[Richard Herd]

[Rick Wise] “using a light meter on video shoots”

I always use an incident meter but then I’m AAU alumni 2005 and it was necessary part of the curriculum. ☺ I sure miss Curran Engel.

[Richard Herd]

[Mike Tyler] “150 mb larger from Final Cut”

One hidden detail in compression is called the key frame interval. And that means how many i-frames there are. Compression is interesting. In order to have color on an image all the pixel data for each pixel is recorded. You can imagine an image of 1920 x 1080 as being made up of tiny 2 million pixels, in a grid. The first pixel is at location (1,1); the second pixel is at (1,2)…and so on. For each location the pixel has a corresponding RGB value (say it’s white) of R=255, G=255, B=255. And so on. All that information is recorded in the Intraframe, the i-frame.

Video compression is very fancy math that calculates, predicts, and records, the CHANGE in data from the i frame to the next frame: b-frame. Then the next frame records what has changed from that frame and so on until another i frame is recorded.

i frames are very big file sizes.
b frames are smaller.

together all the i-frames and b-frames are called the “group of pictures” (GOP). You might read people posting about “Long GOP compression” or something like that.

You can control how big the final output is by changing the keyframe interval (what they should have called the intraframe interval). I usually put it to half the frame rate. So if it’s 29.97, then I set the keyframe to 15, as an example.

It’s best to experiment and find the best balance for you between quality and file size.

Keeping that in mind as you also juggle bitrate can help you get the best picture quality at the most efficient file sizes for your needs.

For the best control on Apple software, it’s wise to get Apple Compressor, or learn to use ffmpeg.

[Richard Herd]

a-ha!

I was given XDCAM EX in a quicktime wrapper!!

Thanks again!

[Richard Herd]

6. File permissions are not wide open for everybody to read and write.

[Richard Herd]

[Daniel Waldron] “It should dramatically decrease your render time.
“

Is there a reason why?
Thanks!

[Richard Herd]

[Mike Tyler] “FPCX produces very large file sizes”

What do you mean by very large? Video files are massive and we always have lots of additional storage. In general, it’s best to keep your camera archive on one Drive. Your editing media on another drive. (One other drive for dynamic link media too.) All of those are NOT your system drive.

This can get one more level of complexity when you start setting it up with backups and RAIDs, etc.

Render time is slightly more complicated because adding effects and resizing and whatever else you’ve done to a particular piece of media may not be exactly the same thing from one project to another. So to really compare you’d want to do the same thing to the same file in the separate applications and see what happens.

[Richard Herd]

I think 1/3 bump open on the bolex is warranted because of that damn prism and it’s not quite a 180 shutter angle. Obviously, you’ll want to run camera tests (bracket exposures) BEFORE you shoot the actual thing.

[Richard Herd]

It’s impossible to answer. Please include your exact workflow steps. Thanks!

[Richard Herd]

[Tony West] “Ironically he was pointing out that Apple didn’t expect ProRes to become what it did. He was saying the marketplace decided that on their own.”

That’s how I understood his comments too.

For Mr. Soyka’s thought experiment: imagine having to transcode all the ProAm to ProOpenSource. Whew.

[Richard Herd]

These have all been very helpful!