ProRes 422 or HDV for editing

[Ed Dooley]

The advice I’ve read, here and elsewhere, from people I respect is, if you’re capturing
HDV material, edit in HDV, lay-off to ProRes 422.
Do a search here and the AJA IO forumand you’ll find plenty of discussion.
Ed

[Walter Biscardi]

[Core] “What I do most is edit HDV, my question is; what’s the advantage of using the ProRes 422 codec instead of HDV while editing and can I capture ProRes 422 material in real time with my mac pro 2.66 dual core with 2GB RAM on a 2 S-ATA2 software raid 0”

If you are laying back to an HDV master after your edit, stay in HDV.

If you are laying back to another format like DVCPro HD or HDCAM, then edit in a ProRes timeline.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Broadcast and independent productions.

All Things Apple Podcast! https://cowcast.creativecow.net/all_things_apple/index.html

Read my blog! https://blogs.creativecow.net/WalterBiscardi

[Adam Smith]

Not positive, but I believe you need an Intel Mac Pro to capture to ProRes.

Editing in HDV can be bad because it’s an MPEG2 long-GOP format and therefore even minor edits can require frames to be recompressed (to build i-frames where needed)… so you can wind up with generation loss in places before you even start adding effects and graphics. HDV is also more processor-intensive for the same reasons, it’s just more work for the computer to manage.

I dunno if your best bet is to transcode to ProRes, or to work with HDV in a DVCPRO-HD timeline or what… but keep in mind that HDV is compressed all to heck and essentially any other format you choose to work in to preserve quality is going to result in larger files / less realtime / etc.

[Walter Biscardi]

[N.Adam.Smith] “Not positive, but I believe you need an Intel Mac Pro to capture to ProRes.”

Not since the 6.0.1 update. Our G5 Quad can capture / edit ProRes SD and HD all day long now.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Broadcast and independent productions.

All Things Apple Podcast! https://cowcast.creativecow.net/all_things_apple/index.html

Read my blog! https://blogs.creativecow.net/WalterBiscardi

[Ed Dooley]

Here’s an article by Tim Wilson of the Cow, putting together a lot of opinions about this workflow. The collected wisdom of the Cow is capture, and edit in HDV, and render out to ProRes (unless you’re doing a lot of Color, then the story changes). You don’t metion if you have a capture card, but if you don’t you can’t capture to ProRes. You *can* capture to HDV, then change to a ProRes timeline. But read the article, it endorses the “capture and edit in HDV” school.
Ed

https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/new_page_wrapper.cgi?forumid=35&page=https://www.creativecow.net/articles/wilson_tim/ProRes02/index.html

Here’s another thread:
https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/8/944791?

[Core]

Thanks a lot for the reply’s and I think I get it, just stay in HDV during editing.
I haven’t read the article, do that tomorrow.

Core