editing at low res question

H

hwoodfilm

Member
i am trying to figure out if i can edit at low res and then simply do a final render to get the final project back to full res at the end.

i am using final cut 4.5 and my 6 year old powerbook G4. it can only really handle playing 480p video during the editing process.

i was doing a little reading about offline edits but it talks about capturing at low res and recapturing at high res at the end. but i am using 7D .mov files. they dont need to be captured because they are already on my hard drive.

can i import the hd mov file into fcp from my hard drive, and then convert it to low res somehow, then edit, then render the final project back to high res?

how does that work?

thanks.
David
 
Um... No.

When you down res your footage, you're throwing away information, you can't just get it back by scaling back up because it's no longer there.

If you want to use an offline to online workflow, you need to preserve the full res information (like on a source tape or a disc image of the original memory card) and then recapture or retransfer from that original.
 
i guess my question then is: (apologize for being a newby in this area)

how do i take a raw clip from my 7D that i have on my hard drive. get it onto fcp as a manageable file size, edit it, then how do i then retransfer full res source clip to the final cut?

thanks.
 
With your G4? This will be monumentally difficult. You really need a MacPro with FCP 6 or 7 to do a lot of this work. Reason? To work with the 7D and convert it to an offline res codec, and retain the camera timecode, name, and add a reel number, you need to use LOG AND TRANSFER. But then it only imports as ProRes...so you will need to so that first...making the high quality files, then use the Media manager to RECOMPRESS to an offline codec, like DVCPRO HD, or DV. NOTE...doing that means that any stills you have in the sequence, and scaling of the footage you do, will have to be manually redone at the online, as the pixel dimensions are different.

If you insist on working with this footage on your G4 using 4.5...from start to finish, convert the H.264 footage the camera shoots to DVCPRO HD. Your machine and FCP version can handle that just fine. It is designed to.
 
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