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Pro Res woes…
i’m at my online facility, ready to go online to HDCam, and had two shows all rendered out, each in three different codecs: DVCPro HD, Pro Res HQ 1920, and HDTV 8 bit. i did the variety not knowing for sure what this facility could use. i had called ahead and talked with their editor, and this was the best plan we came up with.
so, as i’ve already mentioned before when i render out a single DVCPro HD QT file, SOMETIMES FCP renders it out at 1920 x 1080, and other times it renders out at 1280 x 1080, with no apparent rhyme or reason as to why it is doing either. anyway, the ones that rendered out as 1280 worked fine, went to tape beautifully. but the ones that were at 1920 would play back on the timeline, but would not play through to the HDCam deck and therefore not even the output monitor. very strange indeed. so, out best bet with what we have here was to take the 1920 files, put them in a 1280 timeline, and re-render. golly, only another hour to go! this just seems like it shouldn’t have had to happen…
then the Pro Res! these would not play back at full quality off the timeline. they just upgraded to FCP 6 here a short time so are still feeling their way around a bit, and i noticed that they only had (2) Pro Res options in the “Easy Setups”, which i thought might be causing the problem. we went to their “additional easy setups” and saw the plethora of Pro Res codecs availalble there, and it apeared that these had already been installed because there were several Pro Res codecs available when trying to change the sequence settings. the point here is just that they weren’t available when doing an easy setup, so i’m thinking something may not be installed right here. does this make any sense to anyone?
anyway, none of my Pro Res files work here (at least, not at full quality), even though the codecs SEEM to be installed…or maybe they really ARE installed yet there is just something wrong with Pro Res in general??
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3 Replies
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Mortimer,
You didn’t mention what type of video card the facility had, and that certainly can make a difference. If for instance they happened to have a Kona 3 card, which does upconvert, cross convert, and down convert, they could have done your print to tape using any HD QT file. However, not all video cards have all of those features, and so they require much a more rigid and defined methodology.
David
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Maybe its the computer.
My Dual 2GHZ G5 cannot capture or play Pro Res at all.
You really need to be using a MacPro, or if the stars are in perfect alignment, a Quad G5.
The 1920/1280 weirdness in the export is a bug that has been discussed here recently.
A workaround that helped me was putting a Broadcast Safe filter on the offending clips, then rendering. FCP now reads the render file instead of the original media, and the export works at the correct size–1280. In my case, I narrowed the problem down to a few clips (that had nothing actually wrong with them–they were the correct frame size).
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The missing prores easy setups could have been caused by their in house computer guy removing what he thought would be unused easy setups to ease confusion for the editors.
I’ve been tempted to this as well (I Mean who uses all of those) but the one time I might need a 720P Pal easy setup, it wouldn’t be there, so I leave it be.
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