Recommedations for FCP codecs

[Walter Biscardi]

[Nic Chant] “We’ve just taken delivery of two fcp suites. (8 core Intel mac pro’s with black magic decklink cards and a shared 7TB SAN server.) I’m just working out the best way for everyone to use them.”

No offense, but this should have been well thought out before you even purchased your systems. How you’re going to use them greatly affects what you purchase, especially the shared storage.

The first thing my VAR always asks before I purchase anything is “what are you going to do with this?” He’s making sure I have the correct equipment or software for what we are going to do.

[Nic Chant] “At present we use dvcam, but I’m interested in possibly using the ProRes HQ codec to capture. I’m assuming this gives better results when it comes round to colour correcting and grading or are the results negligible.”

If you’re mastering back to DVCAM, stay in DV. If you’re mastering to DigiBeta or higher, you can go to ProRes if you want. I don’t see any spectacular gains in ProRes myself, but others swear it’s far superior.

[Nic Chant] “Also is it better to capture rushes with the ProRes codec or capture with the DV codec and then have the sequence codec set for Prores hence saving server space.”

I believe in staying in one codec all the way around.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.

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[Nic Chant]

Thanks for your reply Walter and no offense taken.

Unfortunately I had no say in the purchase, I was told they were arriving and when I made suggestions on what we needed they were ignored but thats how a certain large british broadcasting company operates. I now have three different systems to work with.

As far as codec choice goes I was considering mastering to a quicktime file to be played out from our broadcast server. But looking around the forums there seems to be problems with colours shifting, is this something to avoid or is it a case of getting the export settings right.

Thanks
Nic

[Walter Biscardi]

[Nic Chant] “Unfortunately I had no say in the purchase, I was told they were arriving and when I made suggestions on what we needed they were ignored but thats how a certain large british broadcasting company operates. I now have three different systems to work with.”

Ah, glorious big business decisions, I love ’em! A Producer I know recommended some small HMI lights for their cameras for run and gun situations. What the company ordered instead were 150lb light kits from Arri. Yeah, those will be fun when you’re traveling “light” around the country. 🙂

[Nic Chant] “As far as codec choice goes I was considering mastering to a quicktime file to be played out from our broadcast server.”

That would be something to discuss with your engineers. I’m assuming they’re playing back an MPEG-2 stream as that seems to be what most broadcast servers seem to play out. Not sure if you can work in codec that can seamlessly transfer over for playback. Whatever format you’ve been working in all along, such as uncompressed SD, would probably be the format to stick with. You might need to literally play the footage off your system into the server for ingest, but this will still be faster than laying off to tape, transport the tape, and then ingest off that tape, you’ll be able to do it all in one shot.

If your engineers are open minded (I’ve met a few) you might want to run some tests to see what format / codec works the best.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.

STOP STARING AND START GRADING WITH APPLE COLOR Apple Color Training DVD available now!
Read my Blog!

[Walter Biscardi]

[walter biscardi] “That would be something to discuss with your engineers. I’m assuming they’re playing back an MPEG-2 stream as that seems to be what most broadcast servers seem to play out. Not sure if you can work in codec that can seamlessly transfer over for playback.”

Actually thinking about that again, I think the Sony IMX format is something that can seamlessly transfer over to a server. I’ve never used it, but I believe that has been talked about on the Cow as it is an MPEG-2 format.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.

STOP STARING AND START GRADING WITH APPLE COLOR Apple Color Training DVD available now!
Read my Blog!

[Todd Gillespie]

Hi Nic,

We predominately are a tapeless workflow for our post work. Most of the broadcasts that we produce are created with a MPEG file.
As Walter mentioned, most video servers are MPEG-2 and should be able to read a file that you can give them. As long as someone in master control is willing to try to see what flavor of MPEG will work best. Compressor is able to kick out a MPEG-2 Program Stream that should work nicely with most servers. We’re able to send ours to the servers via ftp! So they don’t ever get a tape from us, just a digital file.
I’m sure there might be a color, contrast, etc. shift when converting to a MPEG file (as there usually is with any compression) but as long as you are aware of the changes and can make adjustments for them, then the compress file should look fine.

Good Luck,

Todd at UCSB
Television Production

[Nic Chant]

Thanks Walter and Todd,

I’ll start experimenting and see what I come up with. Its a Quantel server which I think is Imx based so I’ll start there.

Thanks for your advice

Nic