how to combine multiple ProRes files into one?

[Tod Hopkins]

The simplest solution is to import into Premiere, string out, and reexport as ProResHQ. The generational loss will be near zero assuming you match all specs and don’t add any other processing. That’s the point of ProRes HQ. ProRes HQ has been tested many times for generational loss and it is, at worse, near zero, even after many generations.

Even faster, nest the string out, then use the nested sequence as your source. This requires learning to edit from a sequence. Not hard, but a bit obtuse when you do it for the first time.

There is software that will concatenate your files without re-encoding. ffmpeg can do this. On Mac I use the UI called ffWorks by OSbytes for ffmpeg chores. I have not used it to do this.

I prefer the first two because I can control other parameters. For instance, most camera original has blank audio tracks. I can remove these in the resulting file and save myself the work of deselecting in edit. I can also reset the time code. For instance, if it was shot NDF and I want DF because it’s a long take. Or it was freerun and I want it to start at a specific hour or set it to approximate time-of-day.

[Sam Frazier, Jr.]

Thanks for that! It wouldn’t work for me though to export as one long file as the reason I’m combining the files is to help them get recognized in an audio sync in PluralEyes.

I was dreading exporting each group of files, but then found that I could import each folder w/ these small files into Media Encoder as something to “stitch together”. The advantage of that is I just had to import each folder one by one, then export the whole thing at once. Took around 1.25 hours, but it seems to have done fine. I was also lucky as the audio only had two tracks, so I didn’t need to do anything special to it.