5D & Premiere CS4

[tazza]

I am working with footage shot on the Canon 5D, 1920 x 1080, 23.976 FPS.
I would like to convert this footage using Adobe Media Encoder, any suggestions on what works best on the Premiere time line?
R

 

[NextWaveG]

Here's a writeup I did about my 5D PC workflow: http://nextwaveg.blogspot.com/2010/01/my-5d-mkii-pc-workflow.html

 

[evanbutson]

Thats a great writeup of the workflow. The only thing I would add is, as far as transcode formats, two others that people are using are the Avid DNxHD CODEC and the BlackMagic CODEC, both are free and offer their own benefits. Having said that, CS5 is on its way the countdown has begun http://www.tdepost.com/blog/2010/3/25/can-you-hear-itcs5-is-coming.html

 

[tazza]

Thanks guys, i will check out all suggestions, I noticed that the Avid DNxHD codec is resident in Adobe Media Encoder, is it that easy to use?
and yes I'm sure CS5 will handle this issue.
thanks again.
R

 

[Demistate]

You can convert all your clips to Mpeg-2 i-Frame as well, but i'm not sure if it's pretty much a one click process to go back to online footage.

I've always transcoded to Quicktime Sorenson 3 at 640x360 with matching framerates into a separate folder. This way the file names match exactly, and when I'm ready to online, I select all the footage, click offline, and then relink all the footage once by pointing to the correct folder.

Mpeg-2 i-Frame only should give better quality, but I'm not sure if CS4 gets tripped up on the re-link process.

 

[Demistate]

Thanks guys, i will check out all suggestions, I noticed that the Avid DNxHD codec is resident in Adobe Media Encoder, is it that easy to use?
and yes I'm sure CS5 will handle this issue.
thanks again.
R

There are huge gamma shift issues with exporting Quicktime DNxHD out of Adobe Media Encoder CS4. Take a look here
http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthread.php?p=1947369

In my experience, there are Quicktime gamma shift issues exporting any .mov video from AME.

 

[mhood]

I've had what might be "gamma shift issues" exporting h.264 MP4 out of AME recently too...

 

[Richard Allen Crook]

Check out this guide: http://crookedpathfilms.com/blog/20...to-the-canon-5d-mk-ii-and-adobe-premiere-cs4/

Cineform Neoscene is the way to go.

 

[steventimothy]

Save your pennies for CS5 and an Nvidia GTX285/470/480 or Quadro 3800/4800/5800 board. It'll edit native ridiculously fast from the look of it.

It will do about 10 layers of RT h.264 with instantaneous scrubbing from the looks of it. If it can do multicam native 4K red footage, it will mulch through h.264 like it's an SD-DV resolution.

 

[Demistate]

I've had what might be "gamma shift issues" exporting h.264 MP4 out of AME recently too...

Actually you probably haven't. Mp4s are suposed to be at REC.709 color space, which means that black is actually 16 and White is 235 (as opposed to 0-255) This means that a player on the PC must actually stretch out the black and white to display it properly on an sRGB monitor.

If you play those h.264s back on any Rec.709 device, they will appear correctly.

Apple Quicktime player 7 does NOT play back .mp4 files on Windows with the correct gamma translation, which is one of the many reasons I recommend users to stay away from Quicktime when doing mission critical work (On Windows). Ironically, if you rename your extention from .mp4 to .3gpp the gamma translation does happen in Quicktime for Windows. Quicktime's h.264 decoder and encoder (for windows) is not implemented well.

 

[mhood]

Thank you for that explanation Demistate. I thought I was losing my mind when 255 white masks were going slightly gray over a 255 white background. They looked fine in Premiere CS4 but when I played the output MP4 in QT...problems galore. I "beat" it with the Fast Color Corrector running 240 up to 255 output to crush whites.

If I hear you right, it never really existed outside of QT. I was compressing the MP4s for Web playback in a Flash player...I'm guessing they would have looked fine there but I never checked.