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Activity Forums Apple Final Cut Pro Legacy H.264, DVCPRO or Pro Res?

  • H.264, DVCPRO or Pro Res?

    Posted by Andrew Conner on March 4, 2010 at 2:24 pm

    Hello everyone!

    So here is my ordeal… A lot of what we are shooting is 720p on a Panasonic HPX170 and either the Canon Rebel T1i or the Canon 5D MKII. So, as you know the Panasonic footage comes in as DVCPRO HD, while the Canon comes in as h.264. We are having some trouble editing the footage as it seems to bogging down our system and dropping frames.

    I am no expert to FCP but I noticed one of the newest features in FCS 3 was the expanded ProRes family. This caught my eye because of the ProRes 422 (Proxy) which would allow us to edit at a lower quality but still export our final product in full quality HD by reconnecting to the master clips.

    Would this be an option worth exploring? And I guess my ultimate question is, in order to obtain that workflow will I have to use compressor to convert all of my DVCPRO and h.264 footage to ProRes (Proxy)? Or is there a way to edit in a “proxy” version f DCVPRO and h.264?

    A lot of our editing is on the road on laptops which is always a pain having multiple external hard drives hooked up. This seems like a simple solution to eliminate over working our systems, but we definitely don’t want to have to add another step to our workflow by converting our footage to pro res.

    I hope this wasn’t too confusing.

    Any information would be much appreciated. Thanks!

    Zane Barker replied 16 years, 2 months ago 2 Members · 1 Reply
  • 1 Reply
  • Zane Barker

    March 4, 2010 at 4:33 pm

    h.264 is NOT a editing codec it is a delivery codec. Convert the video to ProRes.

    There are a LOT of posts on here about editing video from DSLRs and they will all tell you the same thing about editing h.264 A search of the forums will give you more info.

    Hindsight is always 1080p

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