DVCpro HD vs ProRes422?

S

spunkme99

Active member
Hey everyone, I've been searching and reading and am curious as to what you believe to be the "best" for editing in FCP 6?

From what I have gathered, basically...

- DVCpro is good Need capture card for this.

- ProRes gives HDV quality at DV sizes, better for composite work and color correction. But no batch capture. Capture card or firewire

- Capturing/editing straight HDV is not recommended

Is there a clear winner or it depends on the project?
 
spunkme99 said:
Hey everyone, I've been searching and reading and am curious as to what you believe to be the "best" for editing in FCP 6?

From what I have gathered, basically...

- DVCpro is good Need capture card for this.
Click to expand...
DVCPro can be captured over FW just like DV.

- ProRes gives HDV quality at DV sizes, better for composite work and color correction. But no batch capture. Capture card or firewire
Click to expand...
ProRes is intended to give uncompressed HD quality (not HDV) at uncompressed SD sizes (not DV). Using ProRes requires bigger, faster drives than using HDV or DV. If you want to capture as ProRes you need an intel based Mac and the proper I/O to capture the footage. For example, HDV can be captured as ProRes via FW (albeit not in real time), but if you have footage on HDCAM you'd need a capture card w/HD-SDI on it because you can't capture HDCAM via FW. If you purchased the AJA ioHD you could hook that up to pretty much any Mac w/a FW800 port as the ioHD will transcode the footage into ProRes in real time.


- Capturing/editing straight HDV is not recommended
Click to expand...

If you are mastering back to HDV there's no reason to work in any other codec. You can work in an HDV timeline, but set it to render in ProRes, to kinda get the best of both worlds. HDV sized master files but ProRes quality renders for gfx, vfx, color correction, et.,.


Is there a clear winner or it depends on the project?
Click to expand...
It depends on the project and your budget.


-A
 
I see, THANK YOU for correcting me on many points. I found a chart, and ProRes422 HQ is about 1.6GB per minute so I would need mucho space.

Noah - i'll be working with 1080i 24f shot on the XHA1 and HV20. It's a doc, so I only see color correction on the horizon as far as manipulating the footage. I don't know if I'll be mastering back to HDV, I see DVD (hopefully blueray by the time I'm done) as my final destination.

Speaking of the I/O, I don't have the budget for the AJA, but was planning on picking up a Blackmagic card for monitoring. Don't know if that would make a difference.

I'm inclined to just use ProRes because it seems "streamlined" for editing on FCP6. But I feel I need some more reading to do...
 
If you're shooting HDV there's no a lot of advantage to cutting ProRes- edit at HDV then export to ProRes when you're totally done with your edit. However some 24f HDV camera actually require going to ProRes as they are not natively supported. So it kinda depends...

Noah
 
NoahK said:
If you're shooting HDV there's no a lot of advantage to cutting ProRes- edit at HDV then export to ProRes when you're totally done with your edit. However some 24f HDV camera actually require going to ProRes as they are not natively supported. So it kinda depends...

Noah
Click to expand...

I did a short project on Final Cut 5.1.4 with 24F from both these cams. Used JesDeinterlacer for the HV20. Hope it won't be a problem on FCP2

Even though I want to capture all at ProRes, best cost effective plan might be capturing HDV (because of the advantage of log and capture and it's alot of footage) and render ProRes or is it convert to ProRes?

any ideas on the render times to do this?
 
Thank you for pointing to this great article.

Fact is that today, editing HDV in FCP works out great, and you also can render a ProRes version with the final edit.

This article concludes:
"If you do not go out to tape (so you stay in HDV) or you go to DVD or internet you better stay in HDV, but if your endgoal is tape or broadcast go to ProRes as fast as you can."

As stated before, even going to DVD or Blu-ray , doing an export to ProRes before compressing results in better video. Color correcting too. And what if you go to DVD and broadcast? Stay for the DVD in HDV ?

I think you do better with the final program to render in ProRes, shoot HDV and edit basic in HDV, recompress in ProRes (HQ?) and do final CC, place the color corrected video back to FCP.

Questions remain: Going directly to ProRes after the fire wire in? Working with 45 hours tape? That is a lot of ProRes harddrive space. What is the best solution quality wise? And is there nothing to win with ProRes hq (220 Mbps) if your original material was HDV? More or less: your system and hard drives dictates the work flow.

http://images.apple.com/finalcutstudio/resources/white_papers/L342568A_ProRes_WP.pdf
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top