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Is ProRes the big victim of FCPX?
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[Andrew Richards] ” FCPX doesn’t let you define HQ, LT, or 4444 for it’s optimized media”
Does it always render to plain “ProRes 422”?
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[Dan Hayes] “Does it always render to plain “ProRes 422″?”
As I understand it, yes.
Best,
Andy -
I didn’t know about Dirac. The idea was very good until I checked it for quality and found this study.
https://keyj.emphy.de/video-encoder-comparison/It seems it’s even worse than mpg2 for medium bitrates.
Interesting tho. BBC being public, it could have been a good idea. -
[Eduardo Serrano] ” it will be a much harder fight to get rid of tape”
Think of it this way. FCPX is the first NLE in history to build itself around ZERO tape capture. That was one of the first things that people barked at.
As others have observed, it looks like ProRes will be just fine for the foreseeable future…although the time frame that we can foresee just got a whole lot shorter, eh?
But it really is the wild west for tapeless DELIVERY, especially in Hollywood, where SR was the universal language for mastering and delivery. ProRes is nowhere near becoming any kind of standard. It’s on the list, mind you, but I think that the upshot of tapeless is that the idea of A standard is gone forever. There are standards, and the client will tell what they want, end of story.
You know which tapeless format is coming on strong? HDCAM SR. Even before the tsunami, Sony’s recent SR gear releases have virtually all been tapeless.
My point is, there are dozens, if not scores of potential tapeless formats and workflows.
One reason why ProRes came on so strong is that FCP has never been very good at supporting camera formats. It has been easier for Apple to get companies like Cinedeck and AJA to work on outboard recorders, and ARRI and other camera makers to write to Apple’s own codec than get FCP to support theirs.
Here’s my guess, though: FCPX is going to work modularly. Camera manufacturers will either give you their software decoders for free, or they’ll be available as in-app purchases.
If this works as well as FXPlug has. Higher quality and better performance than anything Apple ever did themselves, for very low cost. While it has plenty of limits, it’s the best plug-in architecture that’s ever been built.
How cool would it be to have INSTANT camera format support? No waiting for Apple whatsoever. The fact is that Apple has ZERO financial incentives to build in codec support. Every new one brings more development costs, more support costs, with no chance of recovering those costs in incremental new sales.
A camera manufacturer not only has the incentive, they’ve already done the work by creating the codec in the first place. There’s no extra cost. Now if they could deliver it direct to you without waiting on Apple? Directly into the app? Yowza.
And rather than SPEND money to develop codecs, Apple would take a slice of every sale. This really could be huge.
All the other features and lack thereof are what they are — but for tapeless, nobody offers more POTENTIAL than FCPX. We’ll see.
[Dave LaRonde] ” Their goal is to develop an open-source, cross-platform, non-proprietary, universally-accessible multimedia container with excellent utility for professional use”
I think you might be thinking of IIF ACES: – IIF – Image Interchange format ACES – Academy Color Encoding Specification. There are many, many partners in the worlds of hardware, software, post and technology.
Pick an encoding format. Fast forward a few years. The file may not contain headers that George Jetson’s computer can read. George won’t know anything about the color space, bit depth, frame rate, or all the other critical metadata fields that will tell you what the file actually is or how to play it. IIF-ACES encoding and decoding carries all that.
That’s the archive component. The workflow component carries a lot of that same metadata, plus lens information, camera position, and so on. There are hundreds of fields in the spec. The issue now is that, no matter how many fields you fill in, most downstream applications ignore that, and write in their own fields. The Academy and its partners are trying to fix that.
One interesting possibility with FCPX is that there’s never been an NLE to support more metadata fields. Right now, FCPX’s approach is destructive, but it would be pretty slick if they’d just pass the source metadata right on through.
Anyway, that’s true regardless of codec, so you might be thinking of something else too. 🙂
For today, the heavyweights of native camera tapeless workflows are Premiere and Vegas. If FCPX stays as open as it looks like they could, with the robustness of their FXPlug architecture, well, we might have a contendah.
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[Tim Wilson] “FCPX is the first NLE in history to build itself around ZERO tape capture.”
Incorrect. From Apple: “Final Cut Pro X does support FireWire import for DV, DVCPRO, DVCPRO 50, DVCPRO HD, and HDV.”
Tape archives will be around for many years. Until all the tape libraries go away, we won’t be able to get rid of tape.
I run a business that transfers obsolete tape formats. There is still a lot of tape out there.
Best,
Park -
[C. Park Seward] “Incorrect. From Apple: “Final Cut Pro X does support FireWire import for DV, DVCPRO, DVCPRO 50, DVCPRO HD, and HDV.””
Of course you’re correct. So let me rephrase – no other NLE has gone as far in the assumption that tape is on its way out.
[C. Park Seward] “I run a business that transfers obsolete tape formats. There is still a lot of tape out there.”
I couldn’t agree more. I still know of city TV channels that play back 3/4 inch. And I know that’s why a lot of people were so upset to see how limited…well, let’s say “different,” the support for tape acquisition is.
In the long run, though, whether tape or not, I think that every NLE’s biggest issue is dealing with camera formats as natively as possible, with the greatest performance possible. Premiere and Vegas have this in spades. FCPX has the potential, especially if the camera vendors themselves are doing the heavy lifting.
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[Dan Hayes] “Does it always render to plain “ProRes 422″?”
Actually it does allow you specify how you render, either ProRess, HQ, 4444, or Uncompressed 10bit.
It’s the import transcode option that doesn’t allow you to specify yet which flavor of ProRes you want to transcode to.
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[Dave LaRonde] “it also sounds like the turn-by-turn directions to the Holy Grail of a Universal Multimedia Container are still etched in Jell-O.”
You don’t even want to know what Hollywood’s vegetarians are etching it in.
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My theory was that ProRes would be a big reason people would continue to buy FC, but if they stripped it down? IMO DVCPROHD and ProRes were 2 of the biggest game changers for FCP. It’s just really bizarre to see Apples moves here. Maybe they’ll wise up and sell the codecs for $50 or something. That would be the smart thing but…
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[Andrew Richards] “This is a larger problem than just ProRes. ProRes and DNxHD are both proprietary codecs, so they are not ideal for file-based mastering from a compatibility and risk perspective.”
DNxHD is not a proprietary codec. It was ratified several years ago by SMPTE as VC-3. Also, encode and decode QT codecs are available for both OS X and Windows operating systems. Source code for DNxHD is available for download on avid.com.
Michael
Michael Phillips
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