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How do I keep my Footage?
I work with birds and wildlife footage, so I need to keep footage to edit it several months later. I don´t like to tape anymore because it´s a second generation material, so I use FS-4HD drives. When I worked on Windows and Vegas 8.0 Pro I kept the cleaned m2t files as an intermediate codec files, about 3 times the size of the originals.
Now in Mac, with MPEG Streamclip, I have a wide spectrum of possibilities: intermediate Mac HDV (same size of files), Apple Intermediate codec, similar to the one I used on Vegas, files are 3 times the originals and ProRes422, that makes the files 8 times bigger, too much to keep on hard drives.
My feeling is to keep the material in Apple intermediate codec and the edited piece in ProRes422.
Any suggestion?
Some weeks earlier I made a question on how to make the Windows avi files work on mac. I made some trials and the only way to do it (at least with Vegas) is to convert them to Quicktime uncompressed video, FCP reads the files. -
8 Replies
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What camera?
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Canon XLH1
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Why not keep it in it’s native format of HDV?
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The reason is simple, when you do wildlife you get 80 to 90% garbage, you can´t keep that garbage in HDD without making a big confusion and occupying large portions of the discs that are useless. On the other hand there are many situations on which you frame, iluminate, set parameters and pull the trigger of the FS-4HD and when you come back 3 or 4 hours later you might get a few seconds of a hummingbird that made your day, normally a couple of minutes in the middle of 3 hours footage. It has to be cleaned up.
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So, you can’t keep that 3 minutes in HDV? 3 minutes of HDV with 2 channels of audio is about 600 Megabytes, according to AJA’s data rate calculator.
Is that too much space for you?
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Jeremy:
You did not get it. Lets put this example: I come to my laptop with a 40GB set of clips made on Focus FS-4HD. I do not know what is it inside till I screen the whole material. If I am lucky I might get some seconds on each segment of 2GB on which the HDD segments the 3 hours. I need to load this material on FCP to screen it to clean it up. FCP does not read m2t files from a HDD so I have to convert it to any of the readable formats for FCP. My question is: Is Apple intermediate codec good enough to keep the quality of the material?
Thanks -
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Problem solved
Thanks
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