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Looking for Speed & Economy for BBall DVD Editing – ProRes LT vs AVCHD editing?
Thank you in advance for reading! I really need some wisdom on this.
I do basketball shoots to make DVDs for coaches around the world. We shoot with two Sony NX5U’s in 1080p 30p AVCHD, and use the Canon 7D as a third camera some of the time.
My editing machine will soon be a 2.3Ghz i7 Retina Display Macbook Pro (256GB SSD, 16GB RAM, 1GB GeForce GT 650M graphics), and I’ll be editing off a USB 3.0 external drive (1.5TB, 5400rpm WD).
With projects so far, I’ve been spending a couple days converting everything to ProRes LT. Since there’s inevitably always a glitch after the conversion, I have to keep both the raw footage and the converted footage, and the ProRes footage is 3-5x larger than the AVCHD.
As I understand it, FCPX will actually handle AVCHD, but my first attempt at importing AVCHD rewrapped as .MOV (in ClipWrap 2.5) causes FCPX to crash every time it tries to load that event.
So what I would love to be able to do is simply rewrap the AVCHD footage and edit with that. I do basic color correction, basic cuts, simple crossfades, and that’s it. My concern is that the MBP won’t be able to play back 3 layers of AVCHD reasonably smoothly. If that’s the case, is there a codec I could edit in that doesn’t take up as much space as ProRes LT? We do export 720p footage for the web on occasion, but this is mostly for SD DVD, so slight losses in quality won’t make any difference.
That said, if you believe I could go that route (edit AVCHD), curious if you have any idea why FCPX crashes every time I try and use it?
I really appreciate any help you can offer! Thank you again!
Evan
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1 Reply
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Evan,
Sounds like a fun project. A couple of thoughts:
– Test the USB 3.0 drive before you commit to it. USB by its very design is not in the same class as firewire or thunderbolt. It is more taxing not the processor and access speed can be slower.
– I would definatley try to stay native, and FCP X should have no problem doing that. You need to bring in your AVCHD via “Import from Camera”, FCP X should take care of the “wrapping” for you. You’ll probably plug in via USB depending on your camera.
– from my small experience with it, the new MacBookPro with Retina should have no problem with 3 streams of h264.
– Alternative codecs. I would test bringing in all our native footage and then making proxy versions of your footage overnight. Proxy is actually decent quality, but quarter res. So for 1080p material it is 960×540 which looks perfectly fine on a SD DVD and is passable with a 720 uprez.My 2 cents.
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T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque
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