Transcoding ProRes = Better Quality?

[Chris Knight]

I could write an essay on this, but transcoding your footage to ProRes does not increase image quality at all. It simply helps to edit non-intra-frame footage in FCP.

Premiere will edit 10-bit footage in its native bit-depth (I do this with Intra-AVC footage on a daily basis). If you want to edit 8 bit footage in 10-bit, you can override the default sequence settings, and force Premiere to process most effects in higher-than 8 bit (Adobe calls it floating 32 bit), and render previews to various codecs (including 10 bit YUV uncompressed, which is a far better option for compositing than ProRes, a lossy codec). Editing in above-8-bit mode will cause RAM usage to skyrocket, so be warned. There’s a reason 24GB of RAM comes in handy with Adobe applications.

Don’t forget, you can import video into Photoshop as well, and process footage in 8, 16, or floating 32 bit – but Premiere will only import either 8 or 32 PSD video files. After Effects works in all three modes.

[Ben G unguren]

[Chris Knight] “It simply helps to edit non-intra-frame footage in FCP.”

As I understand it, intraframe compression packs the image information into individual frames: ProRes 422. Interframe compression, on the other hand, will use information from neighboring frames: H264.

While it’s AWESOME that PPro can edit with interframe video (unlike FCP), in my experience things still tend to run more smoothly (and render more quickly) when the video is intraframe (ProRes 422, e.g.). I’m not an expert, but I believe this is because interframe video requires more processing power to decode, so if you transcode to PR422 you can get a lot of the frame-by-frame processing out of the way in advance….