SLR Stop Motion – Project Setup

[Matthew Nelson]

What’s your final delivery?

[Matthew Nelson]

What I mean is what HD are you talking about? What it is will tell you what you should render.

[Tarik Gawad]

Thanks for responding, but that is exactly what I need to figure out. Which HD format will preserve the color and image quality of my stills, and will allow me to edit in fcp on my macbook pro? I have tried exporting from AE in DVCPRO HD in both the 720 and 1080 formats and the footage looks much worse than when I simply play it in quicktime pro after making the initial image sequence.

Currently I am using FCP 5.14 and the HD options are only apple intermediate codec, DVCPro HD, HDV, and XDCAM HD. I have only tried DVCPro HD because I am familiar with the codec and after effects comes with the export preset. I have been researching the new apple prores 422 format and am curious if that could be a solution but I have yet to upgrade to FCP studio 2 and I do not know if I could run uncompressed hd on my macbook pro.

What format would you recommend for the situation, balancing compression and efficiency on my current system against degrading image quality,? I am open to delivery in both 720 and 1080 HD.

I appreciate your feedback.

Tarik

[Uli Plank]

You are on the right track: ProRes 422 will give you the best balance. Uncompressed won’t run on the MBP, even ProRes HQ won’t run smooth. For ProRes you may need a small striped two-disk eSATA drive and an Expresse card, but that works fine for me.

If in FCP 5, stick to DVcProHD.

Regards,

uli

[Tarik Gawad]

Thanks Uli. But what exactly will a small striped two-disk eSATA drive and an Expresse card do to improve things? I assume these products are not inexpensive. If I plan on showing the finished project in its full resolution in an art gallery using a digital projector will my laptop be able to play the video smoothly?

Tarik

[Uli Plank]

I’ll give it a test later today, I have these things around at the institute.

I paid 300 Euro for one terabyte in a Taurus enclosure including the card and use it every day for editing HD on the road. I consider that quite a good price for something that would have sounded like sci-fi five years ago

[Uli Plank]

OK, I did my test, and I was in for a surprise:

Even if Apple does not recommend this, ProRes 422 is running smooth in 24 fps from my internal drive. I fed it to a Panasonic PT-AE2000 projector in native 24 progressive, and it looks awesome.

So, while the small SATA-RAID is definitely helpful when editing (snappier response, more than one track) you won’t need it for presentation only.

This was a MBP 2.33 GHz with 2 GB RAM and an internal Hitachi 160 GB drive.

Please note that this was a short clip (about 5 mintes) and 24 fps only, so I can’t tell if it might get jumpy when it’s longer, the drive is more fragmented or the framerate is higher, like 30 fps for the US.

Regards,

Uli

[Uli Plank]

Oh, and BTW, this was 1920 x 1080.

Regards,

Uli

[Matthew Nelson]

Are you supplying the HD projector? What is the projector’s native res? Is your mac the playback source or are you burning an optical disk? Is the gallery supplying these?

In the generic Apple ProRes HQ is an excellent codec. Used it on a bunch of shows with excellent results. The bit rate for 1280x720p 59.94 was about 30MB/s. About the same as 10bit SD. Unless you have a large raid array your choices are ProRes, DVCPRO HD, XDCAM HD, and HDV. Of these I’d use ProRes.

But it sounds like only you can answer your question. Run some tests and see what you like.

[Tarik Gawad]

Thanks again for the info/advice. It has really clarified things for me. I’m going to upgrade fcp and test ProRes.

The gallery will supply the projector and a laptop for playback (I will oversee they use adequate equipment). The project runs at 24fps so I think it should work. Does anyone have any links to a good deal on an eSATA drive. I think I definitely will need one for editing.

Tarik