[Jeff Meyer]

You didn’t shoot at the same frame rate to begin with – something that is essential for a multi-cam workflow to be successful. You can’t design a car that needs four wheels, put three on it, and assume it will work. There’s a proper way to do things. Maybe Twixtor will do it, but I suspect you will have artifacts in your footage.

My advice on this one is to multicam the frame rate with the best coverage, then add (manually synced) inserts from the other cameras as needed. Given your time crunch you’re running short on options.

[Jeff Meyer]

We’re missing some important details here.
First, most cameras that say they shoot at 30fps shoot 29.97. 30fps is a non-standard frame rate. Your frame rate conversion probably isn’t necessary. Check the media (open it in QT, play it, then hit butterfly+I) from your other cameras. If a conversion is required I suggest converting to 29.97 instead of converting to 30 – even if it means converting more footage.

Second, just because ProRes 422 (HQ) has (HQ) after it doesn’t mean it automatically gives you higher quality footage. If this is footage from a DSLR or HDV camera ProRes422 (LT) or ProRes422 would be a better choice – particularly if you’re going to multi-cam without a RAID drive.

Third, yes, you should be able to speed things up in Compressor. Look into setting up a “virtual cluster,” which is using Q-Master. With dual dual core chips you shouldn’t expect a dramatic difference, but it should help. Also, if you transcode from a source drive to a different target drive (not USB) it’ll help.

[Jeff Meyer]

If it’s an “animatic” I’m imaging a high number of stills involved. Doing freeze frames in Final Cut could take forever. This project is probably a task better fit for Motion. Its’ rendering engine will be happier with the JPEGs than Final Cut’s, and the Keyframe editor’s interpolation controls can really smooth out your animations.

Bret makes a good point – changing the stills to video is an odd workflow. My advice for the project is forget making your clips QT movies and switch to Motion.

Consider changing the default still duration.
https://tinyurl.com/3aq89xt
After making that adjustment import all of your photos into the bin, then put all of those on the timeline in the correct order, then right-click on the sequence and “Send to -> Motion”
In motion you can drag the position and scale attributes from the inspector onto a layer (or multiple selected layers, a group, etc.) in the project pane to quickly give position attributes to another clip.

[Jeff Meyer]

I don’t think Compressor will take JPEGs, but you might be able to use Final Cut’s batch export tool for this task.

[Jeff Meyer]

At 1920×1080 the standard progressive rates are 30p and 24p, so pick between those two.

The real question I have is why not just ask the editors who are working with the media?

[Jeff Meyer]

Dual layer DVDs still won’t cut it for a 12gb movie. The most economical options are usb drives, SD/CF cards, or a Blu-Ray data disk. If your delivery specs say ProRes422 don’t use H.264 or XDCAM, use ProRes422.

[Jeff Meyer]

Yes. Using an external firewire drive is always recommended. G-Technology sponsors a forum on Creative Cow and makes a few bus powered firewire drives that will help your editing without compromising your portability.

It’s important that you get a firewire drive, not USB.

[Jeff Meyer]

What are the limiting hardware features on compression times? Is it CPU/RAM/GPU?
CPU, RAM, and hard disk speed will be the most significant factors. In compressor the hard disk is usually most significant, but with H.264 the CPU/RAM are probably most important.

Would compression times be greatly reduced by buying a beefy Mac Pro?
Yes. With a 12 core box and a RAID-5 I can multi-pass H.264 in anywhere from real time to a quarter of real time.

Any word on virtual clusters? Or even networkingmultiple Macbook Pro’s to use as a cluster?
As far as putting computers together you’ll need a shared storage solution. Shy of shared storage my advice is to stick to a firewire drive, and go for a virtual cluster if you have 6 or more cores allowing you to use three or more segments.

I have had mixed advice on exporting from FCP and then importing to compressor rather than using the ‘send to’ function – I am in the middle of a job so don’t want to experiment with my workflow at the moment.
The main reason to avoid ‘Send to’ is because you can’t use a virtual cluster if you use this workflow. Export a Quicktime movie with Current Settings, then take that QT movie into Compressor.
==
Since your MBP doesn’t have a whole lot of cores I think you’ll probably see best results exporting a movie at Current Settings onto your external drive, then going to H.264 through Compressor. In Compressor you should exporting to a either a different external drive or your internal drive for best performance. You might play around with two or three virtual cluster segments on your laptop to see if that is faster, but I suspect this computer from drive to drive will be as fast as it can be.

[Jeff Meyer]

Progressive video has no field dominance. Check your sequence settings and be sure that the field dominance is none.

While you’re at it, be sure your editing timebase is the correct, either 29.97 or 23.98. If you aren’t sure it will be listed in the browser if you are using a list view, or you can select some of the media and hit butterfly-9, where it will be listed in the item properties.

[Jeff Meyer]

Thanks for the input. The project isn’t too large – only 20mb. I’ll run tools to check out the disk and switch the sequence over to ProRes to see if that helps.