Vance
12-30-2008, 05:49 PM
Hi all.
To give you some context, we're taking an HMC-150 overseas to shoot an episodic documentary show, so obviously there is going to be hundreds of hours of footage. We want to be able to edit while abroad, so we're trying to figure out the best workflow for the AVCHD footage with a Macbook Pro and Final Cut Studio.
I've done some pretty extensive research here, and it appears to me that there really isn't an easy work-around for creating AVCHD proxies to edit from, or offlining the raw footage to something that takes up very little space, and then onlining the final edit back to something like ProRes 422 (at least when working on FCP on a Mac. I am aware that you can generate proxies with some PC programs and even edit natively on Premiere CS4).
The reason we need go offline with out footage is because we have very limited hard drive space and will be dealing with TONS of footage.
So according to my knowledge, I have 3 options here:
1) Using FCP, Log & Transfer to ProRes 422, but only very selectively due to limited space.
2) Using Toast 9, transcode native AVCHD to h.264, since this codec seems to retain high quality, but is more than 5 times smaller than ProRes 422 and DVCPro HD. With the h.264 clips, I transcode THAT to an offline photo-jpeg quality, edit those, then re-online to my h.264 clips. (Or am I asking for trouble with the h.264 altogether?)
3) Wait for FCP to edit AVCHD natively. :)
Does anyone know of a more clever alternative(s) that I just haven't thought of, as far editing hundreds of hours of AVCHD with limited drive space? My editors aren't too savvy about using a PC as part of the workflow, but maybe I can convince them if it's well integrated with Mac...
Thanks for your thoughts!
To give you some context, we're taking an HMC-150 overseas to shoot an episodic documentary show, so obviously there is going to be hundreds of hours of footage. We want to be able to edit while abroad, so we're trying to figure out the best workflow for the AVCHD footage with a Macbook Pro and Final Cut Studio.
I've done some pretty extensive research here, and it appears to me that there really isn't an easy work-around for creating AVCHD proxies to edit from, or offlining the raw footage to something that takes up very little space, and then onlining the final edit back to something like ProRes 422 (at least when working on FCP on a Mac. I am aware that you can generate proxies with some PC programs and even edit natively on Premiere CS4).
The reason we need go offline with out footage is because we have very limited hard drive space and will be dealing with TONS of footage.
So according to my knowledge, I have 3 options here:
1) Using FCP, Log & Transfer to ProRes 422, but only very selectively due to limited space.
2) Using Toast 9, transcode native AVCHD to h.264, since this codec seems to retain high quality, but is more than 5 times smaller than ProRes 422 and DVCPro HD. With the h.264 clips, I transcode THAT to an offline photo-jpeg quality, edit those, then re-online to my h.264 clips. (Or am I asking for trouble with the h.264 altogether?)
3) Wait for FCP to edit AVCHD natively. :)
Does anyone know of a more clever alternative(s) that I just haven't thought of, as far editing hundreds of hours of AVCHD with limited drive space? My editors aren't too savvy about using a PC as part of the workflow, but maybe I can convince them if it's well integrated with Mac...
Thanks for your thoughts!