Jeff Meyer
Forum Replies Created
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The story is anything shot on HDSLR isn’t going to benefit from ProRes HQ. By selecting HQ you’re unnecessarily taxing your system. Plain ProRes422 could fix your choppy playback issues by virtue of having a lower bitrate.
As for exporting H.264, that completely depends on what you’re doing with the file. If it’s destined for the internet that would be a good practice.
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Without system settings it’s hard to tell. ProRes HQ is overkill for HDSLR footage. You can try ProRes422 and see if it makes a performance difference.
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Quicktime -> Preferences
Check “Enable Final Cut Studio color compatibility” -
The concerns I would have are:
1) You need shared storage. The MacPro needs to be able to access the source and destination folders.
2) Your shared storage needs to be fast enough for editing to continue while it’s getting slammed by the transcode process.
3) You need to run few enough segments to where there’s enough left over CPU and RAM for whatever the foreground task is. Remember, the rule of thumb is 1gb of ram per segment, and 1 segment per 2 cores. I would say 4 segments is pretty background on a 12 core, if there’s enough RAM and throughput to throw at it. -
I think GoPro shoots H.264 – have you converted to ProRes for starters?
You describe that “it just becomes blurry and tends to skip frequently.” This simply sounds like unrendered video and unlimited RT to me. After you make your speed change what colour is the render bar above the clip? Bright green? Orange? If it is either of these colours you need to render. Hit butterfly+R or option+R.
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Sounds reasonable. H.264 is a long GOP codec – there are “key frames” (different from keyframes for animation) and then frames that note what has changed since the last key frame. ProRes (all variants) is not a long GOP codec. Every frame is independent from every other frame. Because there is far less compression going on it’ll take up a lot more space.
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I had similar issues with native HD422 1080i 50mbps. I switched over to ProRes422 for the video and ProRes4444 instead of Motion files. Things are much better now.
My advice is to do as much of a cut without filters/layers as possible. Things were pretty stable for me with just the footage on the timeline, but as the project grew in complexity more issues came up. Have your autosave vault duration fairly short and press save often to avoid lost work. Hit it with ProRes next time around – the time saved will more than pay for the disk space used.
I think some more RAM would probably do your system some good, but I’m sure people have cut HD shows with far less. I’m working with a MacPro, 12 core, 12gb RAM, and a few RAID-5s.
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At this stage in the game Final Cut Pro is EOL (end of life) and won’t be getting updated. As such many Final Cut editors are defecting to Avid (Media Composer) and Adobe. While you could go to Final Cut Pro it would be a peculiar decision to be making.
Then, of course, there’s Final Cut X which is inferior to anything listed above for professional purposes and probably superior for family videos or cuts of your friend’s band.
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Not as direct – but what happens if you drag to the Viewer and then back down (or to the appropriate Canvas).
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Big question is what’s your deliverable? If it’s a 320×240 corner on a website you might not need to be working in HD. Sometimes it’s worthwhile to cave in for the sake of peace…
That said I would probably go buy a 2TB firewire drive on the company VISA and ask for forgiveness. It’ll solve your problems for…as long as 2TB lasts you.
Sidenote: Going to H.264 will probably cost more space than it saves when your render scratch is considered.