Free up power to edit on laptop

[Matthew Sonnenfeld]

You don’t want to transcode to H.264. Not only was that the original recording codec, but by making those files smaller you did lose significant quality even if you can’t immediately see it. Trust me, when it comes times to color correct, you will see it. More than that,H.264 is great for acquisition but misery for actually working with. It is an extremely CPU intensive codec. I would recommend transcoding to a more standard editing codec. You would have a wonderful time downloading the free version of GoPro Cineform Studio and converting all of your ORIGINAL files to Cineform and editing them from there. Cineform works wonders for H.264 footage. File size may even increase but don’t worry; it is a much stronger codec to use for editing and even for your final output depending on where it’s going. You should see a pretty serious increase in performance. If not, I’d be very surprised.

Panasonic HPX170, Canon 7D
2011 Macbook Pro 17″, 2.3 Ghz Quad Core, 8GB RAM
AJA IoXT
Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5, Final Cut Pro Studio 3, Avid Media Composer 3.5.4
The College of William and Mary

[Ashley Davis]

Thank you sooo much Matthew! it’s not perfect but works a whole lot better and allowed me to spend most of the night editing!

Is there much loss of quality when converting from original footage on 7D? Also, do you know what the best format to export out as is?

[Matthew Sonnenfeld]

Hi Ashley,

Just glad to be able to help! Another thing that you can try within premiere if you haven’t already is to set the playback resolution to half or even a quarter. If you’re only working on your laptop you shouldn’t really notice a quality loss as its playing in those tiny screens. This can be very beneficial when working with HD+ footage.

In terms of quality, Cineform has a really fantastic algorithm. If I can dig it up I have a comparison screenshot of 5DmkII footage next to the same scene converted to Cineform. Night and day, the Cineform looks BETTER. Only time I’ve actually gained quality after a generation. If I find it I’ll repost it on here but it’s not on the computer that I’m on now.

As for the output format, Cineform is very good but you will find yourself limited in terms of where you can play it as other machines will need the Cineform codec to play it back. But that will most likely yield you the highest quality in terms of a master file so I would definitely recommend exporting one right out of Premiere to have a high quality master. You can make your copies for distribution off of that. On a PC it would probably be good to have a copy in Avid DNxHD. Their codecs are available for free online also. This of course may wind up with the same problems as a Cineform in terms of playback though…. You could also always export a high quality .avi. For PC that will be fine, will have trouble on a Mac but that may not be an issue for you.

Really it depends on where you want it to go. If it’s for youtube/vimeo then you want an H.264. Just choose this setting in the export window and select the preset for VimeoHD or YouTube HD. Then just check the export settings to make sure that the frame rate is correct and everything (I know that the VimeoHD setting defaults to 29.97… very frustrating when you have 23.976 footage. Need to always remember to change it). Same things with DVD and Blu-Ray… just choose the presets and check the settings. If you just want a high quality digital master to show your friends, just export the Cineform (which you should do anyway and make conversions off of the master and not right out of Premiere). It would be a bad day if you lost your project and only had a low resolution/highly compressed master file.

Let me know if you have any more questions!

Best,
Matt

Panasonic HPX170, Canon 7D
2011 Macbook Pro 17″, 2.3 Ghz Quad Core, 8GB RAM
AJA IoXT
Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5, Final Cut Pro Studio 3, Avid Media Composer 3.5.4
The College of William and Mary