will save us a ton of drive space but I’m not finding a good description of what that work flow will be and how we connect the sequence back to the high res files.
My system is a MacPro with 2×3 GHz Quad-core intel processor and 9 gb of ram. Only have Firewire and USB though, no sata or fibre channel card.
Thanks for all feedback and suggestions!
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5 Replies
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You have 4 sata connections inside your Mac Pro. 1 will be used up for your system drive however you can install 3 more drives on the sleds provided in the machine and stripe a pair Raid0 for speed using disk utility. If you purchase some 2 tb bare SATA drives that’ll give you 4tb for $500
https://eshop.macsales.com/item/Western%20Digital/WD2001FASS/
as an example many other vendors as well
Doug Beal
Editor / Engineer
Rock Creative Images
Nashville TN -
I just meant besides the internal SATA drives I can only add firewire and usb external drives. I have about 4TB inside, but we will probably go beyond that. Buying a sata card might be possible, but I don’t think necessary if we’re editing ProRes?
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[Anne Leaf] “Follow up questions are: should we go to ProRes 422 HQ instead?”
No. That’s overkill for DSLR footage.
[Anne Leaf] ” Will we really save that much drive space by using just ProRes 422?”
OH MY YES. 1 hour of ProRes 422 is 75.3GB. 1 hour of ProRes HQ is 112.4GB. 37GB per hour difference. That’ll really add up. And you see ZERO quality difference between the two with this footage.
[Anne Leaf] “so, what about working with Proxy files?”
That’s a valid option. Edit with Proxy, media manage the cut, reimport at ProRes 422 only what is in the cut. Up to you. If you have the drive space, working full res saves time, but if you don’t, then reimporting is a breeze. BUT TEST THE WORKFLOW FIRST! ALWAYS test before you leap.
[Anne Leaf] “That seems like it will save us a ton of drive space but I’m not finding a good description of what that work flow will be and how we connect the sequence back to the high res files. “
That is called the OFFLINE/ONLINE workflow…described in detail here:
Shane
GETTING ORGANIZED WITH FINAL CUT PRO DVD…don’t miss it.
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def -
Thanks Shane! Sounds like ProRes will be the easiest and still be affordable, but I’ll put the proxy option out there for the producers also. They can crunch the numbers as they say…
Cheers!
Anne -
The price of external FW800 drives is trivial compared to the time taken with an offline/online approach. So work with ProRess422 not proxy.
I would take a Media Managed version of the final edit to a post house that can run FCS3 and grade with Color.
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