Advice on lossless workflow

ianflaig

ianflaig

Member
Hey guys,

My situation is as follows, I have a very sloppy and somewhat poorly built premiere project (large HD 720 music video around 3 minutes in length)

It's come time to do the final color correction pass and from what i've read on here it seems like im going to do the initial correction pass with Colorista and then do a 'look' pass with Magicbullet looks.

My problem is that im unsure of what will be the best lossless export settings for getting my video into aftereffects and/or final cut. The problem is that uncompressed .avi is just waaaaaayyy too big to work with at HD. A quicktime sorenson 3 at 100% comes out at about 800megs but there must be a lot of loss there right?

What would you recommend? And on a side note question i've always had, which is more lossless: (a) 100% quality sorenson 3 quicktime or (b) 100% quality Animation codec Quicktime ?

thanks in advance,

Ian
 
what version of premiere? if you don't have sorenson squeeze, you probably don't have the pro version of the codec(??), or the encoder capability of making multiple passes... without pro tools, uncompressed might be the best quality option.

i would avoid the multiple re-encoding scenario that you have laid out there, if at all possible... can't you add multiple filters on your timeline?
 
hey OSV thanks for taking the time to reply. :)

without going into too much explanation of the headache the fact is that I need to export out of premiere(cs3) with quicktime and am wondering what the best quality codec I can use is. (short reason is that i can no longer do any post work in premiere)

I tried using 'none' but the rendered file is 10 gigs. (too large) out of all the other options whats the second most faithful to quality? Right now im working with a 2 gig JPEG codec quicktime. Good? Bad?



edit: i have sorenson squeeze 4.0 so i assume i have all pro versions of the quicktime codecs i need.
 
afaik, the problem with squeeze is that you can't access it from the timeline, as in, frameserving it out like you would for procoder... perhaps you could export the uncompressed 10 gig file to the hdd, then import that into squeeze?

the reason you'd want to do that is so that you can take advantage of things like two-pass encoding, and variable bit rate encoding... can you do vbr and two-pass encoding directly from the premiere timeline? with any of the codecs you listed?

worst case, i would highlight the toughest section to encode of your timeline, and run some test encodes with various codecs, to see what works best... just a short sequence, after encoding use your multimedia player to single-step through the frames, full screen.
 
hmmm i guess im not really getting my point across. I can get the file into squeeze and that works dandy and I can do VBR from there just fine. (but wouldnt CBR be better for quality anyways?)

I just want to know which quicktime codec (besides using 'none') can give me the best quality possible without it being larger then, lets say, 2 gigs or so. Animations, JPEG, PNG, theres so many options.

Thanks for the advice thus far, going into squeeze was a good idea to look around.
 
vbr will give you smaller file sizes at the same visual quality... or better quality at the same file size as cbr, because higher bitrates have been allocated to the scenes where they are needed the most... cbr can be overkill where you don't need it, and not enough where it's really needed.

i ran some jpeg2000 encoding out of vegas today, it created huge files on the highest quality setting.

i mentioned using uncompressed as the path to get the file into squeeze because that step could cause some picture quality loss if it's not handled correctly... maybe you could set your file size limit to something that would fit on a dvd-r, as a data file? 3 minutes into 4 gigs will give you the target bitrate to shoot for.
 
ianflaig said:
hmmm i guess im not really getting my point across. I can get the file into squeeze and that works dandy and I can do VBR from there just fine. (but wouldnt CBR be better for quality anyways?)

I just want to know which quicktime codec (besides using 'none') can give me the best quality possible without it being larger then, lets say, 2 gigs or so. Animations, JPEG, PNG, theres so many options.

Thanks for the advice thus far, going into squeeze was a good idea to look around.
Click to expand...

lol. I'm reading this whole discussion, and it was funny that you said you weren't getting your point across right. I hear you on that. anyways, are you still having trouble with your workflow or what? From what I read, it seems you want a QT codec to us for your workflow.

1.)Does FCP and AF have Magic bullet looks and colorista? If so, thats good.

2.) a - The best codecs to use are "Animation, ( High quality, RGB+ for alpha, and make suer you keep your aspect ratios right at all times. Do not check anything for 16x9 or wide screen). you already shot HD so it is automatically WS.

2.) b - If you have this codec, its called (Apple res 422 HQ) that's also very good and uncompress. I use that shooting on the CineAlta F900 and I did not have a machine that could edit 3k res. So using apple ress 422 HQ, I can down convert it and edit at a reasonable flow. Then use that codec to go back out on a digibeta /or HD Cam tape.

that should be the answers you're looking for you. Let me know.

Best of Luck in your work flow journey. :)

Murray
 
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