Why is rendering XDCAM 422 as slow as Molasses in a SD timeline.

[Mark Maness]

Rendering from HD to SD with any footage will not look good. Yes, XDCAM HD is much slower but that’s because you’re fighting with that Long GOP issue.

ALWAYS, ALWAYS, down-convert your footage to SD when editing SD. Your render times will be much shorter and you’ll be pulling your hair out less.

_______________________________

Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions
https://web.mac.com/schazamproductions
schazamproductions@mac.com

[Peter Corbett]

[Wayne Carey] “ALWAYS, ALWAYS, down-convert your footage to SD when editing SD. Your render times will be much shorter and you’ll be pulling your hair out less.

____________________”

Yep I guess you are right. That’s one for next time. With SD commercials I usually edit in native 1080 or 720 then convert to 576 SD H264 with Procoder. I might do some tests downconverting in FCP or After Effects. But I digress….

Peter Corbett
Powerhouse Productions
http://www.php.com.au

[Olivier Jean]

Hi Peter,

I always recommend my clients to transcode to Pro res
( especially any codec with long gop ).

These codec were definitely not design for editing.

good luck.

Regards
Olivier Jean
Video Sales Consultant
Apple Certified Trainer Final Cut Pro 7
Powermedia Systems
Sydney Australia

[Robb Harriss]

not by half. I never said you had to load them in numeric order (wink, wink).
No, it’s about getting them into the same format. There are apps out there to take the file-based pieces and rewrap them into another format without reencoding. I think the compressor route is way, way too slow, especially when I have 100 hours worth of footage and I want to load first as ProRes Proxy and later reload only my finished version.This is one big reason I’m holding off on a lot of the file-based cameras. The individual files are too restrictive to the overall workflow. There are solutions and I’m still looking.

Non-linear: all the time and nothing but.

[Steve Connor]

Is it just me that doesn’t have any problems with it then? I edit with XDCamHD 422 material every day and I have no issues, I always use ProRes timelines and I find rendering out isn’t any worse than when we used to use DVCPro100. For SD we always edit in HD and let Compressor handle the downconvert to SD and we get no quality issues.

Steve Connor
Adrenalin Television

Have you tried “Search Posts”? Enlightenment may be there.

[Mark Maness]

There you go!

That’s the proper workflow for doing just this sort of thing!

If you shoot HD, edit HD and down-convert on output. Its that easy.

_______________________________

Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions
https://web.mac.com/schazamproductions
schazamproductions@mac.com

[Arnie Schlissel]

[Rafael Amador] “(some times 220Mbps, from the NANO)”

Rafa, isn’t the 220Mbps from the Nano all I-frame?

Arnie
Post production is not an afterthought!
https://www.arniepix.com/

[Andrew Kimery]

I’d change your sequence’s compressor settings from ProRes HQ to regular ProRes as that should decrease the render times and none of the formats you listed would take advantage of the higher bitrate HQ needs.

-Andrew

3.2GHz 8-core, FCP 6.0.4, 10.5.5
Blackmagic Multibridge Eclipse (6.8.1)

[Bret Williams]

Yes, but he’s saying there’s no need to preconvert xdcam and I agree. It works just like anything else, and takes up less space. Simply render to prores, and turn off “Full” in the render checks. That seems to kick in the whole conform process. The latter may only apply if you’re rendering back to xdcam. It’s been awhile. But when we had the slow xdcam renders (didn’t notice the prores option first time round) that fixed it.

And I haven’t had many problems editing hd into SD sequences. The downscale in FCP is fine for me. But the upscale is unacceptable. One option in either case is to convert only what you need after the edit is approved. Especially if you only have a couple shots. Using HD in SD has an extra bonus- you can zoom in on a shot 200% potentially without losing quality. It’s nice to cut from a Wide to a medium shot using the same wide shot. Very convenient for cutting interviews.

[Andrew Kimery]

[Bret Williams] “Simply render to prores, and turn off “Full” in the render checks. That seems to kick in the whole conform process. The latter may only apply if you’re rendering back to xdcam.”
Yes, good call Bret. I had forgotten that that bug was still in FCP.

3.2GHz 8-core, FCP 6.0.4, 10.5.5
Blackmagic Multibridge Eclipse (6.8.1)