Transcode to Pro Res or Pro Res HQ?

[Richard Harrington]

Technically yes…

but you may not see it unless you are using a very high quality delivery method.

Tell us more about footage and workflow

Richard M. Harrington, PMP

Author: Photoshop for Video, Understanding Adobe Photoshop, and ATS:iWork

[Brian Davison]

Richard, thanks for responding. It’s going to be edited online and the layback is going to be to either hdcam sr or D5.

As to the footage, it’ll be a mix of interview and action footage.

[Gary Adcock]

[Richard Harrington] “Technically yes… but you may not see it unless you are using a very high quality delivery method. “

Hey Rich
While technically, yes you should get better quality, Software conversions to ProResHQ are fraught with playback and encoding errors. In my testing of software conversions, the HQ version failed or reported dropped frame errors due specifically to the encoding and decoding via CPU. That very same file converted to the standard Non-HQ version played without incident in all cases.

It was explained to me that with a software conversion to HQ. the CPU is trying to encode and playback the entire 10bits of data, but since most all camera formats are only 8 bit the processing has to fill-in the missing data to complete the file. That bit depth conversion from 256 (8bit) to 1024 (10bit) requires a massive amount of CPU power-almost as much on the decode as encode.

Whereas using the standard version of ProRes the data is not extrapolated into the higher bit depth but rather allows that original camera data to “float” within the 10bit color space. This allows for lower playback and processing requirements while still maintaining the quality needed for a 10bit data stream.

gary adcock
Studio37
HD & Film Consultation
Post and Production Workflows

Inside look at the IoHD

[Brian Davison]

Gary,

I may be wrong, but I think the HPX-3000 with the AVC-Intra codec captures at 10 bit, so I wouldn’t be running into that particular problem, yes?