From Apple Prores 422 to DVCPRO HD 1080 24P

[Rafael Amador]

Alberto, sorry your post has ended up on the FC Basic Forum, although your question (at least for my self0 is not that “basic”.
I’m sure Shane Ross will solve your question.
He is an expert on this kind of workflows.
I’m not.
Cheers,
rafael

http://www.nagavideo.com

[Shane Ross]

[alberto anzani] “I shooted a movie with DVCPRO HD 1080 1280×1080 24p with panasonic and I used in Final Cut Media Manager recompressing all in AppleProres 422 HQ 1280×720 24p for editing.”

Why did you convert that footage to ProRes? All you did by doing that is increase the file size. No quality gain occurs. The original format is an 8-bit format…that won’t change. And DVCPRO HD is perfectly workable for editing. Far easier and faster than ProRes. OH, but you decreased the dimensions of the footage! No longer 1080, but now 720. I don’t know why you did what you did, but what you did was very wrong.

[alberto anzani] “Now, for a film transfer I would like to use the native quality.”

Your thinking is very backwards. You didn’t compress to a LOWER format…you compressed to a HIGHER format, but with smaller dimensions. Going back won’t get you better quality. If anything, it will garner you WORSE quality, as you now recompress to DVCPRO HD, and bump up the dimensions…blowing up the footage.

[alberto anzani] ” if I do the inverse, compress the sequence from Proress 720 do Dvcpro1080, I am sure that the quality of the new Master clips will be equal with the native footage?”

You will now have compressed the footage twice. The quality will actually be worse than if you used the original files, or if you use the current ProRes ones. What I’d try to do is reconnect to the DVCPRO HD masters that you media managed away from…if they still exist. If they don’t, then reimport them all again and try to link to them…yes, you will have to import ALL of the footage, and the full length, in order to reconnect. If you have the original files you media managed away from, you should be able to simply reconnect. But then you need to change your sequence settings, and any moves on stills, or zooming on the footage, will have to be redone manually.

[alberto anzani] ” All the color correction will be lost?”

If you convert, it will no doubt be “baked” into the footage. Permanently there.

The problem is that you did very wrong things from the start, and to fix them will take a lot of luck and time and effort. IF you don’t know how to do it…I suggest calling in someone who does.

Shane

GETTING ORGANIZED WITH FINAL CUT PRO DVD…don’t miss it.
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def

[Alberto Anzani]

Dear Shane,
thanks so much for you help.
Probably I had bad advise compressing the footage to proress 422 and reducing the frame to 720,
but that permitted me to reduce all the footage to assamble to a 1 thera, from 3 thera and work with a laptop.

Luckily I still have all: the original project t in FC where I logged and transferred the clips in DVCPRO HD in 3 HardDisk.

The matter is transform the sequence with the linked clips from proress720 to dvcpro hd 1080

To solve this matter could work also this way?:

In the project proress in media manager create offline set the new sequence at DVCPRO HD 1080
deleting inused part and put all in a new project
Then try to recconect media from the original 3 harddisk to this new project.

About the print of film. What’s your suggestion? export a unique file in Quicktime?
If I export the project in the same DVCPRO HD 1080 24p native
Quicktime say that the frame is 1920×1080 and the codec is DVCPRO HD 1080i60, if I put 1080 30p I will have the same frame and codec but just a better bit rate.

What about you experience in the print with cinevator? Thank-u so much
alberto