[Ryan Holmes]

Neil – Like Eric says, the C100 is gonna max out at 1080p. My recommendation, if you’re sticking with the Canon line, is to take a look at the C70. It’s a very natural progression from a 5DIV.

I’ve got a C70, C200, and C300III and for so many jobs I find myself reaching for the C70 cause it’s just really convenient size, shape, and recording formats (plus the touch screen interface is so much nicer than the C200). The C200 falls in a strange area because its premiere feature was that it shot 12-bit RAW, which was fantastic when it was released in 2017. It’s other working codec leaves a lot to be desired quality-wise (mp4 at 4:2:0 8-bit is really proxy territory but the only other format offered). For the same $$$ I think the C70 is a more versatile camera than the C200, with a wider variety of codec choices and frame rates.

Just my $0.02

[Ryan Holmes]

Well…it’s YouTube, so everything has ads (eventually). Since you’re not paying for YouTube, they get their money from ad $$$$. If you want to ensure no ads, you’d need to use a paid service like Vimeo or something to guarantee no ads.

https://vimeo.com/features/video-player

[Ryan Holmes]

[Bernard Newnham] “you might like to look at NAS solutions – network attached storage. They come in many sizes”

Bernard you are absolutely right. I love NAS! In fact, we run 2 Dynamic Drive Pool (DDP’s) with about 300TB of space for our video team (about 20-30 live event recordings each week!). Storage space isn’t the problem, it’s being able to share it across multiple departments and the ability to search it to find what is needed. The photographers aren’t necessarily the designers, so the designers need to be able to search for photos they need.

I love Synology too! Our photo storage currently lives on a little 32TB Synology box that users across campus can connect to over SMB…but it’s not really searchable. It holds our stuff no problem, but you access it through Finder (everyone is Mac based here) and you poke around hoping to find what you need. And if an outside organization is hired for a campaign of some sort I would love, love, love if our DAM allowed them to search (not download) our photo assets as well, and they could request a series of photos which allow us to control the look, feel, brand as well.

Ryan Holmes
http://www.ryanholmes.me
@CutColorPost

[Ryan Holmes]

[Tristan Finn] “NVIDIA Quadro K2000 “

Upgrading the GPU is almost always a no-brainer. Grabbing a GeForce GTX 1080 or similar would increase your usability and lower render times without a huge hit to the piggy bank.

Puget Systems has some great benchmark tests and recommendations that you may find helpful:
https://www.pugetsystems.com/recommended/Recommended-Systems-for-Adobe-Premiere-Pro-CC-143

Ryan Holmes
http://www.ryanholmes.me
@CutColorPost

[Ryan Holmes]

[Doug Helsby] “Encore CS6 had some useful additional content for making dvd menus et al. “

You could also use a standalone app like Toast from Roxio to burn a DVD. For the few DVD’s I have to produce each year, that’s the route we go as Encore is dead. But like Oilver notes, the menu creation is very limited.

I’d also second Graham’s idea of using a USB-flash drive because that’s cheap and nearly all recent TV’s have a USB port on them to read a media drive. Create a mp4 using the h.264 codec and that’s about as universal as it gets in 2019!

Ryan Holmes
http://www.ryanholmes.me
@CutColorPost

[Ryan Holmes]

[Chris DeVere] “Ok, so how about H.264? Will AME render a clip with an alpha channel using H.264?”

Chris – As of 2019, I don’t believe h.264 supports an alpha channel. You’ll need to use an intermediate codec (like DNxHD or ProRes) to carry your alpha channel.

Ryan Holmes
http://www.ryanholmes.me
@CutColorPost

[Ryan Holmes]

Unlink the height and width and then change it to the resolution you need. Or you can tell Media Encoder to maintain source settings so that what goes in, is the same as what comes out. Then you’ll just be transcoding from what format to another but maintaining all the source clips settings like resolution, frame rate, etc.

Ryan Holmes
http://www.ryanholmes.me
@CutColorPost

[Ryan Holmes]

Hilary – you’ll need to make sure that you set the “Level” of the h.264 encode to at least level 4 to achieve data rates like your spec sheet demands. Levels above 4 allow the target bitrates to reach as high 240Mbps at level 5.1.

See here for more info:
https://help.encoding.com/knowledge-base/article/do-you-have-any-information-on-h-264-levels/

Ryan Holmes
http://www.ryanholmes.me
@CutColorPost

[Ryan Holmes]

[Phil Lister] “One thing…that MP4 format takes forever to download. “

Download or encode? Downloading depends on the speed of your Internet connection and the server you’re pulling it from. If the file is large it could take awhile.

Encoding, or the compressing of information from one format to another, is entirely dependent on your local system. h.264 is extremely processor intensive to encode and decode. the more RAM, faster the hard drives, better the graphics cards, etc all help in speeding up a h.264 encode. But if you’re trying to do this on a laptop or a Windows tablet you should put the coffee on, cause it’s gonna be awhile! ☺

Ryan Holmes
http://www.ryanholmes.me
@CutColorPost

[Ryan Holmes]

Phil – the best delivery format is likely a mp4 using the h.264 codec. That would ensure playback on virtually any computer (Windows or Mac) and all smartphones and tablets. There are some generic h.264 presets included in Media Encoder that can get you started. Depending on your computer specs, the format of the original media, and your hard disk speed as well as the timeline you’re encoring this can be a very time consuming encode (in the several of hours timeframe). So plan accordingly.

Ryan Holmes
http://www.ryanholmes.me
@CutColorPost