Maintaining Best quality with DV

[Alex Elkins]

[Ralph Atkinson] “I’m wondering is there any benefit to exporting the end results as Pro-Res before taking it into Compressor?”

Yes, there is. Things like graphics and any colour correction will be visibly cleaner looking. Definitely render as ProRes.

Best,
Alex Elkins

[David Roth weiss]

However, these benefits that Alex points out don’t come with just an export to ProRes, the timeline must be rendered as ProRes first. So, either move everything to ProRes timeline and render, or change the compressor settings in Sequence>>Settings to ProRes and then re-render.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

[Alex Elkins]

Thanks David, I was quite vague in my response there.

Set the sequence to ProRes, render, then export using ‘Current Settings’ for optimal quality.

[David Roth weiss]

That’s okay Alex, cuz I left out the export info…

Between the two of us we have managed to include everything.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

[Juha Vauhkonen]

Hey, is this with Prores compression only, that you should render the timeline as Prores first before exporting? What about Uncompressed formats?

I don’t understand what’s the point that one has to render the timeline to Prores before exporting, unless you want to check the final quality before export?

I thought the point of all those dozens of compression settings in the export window was to free FCP user from hassle to create extra timelines for different compressions…?

[David Roth weiss]

[juha vauhkonen] “Hey, is this with Prores compression only”

We are talking about DV… DV compression hammers graphics and text because it knock it all down to 4:1:1 color space. Don’t sweat the other video codecs, they are are all 4:2:2 color space and so they won’t destroy graphics the way DV does. Get it?

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

[Alex Elkins]

[juha vauhkonen] “I thought the point of all those dozens of compression settings in the export window was to free FCP user from hassle to create extra timelines for different compressions…?”

This is the case as long as you tick ‘Recompress all frames’ in the Export window. Otherwise all you’re doing is essentially exporting a DV movie, then converting the lower quality version to ProRes – rendering in the timeline as ProRes, or re-compressing all frames, strips the low quality render and keeps it in the best quality it can.

Hope that makes a bit more sense.

Best,
Alex Elkins

[Chris Poisson]

DR,

You two did miss something, and that is to set your render settings in the video processing tab to high precision YUV and set motion filtering to best.

Have a wonderful day.

[Tony Young]

Would you get any better quality if you digitized DVCAM tapes to ProRes in the first place and then put them on a Prores timeline?

Or would it be the same quality to use the DVCAM footage that has been digitized to DVNTSC and then placed on a Prores timeline?