CS5 & Transcoding: Workflow order / Worth the bother?

T

ThisHideousReplica

Active member
Sometimes you hear people say that they will continue transcoding to prores or whatever even in CS5 as prores is more colour-correction friendly and perhaps minimizes noise and artifacts, especially projected on a bigger screen. I was wondering:

a) could someone just edit natively (h.264) with premiere CS5 and only AFTER cutting is done transcode for after effects? Or would there be some kind of degradation in doing it this way? Seems it would be a lot easier to just transcode your finished 5 min. movie as opposed all of the 2 hrs. of footage it was culled from. Especially as you'd need to transcode anyway for DVD.

b) is it worth even thinking about? Specifically with regards to colour correction and large screen projection? Of course we have the Zacuto mafia extolling the virtues of transcoding to prores but that was before CS5 was released and I seem to recall a few of them saying it's not necessary when editing from the native codecs. So says Jason Levine too I do believe.

Thanks kindly in advance and sorry if there are some factual mistakes, mistaken assumptions, noob stupidity in the way I've asked the question. Please be kind enough to not only point out my oversights but also if you could talk to the general idea?
 
It is my firm belief that for most of the cutting that most folks are doing, transcoding is of little value. It makes your file sizes larger and we are talking about a user base who is not used to working with large files and don't have the infrastructure for it.

Transcoding starts to show it's worth when you will be doing video mixdowns inside your project, doing handoffs for color, effects, etc. If there is a single generation between your native files and your delivery codecs, then I don't think transcoding is necessary.

That said, I transcode nearly everything I shoot. I prefer to have a consistent workflow, and my work comes in from all kinds of cameras. Apps like FCP and Avid make this simple because they have a built in codec that is suited for the purpose. And it works for everything from handycam, through broadcast, all the way to film out.

Quite honestly, if you can't see the benefits to doing a transcode, you probably don't need it.
 
Thanks for the reply.

Just to clarify--what about transcoding just the edited movie AFTER you're done cutting as opposed to transcoding every little bit of captured footage BEFORE you edit. Seems it would be way more efficient (transcoding a few minutes of finished film as opposed to hours of footage) But will uspeakably horrible things happen to the picture if done this way?
 
What Perrone said.

But transcoding to high quality workflow codec before even starting, is not feasible in projects with lots of material. Even hollywood will not do this. If it's that kind of project, do creative edits on proxy. DV works fine for this. Transcode to DV and edit that. You will save a lot of time, processing power and storage. You can edit anywhere really, even low end machines, and you can have others work on editing a sequence without forcing them to use your expensive software/hardware/codecs. Then apply the edit decision lists to the original full resolution clips and output to a high quality workflow codec or uncompressed. The material will only be 2% to 10% of the original runtime, so you will not need much storage, even if you go uncompressed. You don't even need realtime performance to apply color correction and finishing, you have taken care of pace and timing in your proxy creative edit.
 
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