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Rendering Uncompressed HD
I started editing an HD animation show recently and during the online I’ve been receiving Uncompressed HD files to edit with. Although I’m working on an 8 core Mac Pro 2.8ghz with 16gb of ram, Kona 3 card, and two 1TB HD’s spanned as a RAID 0, whenever I drop a file in the timeline, I get the red render bar which halves my editing speed. We’re supposed to receive a 5TB Raid 5 machine to speed things up, but I’m not sure whether that will get rid of the red render bar.
I’m beginning to wonder how efficient this workflow is. The previous editor output the final Quicktime outputs to Prores HQ which then go onto HDcam.
My questions are:
1. What’s the point of receiving Uncompressed if we’re gonna output to Prores HQ eventually? Would be there significant quality degradation if I received the online files in DVCProHD or Prores HQ?
2. Given my setup, is there any way to avoid the red render bar, so I can preview footage without rendering each time?
3. When we have shot fixes I’ve needed to create H.264 lorez outputs that include shot and frame # over the footage so the director and animators can review the material. These come in the form of Outline Text tool. That would affect rendering as well, correct?
Any advice would be much appreciated!
Thanks,
Alex -
2 Replies
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The simple rule to avoid rendering is to match the source files and sequence settings.If you have uncompressed HD files you will need a fast drive which I suspect your striped 1TB drive may be marginal. My old G5 with 4 gigs of RAM was plenty for uncompressed so your computer specs are fine for uncompressed or ProRes.
I have 3 internal 1.5TB drives striped as RAID0 and they are fast enough but two drives? The free Kona or Blackmagic speed disk utilities will tell you the answer.
Don’t use DVCPro codecs. ProRes 422 is perfect for source files and sequence settings if uncompressed is going to tax both drive speed and storage limitations of your system.There have been many posts here questioning the HQ flavor of ProRes as being overkill for HD. Search this forum as Garry Adcock has discussed this here before.
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Dave, you’re absolutely right. It’s a studio full of PC’s, and they’re afraid of compression because they assume it’s gonna look like crap. I’m gonna take their large files and convert them to ProRes HQ in Compressor from the beginning and then edit with that. We’re outputting to that format anyway so might as well convert it at some point. I’m assuming when I do the final output there wouldn’t be additional compression if the sequence is ProRes HQ native.
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