ROCKMORE
Veteran
I have an i7 with CS5, but when that computer is busy I have to work on my quad as well with CS4.
This week I had to edit a project with 80 Gb of H-264 1080 25p footage that had to be edited on the Quad which isn't fast enough and can't handle that size workload. I don't like transcoded footage for the final grade and always use the original H-264 camera files for final grading and export. I decided to transcode all the files to work offline, using Streamclip to batch convert each of the 10 folders to 1280x720 with setting Apple Motion JPEG A at 50% quality. This gave me a good looking image to work with offline and the files were reduced to 50% of the data from my original camera files. My 80GB project became a 40GB set of duplicate work files instead of growing X4 in file size when transcoding.
Importing the 1280x720 files to the CS4 full 1080 25fps timeline, I scaled up the 720p to frame size and it edited without rendering faster than anything I've ever done. Very light timeline.
Before I exported the files I right clicked and made each folder in the CS4 project "offline", then linked each folder to the folder of original camera files containing a set of full rez files with the identical names, in this case shot numbers .mov.
This workflow works for me because the transcoding reduces the converted files by half and the M-JPEG files are easy for the slower PC with CS4 to read.
This should allow me to edit in the field offline with even a small compact laptop, but still be able to convert back to my original files for grading and export.
For people who don't have the cash for an i7 and CS5 this is an alternate method to work on a slower system while retaining the best export quality for delivery.
This week I had to edit a project with 80 Gb of H-264 1080 25p footage that had to be edited on the Quad which isn't fast enough and can't handle that size workload. I don't like transcoded footage for the final grade and always use the original H-264 camera files for final grading and export. I decided to transcode all the files to work offline, using Streamclip to batch convert each of the 10 folders to 1280x720 with setting Apple Motion JPEG A at 50% quality. This gave me a good looking image to work with offline and the files were reduced to 50% of the data from my original camera files. My 80GB project became a 40GB set of duplicate work files instead of growing X4 in file size when transcoding.
Importing the 1280x720 files to the CS4 full 1080 25fps timeline, I scaled up the 720p to frame size and it edited without rendering faster than anything I've ever done. Very light timeline.
Before I exported the files I right clicked and made each folder in the CS4 project "offline", then linked each folder to the folder of original camera files containing a set of full rez files with the identical names, in this case shot numbers .mov.
This workflow works for me because the transcoding reduces the converted files by half and the M-JPEG files are easy for the slower PC with CS4 to read.
This should allow me to edit in the field offline with even a small compact laptop, but still be able to convert back to my original files for grading and export.
For people who don't have the cash for an i7 and CS5 this is an alternate method to work on a slower system while retaining the best export quality for delivery.
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