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HD codecs for stock footage
Hi,
I have a question about HD codecs. I am working on a project with a large amount of stock footage from a number of different footage houses. Some deliver their HD materials @ Prores 422, others at Motion JPEG A or B. Are either of these formats significantly preferable over the other?I know we need to be editing in only one format, so we are planning on either transcoding to DVCPRO HD or in the new Prores Proxy format in FCS 7.
Does anybody have any suggestions/precautions regarding any of these formats, or on workflow issues? Which would be the best format to be editing in in terms of image quality?
Thanks!
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4 Replies
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All these questions have different answers depending what You are doing, what is main image format of entire project and what is Your final delivery method? Is it web, sd-broadcast, dvd, bluray, powerpoint, hd-broadcast..?
“Are either of these formats significantly preferable over the other?”
-ProRes is an native Apple FCP editing codec, it works beautifully; fast renders, small file sizes, great image quality. By using it You are practically totally safe in all cases: web or Big Screen.
Motion JPEG is not real time supported on FCP, at least in FCP 6. I don´t know about 7.Forget DVCProHD, it´s anamorphic. And most of HD stock footage is not, so You would loose image quality by using DVCProHD.
But why ProRess Prozy? Why not just use simply ProRes? Isn´t ProRess Prozy ment for some kind of off-line use? -
This project is meant for a bluray DVD delivery. We were planning on using prores proxy because of the low data rate and the fact that we are working on a MBP, not a tower, and are not sure if there would be enought processing power. Ideally we would work in prores proxy and then be able to use the media manager to go back to the original full-res files. Does this make sense?
We would be working on FC 7 so I suppose I need to figure out if that supports realtime editing with Motion JPEG.Does that answer your questions?
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Don’t use Proxy, use at least LT. Proxy is meant to be a full raster offline codec. We cut ProRes and HQ on laptops in the field. It’s possible.
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I work with MacBook Pro and ProRess all the time and there is no problem.
Bluray is one of the most demanding delivery format because it is so high quality. All mistakes and faults from production are visible for end users. So use ProRess, Proress HQ or uncompressed, but with MBP there is some problems with uncompressed.
It´s kind of funny but small file size means high compression level and that means BIGGER NEED FOR PROCESSING POWER! Smalest amount of processing power is needed when working with UNCOMPRESSED material but that means HUGE file sizes.
With huge file size the problems are storage space, storage read/write speed and connection speed, for example firewire 800 is not enough for editing.
So our life is almost always compromise between filesize, connection speed and computing power.
And to my opinion in these days there is no need to go that old fashion off-line-on-line route. All modern Macs are fast enough for on-line and disk space is practically free.
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