HDV – FCP to AE back to FCP

[Jan Sherlink]

highest quality and fastest rendertime;
quicktime uncompressed or animation @100% or “none”

these would be the best codecs !

cya,

Jan

[Jonathan Wiley]

composting and effects pros use image sequences and not wrapped video files for countless good reasons. personally I prefer to convert my video to 16 bpc tiffs.

[Jay Verheyen]

Thanks for the input! Would you mind pointing out a few of those countless reasons of why tiff sequences are preferred over wrapped files?

[Jonathan Wiley]

well… they’re universally excepted, no codec hassles, you can crash a render and pick up on the frame where you went down at without re-rendering the previous frames, you can make changes to a range of frames without rendering others outside of that range, you can batch process in apz like photoshop, keyframes every frame, etc.

[Jan Sherlink]

“Countless reasons” tends to be synonym for “because we’re used to it”
Not to offend anyone, but there are “countles reasons” to use a container too. They both have their pro’s and con’s.
When to use them, might be a better question

some reasons;

Multiprocessing benefits from Image sequences, each core can easily access an Image frame for reading and they can write their own rendered Image. With containers, only one core can write to the file so that core needs to gather all the images (slower).

Moving around a few 100.000’s images over network and Harddrives, gets really slow, AVI or QT copies at a higher speed

If there’s something wrong in an Image Sequence, only render the wrong Images, in a Container you’ll need to rerender the complete clip.

If your going from AE to FCP and you have something like BlackMagic or AJA, render in their uncompressed codec, no sequences needed here.

If you have an AVI or QT, just doubleclick and it’ll play, even with audio 😉

Image sequences don’t need codecs so everybody can open them…
ok that was an old one 😉 everybody can open Quicktime”none” and AVI”uncompressed”, it’s installed in every OS.

Blackmagic’s framelink looks like the best of both worlds !

So,
use what you want, every job needs it’s own approach, just stay away from those interframe compressions.

cya,

Jan