HDV render in Prores : Big NO NO?

[Andy Mees]

What I am saying is that when editing HDV material in an HDV sequence you get the choice of changing your rendering settings to Prores within the HDV sequence (Not the same thing as having a Prores sequence)
Why you would do this is because if you render as HDV, rendering times are much longer and this option permits you to work faster.

yep. we’re still n the same page at this point 🙂

The problem arises once you have finished your editing and want to export it:
If you then have your whole timeline rendered with option to render as Prores and now try to export selfcontained or reference your exporting times go bonkers: 8hours.
Why? Because it doesn’t just export referencing renderfiles but recompressing the whole thing once again.

thats correct … when you export an HDV timeline either self-contained or referenced, and regardless of the render codec, then FCP has to conform that timeline to a single file that conforms to the Long GOP structure. My guess is that the 8 hour render time you see is the estimation of how long it will take to conform your 32 minute sequence.

Solution:
If you on the other hand once finished your editing delete your Prores-rederfiles and rerender your hole timeline as HDV (change your rendering option to same as sequence codec). It will take a while. But once you try to export exporting times go down to 5 for selfcontained and 2 for reference.

interesting. how long is “a while” for you? and are we still talking about a 32 minute timeline? what are your render settings ie Need Render, Proxy, Preview, Full etc ?

Your second option is to change your sequence settings or drop your edited clips into a Prores sequence. Rerender again. And this time exporting times will be very short as well.

correct. the export times would be consideraby shorter now as you are rendering to the much faster ProRes codec rather than having to conform to HDV’s Long GOP structure

I asume by all this that the Prores-rendering option in an HDV sequence is only a meant as a temporary-while-editing solution by apple to help you work on your editing much faster than if you had to render to HDV while you were editing. It is not intended that you export a sequence from these renderfiles and therefore problems arise when you try.

yes, it is a solution to make your edit process much faster but as far as I know you are not expected to have to change this for output … although your own experience suggests that this deserves testing

One more thing that makes me wonder what kind of Prores codec the rendering option in a HDV sequence gives you is that if you try to put an HDV Prores-rendered clip (from HDV sequence) into a Prores sequence. FCP will automatically tell you it needs rendering weather the sequence is Prores 422 or Prores HQ, 8bit or 10 bit.

now that is interesting. again, that deserves testing … it could be a universal thing, or it could be part of the problem that you are having.

Hope it’s a bit clearer now.

a bit 🙂

[Pelai Vancar]

Hi Andy,

answering your questions:

Regarding rendering HDV sequence to HDV.

[Andy Mees] “interesting. how long is “a while” for you? and are we still talking about a 32 minute timeline? what are your render settings ie Need Render, Proxy, Preview, Full etc ?
“

Well what I meant by a while is difficult to say, cause I rendered the timeline in 5 minute segments but I guess the total time was about 4 – 5 hours.
Rendering settings were all ticked even FULL.
Once timeline was completely rendered I then remarked all clips and hit the renderbar wich gives me the conforming message. That took about 1 minute.
Then exporting went superfast.

question 2:

[Andy Mees] “Your second option is to change your sequence settings or drop your edited clips into a Prores sequence. Rerender again. And this time exporting times will be very short as well.

correct. the export times would be consideraby shorter now as you are rendering to the much faster ProRes codec rather than having to conform to HDV’s Long GOP structure
“

Actually here you are wrong. Though rendering may be faster the exporting times are much longer than when exporting HDV (when I said short I meant a lot shorter than 8 hours) since files are much bigger and therefore longer time to write to disk.

iMac 24″ 2.8 extreme, 3gb RAM, 500 gb internal disk + 500 gb FW800 external drive.
OSX 10.4.11, FCP 6.02, QT 7.3

[Andy Mees]

thanks Pelai
appreciate the response. its certainly food for thought as you’re practicing quite a different workflow than I use myself when working with XDCAM HD …. time for further experimentation.
cheers
Andy

[Rafael Amador]

No hard feelings at all. I just wanted you to export your sequence happily, and I larnt something new about FW buses and ports.
Cheers,
Rafael

PPC G5 2x2Gh 4GbRAM/BlackMagic SD/PMBP 17″Core2Duo 4GbRAM
JVC DTV-17″/FCS2/AE CS3/COMBUSTION/SHAKE

[Collin Sie]

I’m sorry to be such a Yutz about this but I’ve read and reread these posts and am still running into the same problem. I’m newer to using HD and understand the basics of what’s being said. I’m stumbling a bit with some of the tech side. Can anyone spell this out to a newbe or point me towards a step by step explanation? I’ve looked around Ken Stone’s site but can’t find it there either. Thanks in advance!