Vegas Option for ProRes 422 (HD)

[Sonic 67]

I have linked here on forum the same product a while ago. I am interested in it’s performance, but for now I don’t have the need to shell the $70 for it.

Maybe you can report back here the results, if you decide for it?

[John Rofrano]

[Steve Hancock] “In doing a little research, I found this site: https://www.miraizon.com/products/codecsoverview.html
Don’t know if that’s an option or not. “

ProRes hacks for the PC like Miraizon are not “real” ProRes. They perform extremely poorly on a Mac and it’s pretty obvious when someone gives you one that it wasn’t generated with Apple’s codec and it will need to be re-encoded to be worked with properly on a Mac. Trust me, your client will have issues and it won’t bode well for your business. There is no way to create an Apple ProRes file on a PC.

If you’re a professional and you need to deliver ProRes 422 HD you need to buy a Mac.

You can get a Mac mini for $499 and Apple Compressor for $50 and have a ProRes encoding station rather cheaply. In fact, you can buy a used Mac mini on eBay for about $150 – $200 these days. When you add $50 for Apple Compressor to that, for $200 – $250 you can create ProRes files for your clients.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Steve Hancock]

Thanks a lot for the info John.

I know someone who has a Mac Laptop. Would we be able to use that for our purposes? If so, what would be the first steps? I’m completely Mac ignorant.

[John Rofrano]

[Steve Hancock] “I know someone who has a Mac Laptop. Would we be able to use that for our purposes? If so, what would be the first steps? I’m completely Mac ignorant.”

Yes. They would need to own either Final Cur Pro X, Apple Compressor 4, or Apple Motion 5. ProRess is not free. It does not “come with the Mac”. It’s a professional digital intermediary codec that only ships with Apples professional video editing software. That’s why it doesn’t exist on the PC. There is no Apple video software for the PC to ship it with. You can’t buy it standalone on a Mac or a PC.

The cheapest way to get the ProRes codec is to buy Apple Compressor 4 for $49. So your friend with the laptop would need to go to the Apple App Store and buy Compressor and then they could convert your footage to ProRes using Compressor. They just drop the video file in Compressor, select the appropriate ProRess 422 HD template, and press “Start Batch”. It’s that simple.

I did take a quick look at ASSIMILATE SCRATCH and SCRATCH Lab v8 for the PC. It looks promising. If it’s really licensed from Apple and optimized for FCP then it might work well. I haven’t had anyone give me one of these files so I don’t know but I’ve personally experienced the slow down with the hacked ProRes codecs from the PC and they are horrible.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Sonic 67]

On the other hand, editing and then converting any other video format into ProRes will not improve the edit quality, it will still be a “hack”. Same for DNxHD or CineForm codecs – they have to be used during production, not just at delivery.

PS: There are also cameras that shoot directly into ProRes format but those are not cheap consumer type – Arri, Blackmagic, Atomos…

[Steve Hancock]

Okay, here is the latest.
We now have access to a Mac Laptop and we have Apple compressor 4.1, but just wanted to clarify something. The files we work with are .mxf in Sony Vegas. Would our best, most uncompressed way to render for ProRes 422 HQ be to first render the whole project in Sony Vegas as .mxf, and then to run that through Compressor?

[John Rofrano]

[Steve Hancock] “Would our best, most uncompressed way to render for ProRes 422 HQ be to first render the whole project in Sony Vegas as .mxf, and then to run that through Compressor?”

Yes, I would render out of Vegas Pro using Sony MXF HD422 1920×1080-60i 50 Mbps template (if you are NTSC otherwise use the PAL 50i template) and drop that into Compressor and select the ProRes HQ template.

BTW, Sony MXF is one of the formats that Vegas Pro will “smart render” so if your source is MXF and there are no FX or crops applied, and it matches your output format Vegas Pro will just copy the source to the target with no recompression (i.e., no loss in quality).

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Steve Hancock]

Can you explain why when we rendered in ProRes after rendering .mxf, the format of sound ended up being dual mono instead of stereo?

[Steve Hancock]

So, what I did was render to .mxf (native) and then rendered through prores, but when our distributor tried to upload the file it read as “dual mono” instead of “stereo.” Any hints on why that could happen?

[Steve Hancock]

Continued with this topic – We were able to render as prores, but the distributor is saying that they can’t accept it because it is coming through as dual mono instead of stereo.

When rendered .mxf it appeared to be set as stereo. Could the issue be the render through ProRes? Any ideas ?