Converting footage to ProRes 422 in Vegas or Windows

[John Rofrano]

[charles meadows] “Is it possible to convert to PR422 in Vegas or in Windows?”

No. There is no ProRes 422 codec for Windows.

[charles meadows] “I’ve looked at the Raylight encoder but is that going to give me PR422? “

No. Raylight will give you DVCPROHD & DVCPRO50.

[charles meadows] “Is it just a case that I either have the footage converted by someone who has FCP and a Mac or that I get a Mac and convert it myself?”

Pretty much. If you want to create ProRes 422 you will need FCP. Since FCP isn’t available on Windows you will also need a Mac. Just to be clear, buying a Mac alone isn’t enough. ProRes 422 comes with FCP so you need that too.

I was recently in a situation where a post house wanted to charge an extra $400 transcoding fee for submitting non-ProRes files. Since we were submitting 13 episodes of a show that would have cost an extra $5,200 in which case it would be cheaper to buy a MacBook Pro and FCP Studio for around $2,400 and just send them ProRes files.

So if you run into this a lot, it may be cheaper to just buy a Mac as a transcoding device. Think if it as an expensive dongle for your transcoding software. 😉

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Dave Haynie]

You do have to have MacOS and FCP to get this going. But if your only reason is creating FCP files, there are some possible shortcuts.

First of all, the Mac. Going the totally legit route, you can run FCP on a Mac Mini. Or buy an older Mac on eBay. Obviously, if you have other uses, you’re not going to get great mileage out of the more CPU intensive modules that come with, but if you only need to transcode video (and FCP is fairly low overhead, in the same class as Cineform or Avid DNxHD.. and in fact, if you export to DNxHD, you can read this directly in Quicktime on any Mac with the Avid plug-in installed), why pay for more juice.

If it were me, I’d by a copy of MacOS and see if I couldn’t get it running on an old PC as a “Hackintosh”, or better still, in a VirtualBox VM. There are suggestions on how to do this easily found online. This is against the Apple shrink wrap license, though, so if you believe those are legal, you may want to take a different approach.

As for FCP, I’d look around for an older copy still in stock somewhere. This is how I first got Photoshop… in the days of Photoshop 4, I found a copy of Photoshop 3 for $60 at a computer fair. Totally legal, and once registered, I qualified for a low cost upgrade to PS4. And of course, the older version of FCP may produce perfectly acceptable ProRes output. ProRes was apparently introduced in Final Cut Studio 2. I’ve seen this on eBay, new, for about $450… and you can bet it’s around for less. You can find educational versions for less yet, but these are not licensed for commercial application, such as converting video for client delivery.

Now of course, for a business that needs this often enough, you may just go in head first and pay the price — too much mucking around during business hours, and you’re better off just buying the Mac setup at your local Apple store.

But I’m very much against proprietary formats like ProRes being any kind of acceptable standard, much less a required one. Particularly when better companies are working to deliver open standards… like Avid’s DNxHD (which is officially standardized as SMPTE VC-3). So I wouldn’t personally feel good about either paying $400 per conversion or paying Apple top dollar for an otherwise useless, very overpriced PC. Ok, sure, you could run Windows on the Mac when not converting FCP. But a creative solution is so much more fun.

Not that I did this for Vegas … in fact, my first copy of Vegas was a freebie; I had helped out one of the Sonic Foundry engineers and he surprised me with gratis copies of Vegas and Acid. But they’ve seen my cash ever since, and I’ve spread the gospel — very good marketing on their part).

-Dave

[Charles Meadows]

Dave,

Thanks for the info. Personally I think the whole Prores thing is a completely pointless exercise furthered by Mac FCP based editors who know diddly squat but want to seem knowledgable. There is nothing worse, in my book, than an idiot who is yet to cotton on that they are indeed an idiot (and a lot of them seem to be users of Mac and FCP). I eventually gave the client the original files from the EX1 along with Quick Time hires files as back up and I’ve heard no complaints or grumbles.

[Dave Haynie]

The easy thing would be to get the ProRes guy to install the Avid DNxHD plug-in. Takes a minute, and from then on, you can exchange full quality video files, on … well… maybe some kind of hard drive. Do Macs read NTFS these days? I know they don’t usually have BD-ROM drives, much less BDXL. Ok, I don’t have BDXL either… yet.

But as John says, if you have a client base that demands this, you probably have to comply. If it’s just a rare occasional thing, there’s always some alternative. And it sounds like you did the one I would have. Despite their world of odd, proprietary formats, FCP editors do ultimately have to import video from their cameras. Other than the rare workflow that shoots directly in ProRes, this means that your original files (or an edit in the same format) are something they can deal with.

-Dave