XDCAM and ProRes

[Alex Elkins]

Edit in Pro Res, and if you have the patience, transcode all of your XDcam stuff to Pro Res to cut down on rendering.
If it’s just a fairly quick project I’d leave it as XDCam, but just ensure your timeline compression is set to Pro Res.

[Luke Price]

Sergio,

I’m cutting a weekly broadcast series shot on XDCAM HD and other HDV sources being converted to ProRes before I get to use them. Cutting on ProRes timelines has been a nightmare. The first 4 weeks of the show there were CONSTANT crashes and rendering anything was arduous at best. We are running 4 suites via Fibre Channel off a well managed 40TB RAID.

I started on week 5 and after doing a week of this I decided to cut on XDCAM HD timelines native to the source material. Still crashes when bolting the whole show together, but completely manageable.

We are then rendering out, through Compressor, ProRes Quicktime movies and re-importing these for our final playouts to SD and HD deliverables. This is working 99% of the time, occasionally we have a filter related problem which means we just re-render a chunk and that usually fixes it.

The system it’s self wasn’t setup or run by me and so there may be other suggestions as to why we are having some problems – though like I said, now manageable. We do have a lot of storage and huge amounts of footage gathered for this project over nearly 5 years on a multitude of formats. It’s not a time for ‘re-thinking’ the system.

Alex may well have the right answer for your project if it is relatively small and you have a quick suite, but I had to let you know my experience.

At the end of the day if you’re going to use ProRes to deliver to tape or whatever, then let your machine do the hard work of re-compressing it and save yourself the grief.

All the best

Luke
http://www.newbornadventure.com

Mac Pro Quad 3GHz, 4GB RAM, 2x7TB XServe RAID

[Sergio Deustua]

Thanks Alex and Luke.

I believe I´ll take my chances with ProRes. Hope everything goes fine.