Transcoding Apple ProRes 422 to Premiere CS5 mpeg

[Tim Kolb]

The key is that PPro doesn’t capture “as” anything…it brings everything in natively. In FCP you have HDV transcoded to ProRes. In PPro, you don’t transcode it, you use it in its original form.

I wouldn’t bother converting your ProRes files…I’d just use them.

I think you’d find that PPro is far less fussy about editing mixed media on a timeline than FCP is…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tony Sarafoski]

Tim I’m trailing Premiere for the first time, please excuse me for my novice questions.

I’m working with a few clips that were captured using Final Cut Pro as Apple ProRes 422. To create a sequence that conforms to the clip, I dragged one of the ProRes 422 files on the little sequence icon in the projects tab.

From what I understand this should then conform the timeline to the clips settings. Even though, I seem to still get a yellow render line? is this the way CS5 works or am I doing something wrong?

Out of curiosity I decided to capture a HDV tape using CS5, and as you advised CS5 captures HDV in it’s native format (MPEG). Not sure if it’s my imagination, but I’m finding I’m able to smoothly scrub these MPEG files, but it’s not the same case with Apple ProRes 422. Any explanation for this..?

Also I work a lot with Canon 5D MarkII files. I know CS5 can handle these natively, however what’s the best format to transcode these too?

In FCP I’d normally transcode straight to Apple ProRes 422 (LT) before I even attempt to cut them.

BTW my machine specs are:
17inch MacBook Pro
2.66 GHz Intel Core i7
4GB RAM
500 GB 7200 RPM Internal HDD

[Richard Jacana]

But what happens if your machine is having problems playing back footage even with the magic Mercury Engine? I have a 2.6 Ghz 2008 MBP with 6 gigs of ram and an 8600GT graphics card. It can play AVCHD fine but 7D footage is a little choppy and I have to set the playback Resolution to 1/4 and it almost maxes out my poor CPU.

So if I wanted to convert my 7D h.264 footage to an intermediate codec what is Premiers ProRes422 equivalent and how would I do the actual Transcode in PP? (I’ve used the canon plugin for FCP to trancode and it works great)

[Tim Kolb]

A yellow line means that PPro believes it should be able to play through a section without a render. Green means that it’s been rendered…red means that PPro believes it probably has to be rendered.

Because it’s difficult for PPro to measure every nuance and calculate each footage/configuration/circumstance instance, sometimes a timeline that’s yellow will have some trouble playing back at framerate, and sometimes a section of timeline that’s red will playback without needing to render.

PPro sequences aren’t like FCP sequences. You’ll find lots of sequence presets that indicate formats and codecs, etc… However PPro is really just lookiing at frame size, pixel aspect, and framerate. If the codec is on the machine, PPro will play the material. In other words, there would be no technical difference in a sequence for ProRes, XDcamEX HQ, or DSLR that was setup for 1920×1080 at 29.97 progressive as you could simply mix all those formats matching those frame size/rate specs. If you brought in HDV at 1080 however, that format is 1440×1080 non-square so you’ll have some scaling to do. The HDV could show red on your timeline. Depending on how powerful your machine is, you may still be able to simply play it through dropping moderate to no frames.

In any case, you’d never get the full screen “you must render this” graphic.

As far as being able to scrub HDV smoothly vs (I’m assuming you’re implying not) scrubbing ProRes…

HDV is 25 Mbits/s. ProRes is 145 Mbits/s or 220 Mbits/s on HQ depending on what you’re using (LT drops lower of course, etc.). So, since the CPU is up to the task of doing the decode in MPEG, you’re probably relieving the system of having to chug through much larger ProRes data files…

Also…QT is 32 bit and QT video formats requires Adobe to jump through some hoops to make it work in a 64 bit application. FCP is 32 bit and all that works together with QT fine, but Adobe happens to have gone 64 bit native before (for some inexplicable reason) the video editing application from the computer manufacturing company who has had a 64 bit operating system for 10 years and up until now has still had a 32 bit editing application running a 32 bit media architecture. QTX is changing that, but it seems like it’s about a decade overdue…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

For PPro, most people would use CineForm in my experience. It’s as good, if not possibly a twitch better that ProRes in my experience. Both codecs are excellent with the slight difference that CineForm is completely cross platform and truly wrapper-interchangeable between AVI and QT.

You have to purchase CineForm separately, but then since PPro’s general operations don’t require it’s use (as ProRes is really necessary for multiple workflows in FCP), Adobe doesn’t have a “house” intermediate codec other than perhaps DPX frame sequences on the high end, which are supported with extensive flexibility inside PPro CS5.

CineForm has a transcoding utlity.

Alternatively, I suppose you could use the Media Encoder to transcode your DSLR footage to XDcamHD 422, which is an equivalent data rate but a less complex decode process (MPEG2 vs MPEG4). You may gain some speed there, but you’ll obviously lose something in the transcode. Whether the visual loss is notable in your workflow or not becomes a question you have to answer…

You could also convert to some P2 format or something like that (with even more substantial visual loss due to frame subsampling), but I suspect that if you had to backtrack to replace clips later with the DSLR originals, the infernal P2 naming structure may not help much there…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Ansel Spear]

Hi Tim. I couldn’t help jumping on the bandwagon on this thread.

I am in PAL land and edit on PP CS5 on a PC and clients want to give me ProRes 422 LT material recorded on the AJA ProRes deck. I haven’t confirmed, but it is likely to be NTSC, although I have requested PAL.

I will be asked to edit the material (into what, I do not know yet), and am trying to determine (i) whether the LT version is too compressed to edit extensively and (ii) whether I’ll have problems using PreRes 422 on a PC CS5 timeline.

Any insight would be extremely welcome.

Many thanks, JontyMS

[Tim Kolb]

This should not be a problem, but some ProRes is not full raster, so check out what the real clip resolution is…and you may have to do this by looking at it in Bridge and viewing the metadata.

I have found that the Inspector in QuickTime sometimes tells me that a clip is “1280×720” as that’s what the player is mapping it to, but on further examination in Bridge it may very well be 960×720.

This is important to making the most responsive timeline in PPro possible as remapping pixels can take up system resources that you could be employing elsewhere.

The format is solid, it’s quite solid to edit in my experience…you just can’t export your master cut to ProRes from a Windows machine…or from a Mac without Final Cut for that matter.

…though if you have an SDI I/O card, you could feed an AJA KiPro the master timeline and it would write a ProRes file…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Ansel Spear]

Thanks Tim. Useful info. I’ll check with the guys in Las Vegas who are supplying the material.