Even worse, at least to me, is what Prores does to the camera's lowest quality setting, HE. These files are recorded to SD card at a tiny 6Mbps, but because the resolution of the clip is 1440x1080 and 29.97, the transcoded Prores clip swells to over 15MB/sec! That's right, a clip that is more than a third smaller than the highest quality 720p clip becomes twice as big as it after transcode.
The HE mode is perfect for long recording times, especially when the subject is a human who's giving a very long speech. You can squeeze many more hours of footage on your SD card and not have to worry about stopping to change out cards. But all of that space savings is thrown out the window once you transcode. I'll leave you with an example:
Clip - recorded using HE mode
Length is 1 hour and 13 minutes
AVCHD file size - 2.97 GB
Prores 422 file size - 65.92 GB!
7 comments:
ProRes always transcodes to its default data rate.
Can you edit the HD material natively and not transcode to ProRes at all? Or you could go to something like DVCPRO HD to save space ....
Well in a perfect futuristic world ProRes would have some intelligence behind its encoding and recognize the various compression schemes of the files being converted. I.E. - it would know to treat a 6 Mbps clip differently than a 21. But I'm dreaming...
Within Final Cut you're limited to ProRes and AIC. Using Toast you could go to DVCPRO HD, but it loses TC information and seems quite a bit slower in the encoding.
And no you can't edit natively with AVCHD files in Final Cut. I believe you can with Premiere, though.
That's a drag!
Can't wait till Final Cut supports native HMC150 files.
Have you guys ever tried the the AVCHD -> DVCPHD converter from panasonic. I work at an editing house that still has a mixture of G5's and MacPros, and its our only option for the G5's.
It seems to work and is really fast, i just wanted to see if you guys have tried.
https://eww.pavc.panasonic.co.jp/pro-av/support/desk/e/download.htm#avchd
-J
Icyblue,
I've never used it. Isn't this Windows-only? Do you use Boot Camp on your Mac Pros to use it? And does it maintain the TC from the AVCHD files?
Yes we actually use a pc and then offload to the G5, via network.
Its not an ideal workaround but it's much faster then toast or voltaic. (however that's probably because the pc we are using is burly)
On the intel mac's we just re-wrap to AIC or pro res. Mostly to AIC - since it's smaller (we sometimes do corp video, where speed is more important then quality 8-(
On an alternative sub. Do you know of a program to verify the copy? Were trying to do it on mac, and we can't find any.
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