ProRes 422 for SD

[Ben Holmes]

Matt,

There are a couple of ProRes discussions below, with a couple of links you may find useful (including an Apple white paper on their website). In brief, however, yes it is compressed and has numerous presets available such as PAL and NTSC framerates and sizes. It is, however, a single codec. Apple claim it to be a high quality compressed codec ideally suited to the needs of post-production and edit hardware, similar to Avid’s own compressed offering.

Ben

Editec Broadcast Editing Ltd

EVS & FCP specialists for live OB operations.

New HD edit/slomo truck on the road this month. Dual FCP systems/6 slomo positions.

[Matt Galuszewski]

Thanks Ben.

I had read the discussions which were manly HD centric. Hence my question re SD.

Thanks for the suggestion on the white paper. Again mainly HD centric with obvious reasons why but one paragraph answered my bit rate questions with regard to SD.

[Ben Holmes]

I think that Apple concentrates on HD as they consider the ability to manipulate HD video more easily to be the killer app – it’s not really hard to deal with SD at the moment with a MBP and a FW800 drive.

However, ProRes has some interesting advantages that may prove a boon for SD – such as a briefly touched-upon ability to be efficiently processed by multiple cores. We shall see…

Ben

Editec Broadcast Editing Ltd

EVS & FCP specialists for live OB operations.

New HD edit/slomo truck on the road this month. Dual FCP systems/6 slomo positions.

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Ben Holmes] “it’s not really hard to deal with SD at the moment with a MBP and a FW800 drive.”

Yes it is in 10bit. ProRes is 10 bit which is the best news to me. There are plenty of decent 8 bit compressed codecs, but it’s hard to find a decent 10bit one that works with FCP. I hope ProRes is all that it’s cracked up to be.

Jeremy

[Ben Holmes]

[JeremyG] “Yes it is in 10bit”

Nope. You can work in uncompressed 10-bit using a fw800 array like the G-Raid, and have been able to use something like this (coupled with the AJA IO) on a Mac laptop for a number of years. With FW800 on Mac towers, such as our old 2.7Ghz machines, we frequently use a Lacie FW800 drive as a backup for 10-bit uncompressed capture and archive needs.

So, whilst I share your hopes for ProRes I’m really hoping for performance gains in SD. As far as HD goes, you can use excellent DVCProHD via the above method, for great quality and performance. So again, I’m hoping ProRes leads to other advantages…

Ben

Editec Broadcast Editing Ltd

EVS & FCP specialists for live OB operations.

New HD edit/slomo truck on the road this month. Dual FCP systems/6 slomo positions.

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Ben Holmes] “You can work in uncompressed 10-bit using a fw800 array like the G-Raid and have been able to use something like this (coupled with the AJA IO) on a Mac laptop for a number of years.”

That’s cool, but i haven’t been able to reliably. I can never capture reliably, playback maybe, but not capture/edit. 2 SATA drives crunch through no problem, but not FW800. Maybe I’m just goofy.

[Ben Holmes]

Jeremy

Works a treat. In fact, more reliably than many SCSI arrays I have used. Always carry one in my bag as a fallback. Sure, scrubbing can be a little less smooth on occasions, but capture via cards or IO is faultless.

You need a good brand FW800 array however, and the G-Raid and Lacie options both (to my knowledge) use a pair of raided drives.

Hope this helps you in the future.

Ben

Editec Broadcast Editing Ltd

EVS & FCP specialists for live OB operations.

New HD edit/slomo truck on the road this month. Dual FCP systems/6 slomo positions.

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Ben Holmes] “You need a good brand FW800 array however, and the G-Raid and Lacie options both (to my knowledge) use a pair of raided drives.”

I’ve tried both, it’s just not for me.

[Chris Borjis]

One of my clients brought over his G-Raid to capture a 5 minute digital betacam clip through my g5 quad via FW800.

We captured it 10-bit SD uncompressed DIRECTLY to his G-Raid.

Worked Great!

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Borjis] ” to capture a 5 minute digital betacam clip”

Right, now try editing a hour long documentary @ 10 bit and outputting that sequence back to digibeta. DOn’t get me wrong, FW800 raids have their place, but it’s just not for me most of the time. Offline editing is wonderful, but when it comes time for the online FW800 raids, in my little corner of the editing world, don’t have what it takes.

Jeremy