[Tom Brooks]

The MOTU doesn’t seem to claim ProRes “in hardware.” So the encoding and decoding must be done by the CPU, no?

[Tom Brooks]

Zak has pretty much summed up all of my suggestions. Make sure you are Rendering out of After Effects, not Exporting. You want to choose an uncompressed or lossless setting and render fields the same way they came in. In the Render Queue where it says “Best Settings”, go into that and set field rendering to lower first for DV footage (assuming it was not progressive to begin with).

The key is avoiding DV compression whether it happens as a result of exporting a movie or rendering in your timeline. If you don’t get the concept of changing your sequence setting or you’re unsure how or at what point in your edit to do that, ask again. You can also search posts. Our leader David has given advice on this technique many times. Cheers!

[Tom Brooks]

Marcela,
I don’t think there would be a big difference between the two but I might give a slight preference to the H.264 model because that is using Quicktime. Final Cut Express is a Quicktime-based application.

Also, H.264 is a very efficient, modern codec, so the quality might be better at a given file size. AVI is basically an outdated technology.
-Tom

[Tom Brooks]

You’re mixing technologies and terminologies a bit in that question. AVI is a container for video. Quicktime is also a container for video. H.264 is a codec that is used for video within the Quicktime container.

With AVI, the usability for editing depends on the codec used inside of that AVI container. If it’s an AVI with the DV codec, it’s probably easy to convert for use in Final Cut. I believe the manual says Final Cut is able to import AVI directly if the codec exists on your machine. I’d have to check on that. The other approach is to open the AVI in Quicktime Pro and save it out as a Quicktime Movie. If the AVI is using the Cinepak codec, you’ll have to convert it to an editing format using Quicktime Pro or Compressor.

The process of converting a movie of nonstandard format to a standard editing format has to be taken on a case-by-case basis. All the issues of frame size, frame rate, progressive vs. interlaced have to be taken into account.

What’s your specific scenario? Why would you need to convert one of these formats?

[Tom Brooks]

[Paul Godard] “1/ The way I have imported my clips from the P2 cards onto my hd is by using the P2 import feature in FCP 5.1 that creates QT files that are DVCPRO HD 720p50 (I don’t know why 50?). Is that first step correct?”

That is correct Paul.

[Paul Godard] “2/ If now we totally forget the video (no video in my movie), and only concentrate on the still images with text over and some transition and I want to create the best quality true hd movie at 1920 x 1080 what would be a/ the ideal timeline settings, b/ the settings to export the best quality QT file to play the hd movie from the mac and c/ from the pc and finally d/ the best way to create the mpg2 files for DVDSP to create the best quality sd dvd?”

Look in your Easy Setups. What are the choices for 1080? Choose the best among those. If you buy a high quality codec like Sheer Video, you can create a setup for that codec, but that’s going a bit beyond the basics.

By the way, the choices for DVCProHD have changed over the past couple of years. Apple has updated Final Cut Pro so that it handles more of the shooting modes of the P2 cameras. If you could upgrade to the latest version of Final Cut, you would have more choices in DVCProHD and you’d have ProRes 422.

Uncompressed codecs usually come with hardware capture cards like the Kona product line. If you have no need to capture from or output to an HD or SD VTR via analog or SDI, you probably don’t need a capture card.

Good training sources are the Final Cut manual, the Apple Pro Training Series, and several of the DVDs on this site. Shane’s Getting Organized DVD is probably a great investment. I don’t have it (Sorry Shane!) but I hear good things about it and a basic understanding of project setup and organization are essential.

Email me what you see in your Easy Setups list if you want.
tom at image-stream dot com

[Tom Brooks]

I think I understand what you’re after here. But you’re in FCP 5.1 and you have no Kona or other hardware I/O device (Am I right?). So your uncompressed or lossless codec options are limited. In 6.0.2, I have DVCProHD 1080p25 by the way–although I would not be happy to use that as it is still too lossy.

Perhaps the Sheer Video codec would be a good way out of this mess for you. You need the advice of frequent poster Rafael Amador on this one. He makes a good case for that codec, which costs around $150 I think. It has no RT Extreme capability but could be great as an intermediate. You could change your sequence compressor to the 8-bit or 10-bit 4:2:2 HD version of the codec and then export as a QT movie from that sequence. Rafael?

https://www.bitjazz.com/en/products/sheervideo/

[Tom Brooks]

I second Jeff’s recommendation. As long as your project is set up to edit the majority (or perhaps the most important) of your source footage in its native codec, the best export is as Jeff describes. This method does not recompress your material.

Another method is often mentioned on the Cow in cases where the source footage is recorded in a very lossy codec like DV or HDV. The trick is to change the compressor in your sequence to a less lossy codec like Uncompressed 8-bit or ProRes 422 HQ and then export your Quicktime movie from the sequence. Do this at the end of the edit. Use that movie as your intermediate. The purpose of this is to apply less compression to titles, stills, imported animations, etc. I’m sure a search of posts will turn up references to this.

Here’s a quote from another forum as an example:
From Graeme Nattress:
Although many people recommend getting out of HDV as soon as you can, what is usually best for HDV is to edit nativly. Yes – this works fine, as Apple have done a superb job on the codec to make it work right. Then, right at the end of editing, you change the timeline to uncompressed, re-render, and output to your high end HD deck. Quality is maintained as best as possible throughout the whole process, and you don’t need a massive raid while editing, only at the end.

[Tom Brooks]

Could it be a disk or operating system issue rather than a Compressor issue? And yet, you said you have compressed the film successfully before. What type of drive were you writing to? Was it network storage or local? Were there changes in those types of things in addition to the compression changes that could also have caused this new problem?

[Tom Brooks]

[gary adcock] “no.”

Tell Apple that. It works in a pinch. The codec isn’t the problem. If the specific H.264 movie you have is rejected by FCP, you’ll have to change it. Might’s well change it to a standard editing format.

[Tom Brooks]

There are probably variations of H.264 that are unknown to Final Cut, although in general, it should recognize most formats that Quicktime itself recognizes. Looks like some experimentation and batch converting are in order.