[Mike Johnson]

Rafael,

You know, we had initially tried MPEG2, but were getting major stuttering on playback. I have delivered MPEGs to Pathfire before; using their specs I never had any complaints. For our test, I was simply using Compressor’s default Program Stream preset; maybe we had set our bit rate too high?

I will definitely explore that route as well as take a look at PhotoJPEG. I’ll admit to being completely ignorant with that one. I’ve always seen it, but just assumed it was a legacy format (since I’ve seen it for so long).

Thanks

[Mike Johnson]

Walter,

Thanks for getting back to me.

First off, with the ProRes Decoder for Windows, it is not limited to FCP users any longer. Encoding to ProRes, yes. But not playback (at least as far as I understand. So my question stands, would the ProRes Decoder allow an Avid to actually read the file or at the very least convert it to an Avid friendly format?

I had thought about h.264 but was thinking that the compression might be too heavy. Also, Aja’s Data Rate Calculator doesn’t include it, so I couldn’t easily get a size comparison. 😉

I looked on iStockPhoto’s site; they are indeed offering some clips (depending on source) as an HDV Quicktime. I would imagine that they would not limit there user base to FCP users only. The reason I thought an HDV Quicktime was for FCP users only was based on posts similar to this one:
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/8/1023124#1023124

[Mike Johnson]

Gary,

Does this hold true with the HDV to ProRes setup or was this based on tests captured as HDV and then converted to ProRes? I’d like to think its the exact same thing, but I just want to be sure.

My post today will explain why I’m asking this; the savings in file size from the standard ProRes could make all the difference to me.

[Mike Johnson]

Nope, I’m not on a SAN. Just several computers connected through a router. File sharing is enabled. I mount the appropriate drive on the shared computer and open up the reference file. That’s it. 🙂

[Mike Johnson]

Whether or not its “supposed to,” I’ve been doing it for 3 years. Please don’t read this as being snarky, but you did see that I’m bouncing these around within the same network, right? I’ve always been able to mount a shared drive on another machine and run the Ref file, both in quicktime and compressor. I would never use a Ref from another machine in Final Cut, or anything that actually needed to play it back, but for compression or file conversion I’ve always done it.

Thanks

[Mike Johnson]

Ok, I’m slightly embarrassed, but not too much…

It turns out my intern had changed the settings on his machine. He was capturing to a different drive than the Ref was exported to. I wasn’t aware of this, so I was only connecting to the drive with the Ref file, assuming (yes, I know the old adage) that they were on the same. As soon as I connected to both drives, the file opened up fine.

[Mike Johnson]

Rafael,
I don’t think that’s the case here. I have Final Cut installed on both machines. It was exported from a DV project. I know that I can play DV files on the other machine.

Thanks.

[Mike Johnson]

Missed this last reply. I’ll bring my camera in to the office and give it a try tomorrow. Thanks!

[Mike Johnson]

Thanks for replying Walter.

That was one of the first things I checked; they do indeed match. I’ve also tried a new project from the one i digitized in with no luck. Also, while I’m watching this, I’m noticing that my video’s frame rate seems off; sort of “sped-up.”

The kicker is that I started this in iMovie; it was just my 2-year old playing the piano that I wanted to put on Facebook. iMovie kept giving me dropouts, so I figured I’d try FCP….

[Mike Johnson]

I mean, who throws a shoe? Honestly!