Editing in FCP using H.264

I understand that.

However, your posts often pit FCP/Mac against PC. The OP didn't asked about workflow using other NLEs on Windows. Responding about Premiere's treatment of native h.264, RED, EXCAM, mxf, AVCINTRA, AVCHD, or any other native format has no relevance nor provides assistance to the OP who came here asking about help with native h.264 in FCP and color correction versus transcoding to prores.

If you have experience with FCP regarding color correction of native h.264, then provide it.

Otherwise, please check the Mac versus PC or FCP versus Premiere discussion at the door.

It wasn't asked by the OP.

My patience has ended on this issue.

best
 
Last edited:
Epeck said:
My ? is did the OP get his/her answer yet.
Click to expand...

In part.

I would always transcode to pro res, and grade the pro res footage.

Editing and/or grading a delivery codec, to me in my experience using FCP, is less efficient and desirable.
 
if you are going to be in FCP, and this is a long form project, cuting native h264 is a bad idea. H264 is not by any sense a good acquisition codec. It's actually miserably God awful for acquisition. But, that's besides the point. You are going to have the most grueling awful time editing it natively. You'll be rendering every other second with every thing you do for real time playback and seeing your effects, layers and so on. A few good ways on saving hard drive space, as before mentioned, PRO RES LT, possibly even downconverting to 720p. If it has to be a 1080 finish than it's no good, but if it doesn't, 720p pro res LT will yield you near equal file sizes to the original h264.

further more you can do a poor man's offline online edit. Transcode and edit pro res proxy. At the end maybe you'll have more money for some hard drives, re encode everything at HQ and relink to those, change sequence settings to the higher codec. Or use media manager (not a bullet proof method) and cosolidate your footage and timeline to another drive or partition, and then re-encode just the files you need, repeat method as before mentioned.

There are other disadvantages in editing native h264 even if you were to do it in something that can handle it natively. 8 bit, long gop, highly compressed, won't yield you good results in the Color Grade. The pure fact that you are converting it to 10 bit eventually or initially matters a lot, from effects handling, grading, and maintaining visual quality with every transcode.
 
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