[Tim Kolb]

Hi David,

Overall of course, none of these questions are distantly related to Premiere Pro…

Question 1:
“mixing board and monitors”…in the industry this language would cause most of us in North America to think you mean an “audio mixing console” and “monitor” speakers, which would be best asked about in the Cow’s “Audio Professionals” forum.

I suspect however, you mean a “video switcher” (“vision mixer” for many across the pond) and video display “monitors”. This covers a lot of area and is a question that is impossible to answer without some idea of the equipment you’ve already purchased.

Question 2:
Compression Tool…the Cow’s “Compression Techniques forum would be a great place to ask this.

Question 3:
“What is a RAID?” The Cow’s “ARRAYS and RAID Set-up” forum might get you further with that.

Question 4:
“What sort of flat panel display?”…this one is also pretty broad and depends on a host of factors with your existing system.

Question 5:
“Roll two cameras from the control room…” Again, without some sort of actual information about what cameras you’re using, what format you’re recording, what software you may be doing post production on, what frame size and format you are distributing and/or archiving…any answer would be an arbitrary and uninformed one.

When you are setting up a facility like this, you can’t simply buy each item individually without some sort of a plan as not every thing connects to, or is compatible with every other, or even a variety of other thing(s).

I recently had a performance venue that decided they didn’t want to pay me to help them plan their in-house HD system, but after they received the gear, they realized they were over their heads and they called me in to configure the system and I ended up saving them well over 10,000 USD the first day I showed up, even with heavy restocking fees for returning the gear they were convinced they needed, but actually they didn’t…

The restocking fees alone would have covered my time tweice over to help them come up with a well-engineered plan in advance, but as it was, the system was still a compromise in many ways because it wasn’t designed by someone who understood how it all needed to work as a “system”. They paid me later to have to “adapt” what they had to create a functioning facility.

These seem like areas that probably aren’t central to your current expertise. I’d recommend you secure the services of someone who can advise you and has optimizing your system as their primary goal. Otherwise you’ll be sifting through sales pitches disguised as objective technical information in many cases.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

Yup…it definitely does.

…in fact I have a video on AdobeTV where I edit a 90 minute timeline of ProRes with CS4.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

Hi Jeff,

Actually PPro CS4 and CS5 just look at what’s installed in QT. There really isn’t any specific Adobe stuff involved in this, so having the ProRes read codec would depend on whether or not the user installed it with QT.

I’ve always used QT Pro for at least the last 4-5 years and the ProRes read codec is in there already (best 29.95 USD you can spend BTW people…).

For the standard, free QT install for Windows, once upon a time you had to track down the ProRes read codec and install it separately (also free), but these days I am not sure if it’s included or still separate…

So…that’s what I know…and what I don’t. 🙂

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

It sounds like you’ve covered most of the bases.

As a last resort, I’d try cleaning the Media Cache from the preferences, and if that doesn’t do it, I’d say you might be left with reworking the changes since the last auto-save.

My auto-save is set pretty aggressively, so I only lose 10 minutes or less of the last work I did.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

Um…you won’t find any “FCP codecs” on Adobe’s site I’m afraid. Most of the codecs that FCP re-wraps to are only available to FCP users with the exception of the ProRes “read-only” codec that Jeff mentioned.

(don’t blame Adobe, address those cards and letters to “S. Jobs, Apple, Inc…)

There are several of these codecs that are recognized by AJA board users through AJA’s software, or yoou can get software from Calibrated Software that will enable you to read many of these codecs outside of a machine with FCP, but other than that, once the media has been rewrapped by FCP, it’s designed to stay there unless you choose to fully transcode to a generallly available legacy QT codec, or you use a truly cross-platform codec solution like CineForm.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

How are you handling the media? I know when I transfer EX files, the Sony utility combines spanned files.

I’m not sure whether to span or not is the NLE’s decision…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

Assuming all the material is the same pixel dimensions, pixel aspect and frame rate…as long as the sequence matches that, it doesn’t matter whether you have the XDcamEX HD sequence or the DSLR sequence as the base setting.

None of the PPro sequence settings are based on a codec. Any codec on the machine is recognized and used and they can be mixed on any sequence without a problem. The “presets” are there as a bit of a quick-reference for users, but for instance the XDcamEX HQ preset, the AVCHD preset, and the DSLR preset that are 1920x1080p23.976 are all the same sequence.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

For PPro, most people would use CineForm in my experience. It’s as good, if not possibly a twitch better that ProRes in my experience. Both codecs are excellent with the slight difference that CineForm is completely cross platform and truly wrapper-interchangeable between AVI and QT.

You have to purchase CineForm separately, but then since PPro’s general operations don’t require it’s use (as ProRes is really necessary for multiple workflows in FCP), Adobe doesn’t have a “house” intermediate codec other than perhaps DPX frame sequences on the high end, which are supported with extensive flexibility inside PPro CS5.

CineForm has a transcoding utlity.

Alternatively, I suppose you could use the Media Encoder to transcode your DSLR footage to XDcamHD 422, which is an equivalent data rate but a less complex decode process (MPEG2 vs MPEG4). You may gain some speed there, but you’ll obviously lose something in the transcode. Whether the visual loss is notable in your workflow or not becomes a question you have to answer…

You could also convert to some P2 format or something like that (with even more substantial visual loss due to frame subsampling), but I suspect that if you had to backtrack to replace clips later with the DSLR originals, the infernal P2 naming structure may not help much there…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

A yellow line means that PPro believes it should be able to play through a section without a render. Green means that it’s been rendered…red means that PPro believes it probably has to be rendered.

Because it’s difficult for PPro to measure every nuance and calculate each footage/configuration/circumstance instance, sometimes a timeline that’s yellow will have some trouble playing back at framerate, and sometimes a section of timeline that’s red will playback without needing to render.

PPro sequences aren’t like FCP sequences. You’ll find lots of sequence presets that indicate formats and codecs, etc… However PPro is really just lookiing at frame size, pixel aspect, and framerate. If the codec is on the machine, PPro will play the material. In other words, there would be no technical difference in a sequence for ProRes, XDcamEX HQ, or DSLR that was setup for 1920×1080 at 29.97 progressive as you could simply mix all those formats matching those frame size/rate specs. If you brought in HDV at 1080 however, that format is 1440×1080 non-square so you’ll have some scaling to do. The HDV could show red on your timeline. Depending on how powerful your machine is, you may still be able to simply play it through dropping moderate to no frames.

In any case, you’d never get the full screen “you must render this” graphic.

As far as being able to scrub HDV smoothly vs (I’m assuming you’re implying not) scrubbing ProRes…

HDV is 25 Mbits/s. ProRes is 145 Mbits/s or 220 Mbits/s on HQ depending on what you’re using (LT drops lower of course, etc.). So, since the CPU is up to the task of doing the decode in MPEG, you’re probably relieving the system of having to chug through much larger ProRes data files…

Also…QT is 32 bit and QT video formats requires Adobe to jump through some hoops to make it work in a 64 bit application. FCP is 32 bit and all that works together with QT fine, but Adobe happens to have gone 64 bit native before (for some inexplicable reason) the video editing application from the computer manufacturing company who has had a 64 bit operating system for 10 years and up until now has still had a 32 bit editing application running a 32 bit media architecture. QTX is changing that, but it seems like it’s about a decade overdue…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

I trust that the media was sent to your client in complete and original folder format…

I edit DVCProHD from P2 frequently…it would probably be one of the formats that PPro works with easiest (yes, on a PC)…definitely easier than H264 on all counts.

Does your client have lots of experience editing? Have you verified that she has the correct sequence (non-square pixels, etc.)?

Running DVCProHD on a full res/square pixel sequence might make things a touch grouchy…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,