[Tim Wilson]

[Shane Ross] “Video is not his forte…kicking ass is!”

Hmmm…closing in on a pretty good name for a forum….

[Tim Wilson]

[Walter Soyka] “Official Apple ProRes encoding on Windows is currently available in Assimilate SCRATCH and The Foundry’s NUKE, if you need it.
“

There are other, albeit in some cases less official ways of getting there. And in some cases issues with readability on the other end — DEFINITELY not acceptable for iTunes uploads — but these have all been proven in the field for years.

ffmpeg is free, but command-line-y, so perhaps not accessible for everyone. Definitely accessible: the price. Free.

But because it’s a multi-purpose encoder, ProRes support is good, but you really need to test it before you get to a mission critical situation to see if the files are readable at the other end. Probably so, but issues have been reported.

AnotherGUI adds a nice front end, and makes batching easy…although since we’re talking about encoding final output, I haven’t typically found batching a huge need. But it’s here. Also free.

TEncoder is another free GUI front end that a lot of people prefer.

There are others, including some pricier GUIs with even more capabilities, but I want to draw your attention to one in particular that’s about the cost of a big-city movie ticket. Okay, a 3D movie ticket. LOL

Fallen Empire PRHelper for PC is unique among all these so far in that it provides an even nicer GUI for ffmpeg tech, with an added benefit. Fallen Empire is a RED-based production post house and workflow consultation company, and they’ve shaken this down in a serious way. ProRes-specific bugs have been worked through far more thoroughly than ffmpeg itself since ProRes is its primary intent.

Lots of the stuff you’d expect for a professional post product are there, including support for GoPro and DSLR input formats to go along with R3D, robust watch folder support, and because it’s developed by people who understand post, it supports a wide range of metadata including timecode and reel name) through the rendering process.

And at $14.95, a no-brainer to at least take for a spin…and yes, a free trial.

Cinemartin CINE PLI couldn’t make it easier. Export to ProRes just shows up in the Premiere and After Effects output modules. Not cheap: 699 €, but of course, a free trial.

Moving away from straight-up encoding, Telestream has a plethora of Windows ProRes encoding options. BUNCHES of ’em. If you’re doing heavy lifting, there are a bunch of Windows Server-based options that I’ve seen people poo-poo (how many people are running Windows Server?)….but anybody doing large-volume encoding of ANY sort should be looking at Telestream anyway.

Well within the reach of any small shop and many individuals, Telestream Wirecast is a terrifically robust streaming/broadcast solution that’s worth checking out for anyone doing online video, but has officially licensed ProRes encoding for $495, and runs on any modern stock Windows OS (ie, Windows 10 rather than Windows Server.) Free trial of course.

And of course, if $495 or 699 € is too much, you can take the aforementioned free and nearly-free options for a spin.

Nuke and SCRATCH are already in many folks’ toolbox of course, so use ’em if you got ’em. But if not, all these other options are cheaper than those. 🙂

In the meantime, don’t buy the FUD. ProRes for Windows can be done affordably, reliably, and even officially, for a surmountable expense, if any.

[Tim Wilson]

There should be no problem at all. Let us know if something happens, and we will be happy to try to help!

[Tim Wilson]

Please post the video clip or a link to it!

[Tim Wilson]

Hi John,

Thanks for the tip! I’ll look into it and get back to you. It should be the same via both routes, and your Sony Vegas bookmarks should work the same regardless.

More soon,
Tim

[Tim Wilson]

Hey for now, all I’m going to say is that I apologize for my tone. Reading it back now, I was a lot more of a dick than I meant to be. You all deserve better than that from me.

So I’m going to put myself in a time out, and I’ll be back tomorrow to engage in a more appropriate manner.

Im the meantime, I’m reading along. 🙂

[Tim Wilson]

[Andrew Kimery] “lack of info that the FCP suite (plus Final Cut Server) would be pulled from store shelves the moment X was launched.”

You.

Can.

Buy.

It.

Today.

Right now. Today. You can have it with free shipping by Sunday, which is miraculous to me. A Sunday in the middle of a three day holiday weekend, for free with your Amazon Prime membership.

For only $8.95, you can have it tomorrow.

For another $3.95, you can have it gift wrapped.

Object to anything and everything you want to. Object to Apple pulling it off shelves. But the idea that it was EVER not available, for a single second, is simply not the case.

It’s available now, five years later.

[Tim Wilson]

[Andrew Kimery] ” A big reason I moved from Windows and Premiere to FCP and a Mac is because I couldn’t find any work with Premiere.”

Unlike me, you actually work for a living, so I’ll ask you. Is it now easier to find a job in LA with Premiere than X?

I’m sure that this is a regional thing, and Hollywood is its own thing, but I know that Bob Zelin has reported that Orlando is virtually an all-Premiere town. Not even Avid is worth as much there anymore.

So while Avid obvs has some value where you are, what’s the balance of work with Premiere vs X for you?

[Tim Wilson]

[Shawn Miller] ” I could see purchasing FCP7 more for the installed user base and the halo effect, than the actual technology.”

We can argue whether it was state of the art in 2011 (which I’m obviously not convinced it entirely was, except in the most literal sense of the word), but state of the art anymore? Can you even run it on today’s OS? I don’t know. Just asking. I’m not sure why anyone would buy it today.

WHICH YOU CAN. BUY FCP 7 TODAY AND HAVE IT SUNDAY WITH FREE SHIPPING. Want it tomorrow? It’s yours for $8.99 shipping.

Please please please, can we lay that to rest already? The fact that Apple doesn’t sell it doesn’t mean you can’t buy it. Want it? BUY IT NOW.

Heck, get it gift-wrapped for $3.49. A bargain for a box that big.

[Steve Connor] (quoting Bill) “And as I have long argued, conserving knowledge about what has worked well in the past is always valid, UNLESS there there turns out to be significant new advantages to be gained by adapting to a new way of thinking.””

As enthusiastic as I’ve been about X, I don’t think it’s even a little self-evident that there are NECESSARILY advantages to adapting to it, or indeed that X NECESSARILY represents new thinking.

I also think that expertise and the craftsmanship that can only come with experience have a unique and irreplaceable value, no matter how much shiny new thinking blooms around it.

But I ESPECIALLY vigorously disagree with the contention that “Other than the few hundred folks in attendance at the nab event all the rest of us heard were rumors.” That presentation was on YouTube, here in the COW, a bunch of blogs, and who all knows where else. A speedy glance at the MANY iterations on YouTube suggests tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of views in those three months. That information was as widely disseminated as any news to EVER come out of NAB. Arguably the most-widely disseminated news EVER to come out of NAB.

Let me note that I was as quick as anyone to argue that the paint wasn’t fully dry on X. Even Apple admitted that. If it was me, I’d have at least had hired Wes Plate or Phil Hodgetts to whip me a project importer… but as a jillion people pointed out before me, it’s not like 7 stopped working.

For most of the editing world, ie, everyone using everything else, X represents neither disruption nor innovation. It simply doesn’t factor in.

And as noted earlier, you can buy FCP 7 today, have it tomorrow, for about half the price it cost in 2011.

[Tim Wilson]

[Ned Miller] “Nothing will change. “

Well, not to put too fine a point on it, 16 million people have insurance now that didn’t 3 years ago. We’re now down to single digits of uninsured. I’m one of the ones who couldn’t be insured based on pre-existing conditions. Now I am. I’d say that’s a pretty big change. Certainly for me. LOL

I certainly agree that insurance companies are out of control. THEY’re the ones pushing prices higher than they need to be…although, again, the price increases under the ACA are the lowest since we’ve been keeping track of this.

(Ironically enough, Romneycare comes much closer to getting it right. One of my favorite parts about living in Massachusetts, which I left only when I was able to find a high-risk health pool in Oregon, which cost a fortune for profoundly poor care — but those were the only two states I could get ANY insurance in at the time.)

ACA notwithstanding, I don’t think that bringing them to heel is quixotic. We did it with meatpacking. (Although it’s getting worse again, it’s nowhere near as bad as it used to be.) We did it with car safety. (Again with some notable slip-ups, the difference in safety between cars in 1966 and 2016 is night and day.)

It’s certainly never going to happen in a corporate kleptocracy where we encourage companies to ride roughshod over us, but hey. We grew up in the 60s convinced that the Berlin Wall would never come down. We just have to decide that we want better health insurance as badly as we want safer cars.

Heck, it’s enough of a goal to have as many choices for health insurance as we do for car and homeowner insurance. It’s not beyond our reach any more than those were.

No question though, those are some heinous people. I’m glad they’re paying you, though. SOMEBODY should benefit directly from them.