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Working with HDV
I’ve shot some footage on a Sony HVR-Z7 in HDV mode and have ingest it using Apple’s ProRes 422 codec.
The ingest method I followed was Chris Poisson’s, which I found on Creative Cow: https://library.creativecow.net/articles/poisson_chris/hdv-prores.php
Before I delve into my problem, I’d like to give you a quick insight of the hardware I’m using to better understand my question.
I’m using an iMac 2.16 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 4GB RAM and am running FCP 6.0.6.
The HDV footage was captured to an external drive, Taurus RAID Dual Bay 1TB 2-Drive (2x500GB USB/FW400/FW800) as the Apple ProRes 422 codec.
I started a new FCP project, followed by importing all my ProRes 422 clips into a bin. I then dragged and dropped 1x ProRes 422 clip on the timeline, which FCP then asked if I’d like to change my sequence settings to match my clip. Selecting YES, I now conformed my sequence to my clip.
So far so good….
I then dropped all the clips on the timeline and started scrubbing through the footage to take out what I didn’t need. This is where my problem begins….
Trying to scrub through the clips was almost impossible, FCP became very choppy and only previewed every 5-10 frames. On the other hand, hitting the spacebar to playback in real-time was no problem.
Checking my RT settings, I tried setting different playbacks and frame rates, but to no avail.
Further digging around the net, I came across Larry Jordan’s website https://www.larryjordan.biz/articles/lj_video_data_rates.html He explains in great detail everything you need to know about transfer rates, data size etc…
Going off Larry’s charts, I’m led to believe my hardware setup is more than sufficient in editing Apple’s ProRess 422 codec (which only has a Transfer Rate of 5.25 MB/second).
Doing some of my own tests, I decided to re-encode the footage to 8bit Uncompressed (which has a Transfer Rate of 20.2 MB/second). I found working with the 8bit Uncompressed version was as smooth and fast as working with DV footage.
I’ve honestly spent a few days researching a workaround solution, however I still fail to understand why I can comfortably edit 8bit Uncompress, but not Apple’s ProRes 422?
Please…Any advice or comments would greatly help.
The only other workaround solution I can think off is to re-compress all my Apple ProRes 422 files to DV PAL 48kHz Anamorphic or maybe Apple ProRes 422 PAL 48kHz (using Media Manager), Then once I’ve completed the edit, I would re-connect my sequence clips back to Apple ProRes 422 for mastering to DVD or Blu Ray. Any suggestions?
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2 Replies
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Tony,
If you missed this step, here’s what I do. And it’s not updated yet in my article except in some of the comments.
I let FCP capture a whole tape, and I’ll name the capture something like Tape 001.
When it’s done there are lots of clips in the browser, depending on how many times the camera was started. I then open each clip into the viewer, and decide if I want to keep it, and change the name to something appropriate. I also open my capture scratch folder, and any of the clips I don’t want, I just toss from there.
After all the clips have been renamed in the browser, I select them all and control click to rename, file to match clip. in an instant, you see all the QT clips in your capture folder change, and you’re done.
Does this help?
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Hi Chris,
Thanks to your HDV to ProRes tutorial, I’ve already captured my HDV tape to Apple’s ProRes 422 codec.
The problem I have now is when I scrub through the clips on my timeline, it’s really choppy and almost impossible to trim or scrub though the clips in realtime.
Spending the past few days researching, I’ve come to realize in order to handle Apple’s ProRes 422 codec, I need to either purchase a really beefy Mac Pro tower, or buy a portable video audio I/O Interface box like an AJA Io Express, or a Matrox MXO2 Mini box. It seems the IO Interface is the better solution out of the two, especially if I want to continue using my iMac to edit HDV or Apple’s ProRes codec.
So now that I have almost spent a week trying to solve how I’m going to edit these files on my current system, I’ve come to the conclusion that I have no choice but to downconvert these Apple ProRes 422 files to a less CPU intensive codec.
Do you have any advise in this workaround solution…?
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