-
h264 or ProRes
Hi, Im a wedding cinematographer, who makes small wedding stories for the clients.
I use 5D Mark 3.I was looking at other videos of some famous wedding cgs and I find their details are much more than my shot footages.
Is it because I shoot at 50fps IPB mode, is that too much compression ?
And shall I go the Atomos Ninja way and shoot uncompressed HDMI output way to ProRes ?
Is there really a heavy difference between the h264 output and prores footages ?
I just mean to ask this, because my clients are small and I dont know, if its really worth to invest on Atomos Ninja and then increase the workflow process longer too with ProRes.
Let me know.
-
6 Replies
-
There are several bit rate options for each format, but in general; Prores is far superior to H.264 with both color and compression.
25P will improve the compression ratio over 50P, but if you do heavy color correction, or deal with more than talking heads, H.264 usually doesn’t hold up very well.
Vince Becquiot
San Francisco Bay Area
-
I normally shoot all at 1280 50p IPB mode, because I mostly use slow motion in the wedding videos.
So, I shoot at 720p but I scale them all to 1080p in Premiere Pro frame.
And the premiere pro timeline is always 25p.
And about the color correction, I use Magic Bullet Looks presets only and alter it a bit.
-
I shoot in 1080p with the Blackmagic shuttle2 recorder which captures Prores HQ. I also edit in a 1080p timeline. Your timeline should match the resolution of your camera footage. If you shoot slomo at 720p then the tmeline sequence should be 720p. The sequence should also match the frame rate of your wedding footage.
Prores will maintain quality during edit. H264 is okay to use for delivery, like to Youtube.
You have a good camera so capture the best quality. Your wedding cliens will thank you for it. -
I always shoot at 1280 50p IPB mode.
And I always pull them to the 1080p timeline and do SCALE TO FRAME.
Never had a problem.
-
” Never had a problem ”
Well apparently there IS a problem, you’ve asked for help because your videos are not as clear as those of the competition. Any time you upscale your video, like 720p to 1080p, there will be softening. Why not stay 720p and deliver a clean 720p product to the customer? You are not doing anyone a favor by delivering 1080p from a 720p source. It is still 720p, but now looks worse because it has been blown-up.
I’m a fan of the Ninja units, have used them on several projects. But in my case, it was more for convenience. My cameras are HDV and when shooting multiple long events, there is lots of tape changing and then many, many hours of capturing all of those tapes. Ninja allows me to capture direct to the hard drive, ready to edit!
As for quality…recording to ProRes with 4:2:2 color can be helpful when planning to do a lot of color grading, or especially compositing such as green screen work. Fast motion video will have less artifacting with the higher data rate and more robust codec. But in general, you will not see an obvious difference between camera native footage and the ProRes most of the time, without scrutinizing the footage side by side and expanding the image to check/compare details. In other words, don’t expect your footage to magically look much better just because of using Ninja. To the naked eye during playback, the footage will usually look the same.
Thank you
Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers -
Oh I did not know that.
So, for the current project, better I simply copy the whole timeline to a new 720p sequence and then render
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up