How to export a sequence’s clips and transcode to Prores

[Vince Becquiot]

Hi Keith,

Prores is exclusive to Apple/FCP.

Vince Becquiot

Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area

[Alex Udell]

Keith do you have the FCP suite?

If so, you have Compressor.

Export from PPro via some lossless method then use a Compressor droplet to do the conversion.

Alex

[Keith Moreau]

I do have the FCP suite. There are some things I need to do in FCP where either a plugin isn’t available or I haven’t yet purchased or found a substitute for it or the same plugin from Ppro or AE seems buggy and less or unusuable. Since PPro is all about FCP XML import and export, I figured they’d do a bit to make this happen on a media level too besides EDL level.

Anyway, thank you, do you have a recommendation about which lossless codec to use that would be compatible with FCP directly or at least with good transcode ability?

Thanks much!

[Alex Udell]

MJPEG B or Animation typically work pretty well for transcode source

🙂

Alex

[Keith Moreau]

Now is there a quick way to ‘batch export’ to this codec? When I use the PPro Project Manager it seems to just want to copy the files over. In FCP I could use the Media Manager to convert the files as well, this was handy. I suppose I could use mpeg streamclip for this once the files have been copied.

[Alex Udell]

I think Vince had suggested to throw all clips on a timeline in PPro.

then 1 by 1 in the sequence, select each clip and nest it, this creates a seqeuenc in the project pane for that clip.

then you can add all those nest sequences to AME.

Does that work?

Alex

[Keith Moreau]

Yeah that might work but it’s too much trouble with a lot of clips.

What I wound up doing was using the PPro Project Manager to export just the clips in a particular sequence by copying the media to a new location (which took some time), I don’t think it truncated the media properly, it seem to want to copy all all of each clip, even when I set it not to.

I then used MPeg Streamclip to batch process all the clips into Prores 422, then brought that transcoded batch to Final Cut for some processing.

If I could get the PPro to AE workflow to work reliably for the few effects I need FCP for I wouldn’t have to do this. However, I tried quite a while and couldn’t get a reliable result from PPro to AE. I’d do stuff in AE, AE saw the clips and seemed to process them and PPro did kind of see the results, but they never seemed to render in the final export, so I temporarily scrapped that workflow in favor of the PPro to FCP and back, which, once I did what I described above, worked well.

Thanks everybody for the advice.