How to get a Vegas project rendered ProRes 422 for FCP

[Tim Neighbors]

Also, should I be rendering to PAL? This is ultimately going to the web, so I’m not sure it will matter.

[John Rofrano]

[Tim Neighbors] “Is this the best approach or is there some QT output setting within Vegas that will work.”

QuickTime does not support encoding ProRes on Windows.

[Tim Neighbors] “If not, what would be the best way to render for this 3rd party app to then take it to ProRes 422?”

I would render to Sony MXF if you are buying Cinex Pro or Avid DNxHD if you just buy Cinec. You’d have to download Avid’s DNxHD codec but Sony MXF is built into Vegas Pro.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[John Rofrano]

[Tim Neighbors] “Also, should I be rendering to PAL? This is ultimately going to the web, so I’m not sure it will matter.”

Ask the company you are delivering to. Australia is a PAL country so that’s probably what they are expecting but double-check with them.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Mike Kujbida]

[John Rofrano] “[Tim Neighbors] “Is this the best approach or is there some QT output setting within Vegas that will work.”

QuickTime does not support encoding ProRes on Windows.”

John, I installed the codec that Tim suggested and it appears to work for creating a ProRes file. What I don’t know is if it’s a “real” ProRes file. If you or someone who has a Mac is willing to try it out to confirm, that would be greatly appreciated as this may finally solve a long time stumbling block for PC users wanting to create ProRes files. Thanks.

[Matthew Ross]

I just did a couple of tests on my PC and checked them out over on my Mac. One of the encodes I did was from WMV to ProRes 422 and while the picture was fine, I wasn’t getting any audio and QuickTime was complaining about needing to download more components to play correctly. I believe that’s because the audio was probably still WMA.

Another test was an H.264 .MOV file converted to ProRes 422 and that seemed to work fine with both audio and video. So I think if you feed it an audio stream that QuickTime plays natively like AAC from an H.264 encode or obviously just uncompressed, it works fine.

Final Cut Pro recognizes these encoded files as ProRes 422, but I did notice that QuickTime itself reports the video format as “prores” while with a “real” ProRes file created on the Mac it reports “Apple ProRes 422.” I’m not sure if there are any implications there that a user needs to worry about; I guess someone would have to send such an encoded file to someone requesting ProRes and see if there are any acceptance problems.

[Matthew Ross]

Follow up: I also did a DNxHD encode to ProRes 422, and while it initially looked like the audio and video came across just fine, there is a noticeable change in gamma (ProRes is darker). I know I’ve read about gamma issues going back and forth between these two CODECs before; I don’t know what can be done about it here.