Editing UHD footage Just switched over from dvx100 to the 200

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Peem Washikiat

Active member
Hello,

Just christened my new dvx200 with a couple wedding shoots or should I say the camera christened me. What a work out. I feel slightly out of my league.
Although some of the footage looks fantastic and Im stoked to shoot some more and call this camera mine.
Along with the camera a new computer to boot and Im finally looking at a trial version of FCP X, my fresh MOV video files ready for import to a project.
Thinking back, it took me a while to understand the specifics in shooting 24PA back in the day, using the right settings for camera / edit so Im recalling that and hoping to get it right the first time here. Yes! My footage is UHD 23.98. Im not sure that Ill output to a DVD though I think it would be a great option. I've also thought that if I elect to finish in 1080p I might have more options to clean up my shots. I'd appreciate anyones comments here pertaining to the editing settings that would be best. As always Thanks for the support!

cheers
 
Uh...lol stop making life difficult. And buy fcpx. It's $200. You just spent ~$8000 on the camera and computer. And buy Compressor and Motion, too. There's zero reason not to shoot, edit, and finish, in some flavor of 4K. From there, THEN you can make your deliverables from 4K on down. You'll find it difficult making 720 or 1080 into 4K later. Start big and go small later. The other way doesn't work. Finish in 4K. Sample down to 1080 or SD later. Also, try to move away from any kind of optical disc. Modern televisions and computers have USB drives you can play your lovely 4K and HD videos from. Also, consider web delivery as an option since most people watch everything from their phones, including their own wedding videos. But if they say gimme 4K then you have the master ProRes file you can make a 4K MP4 deliverable from. Even if theyre fine with SD, you and your demo reel will have a lovely 4K source video to sample from. Meanwhile, my BluRay burner is collecting dust in a drawer. Congrats on your new purchases! DVX200 and FCPX are a great combo. Start buying two drives for every project, too. :D
 
Jason,

You write, "...you have the master ProRes file you can make a 4K MP4 deliverable from."

What is your workflow to arrive at ProRes?

Thanks.
 
Are you saying that you went from editing standard footage to 4k? That is a deep plunge. Most of us transitioned from standard to HD, and then to 4K.

In 4K editing the files are obviously very massive. Like Jason said, get drives. I am starting to use solid state drives - SSD. They are more expensive and hard to replace all drives. I use a combination. Exploring Hybrid drives as a potential. You should also consider RAID in various configurations. Outside of file size, there are not too many differences.
 
David_ said:
What is your workflow to arrive at ProRes?
Click to expand...

Whether internal h.264 or external format, whatever your source footage is, once it is ingested into FCPX, the footage will be transcoded into "optimized" and "proxy" media, which are encoded as some flavor of ProRes appropriate to the source and it's intended destination. On a Mac, ProRes is almost always preferred as that is the native Apple video format.

If you are recording externally, the format will most likely be ProRes since you're going to FCPX. As opposed to used DNxHD for an Avid workflow.

Internally, DVX200 records to h.264 in a MOV wrapper (again, since you're going to Mac, you don't want the other codecs). H.264 is a carrier codec, not an editing one, so utilizing the ProRes media in FCPX is the way to go. The fun part is that's all done in the background so, once the video is ingested it begins to transcode, so you don't need to remember to do it, really....unless you changed something in the import media window.

Your media is already in ProRes. When you're finished, you can export a Master file which will use the same file type as the source (h.264, which is not good), so it's better to simply export a ProRes master up to the highest bitrates used from the source. 422 or 422 HQ are more than enough. Technically, if you're acquiring internal 8-bit 420, then you really only need ProRes LT. Back in my DSLR days, I'd export to Proxy, it was that bad.

So, you make your master file, then you make another export of the video via MP4...and those can be in 4K, HD, SD, VGA, whatever. That's what you'd upload to youtube or deliver to the client. It's ok to deliver a USB drive or a Google/Dropbox link to a folder with the 4K, HD, and SD, files. Or, you can shoot 4K and do HD crops to emulate two cameras and make your deliverable only in HD. In that case you'd probably know you are delivering only in HD and therefore edit on an HD timeline and do your crops from there. I don't usually do that, but it is an option. Even FHD1080 will crop similarly to HD720 if you know you will only be delivering to HD720. Or SD480. It just depends. But, know what you're going to do before you do it, then shoot it accordingly, edit and finish accordingly.

TL;DR: you push a button that exports your deliverable to ProRes.
 
Thanks- Yeah I know- buy it already- so far all the tags I see are marked 299$. But thanks for the info- I should just assume the client wants the Ultra def- I would have shot in 4K but was a little skittish about it but Im working on it- so I need to figure the settings for the appropriate output from video shot in UHD 23.98 then. Thanks again for the comments /info.
 
Yeah- I made my DVX100 last quite a while- clients were happy with my Dvds which I really had a blast making. It blows my mind that people don't dig the discs anymore. Perhaps Im to sentimental. Anyhow I took a break from technology and now Im back eyeballs deep!
 
Stop worrying about settings. FCPX does that in the background. Whatever it costs, it's cheap. I'm glad optical discs are going away. I'm glad deliverables can be made over the internet. The quality of our product goes up and the affordability of services goes up.
 
JRJphoto said:
...whatever your source footage is, once it is ingested into FCPX, the footage will be transcoded into "optimized" and "proxy" media, which are encoded as some flavor of ProRes appropriate to the source and it's intended destination. On a Mac, ProRes is almost always preferred as that is the native Apple video format....utilizing the ProRes media in FCPX is the way to go....
Click to expand...

Whether FCPX transcodes to optimized ProRes or proxy upon import is a configurable option. Before H264 4k, FCPX (like Premiere) was fast enough to edit single-camera native H264. Even in that case FCPX actually edits and renders using a ProRes buffer, so in a sense it's always editing ProRes. With the advent of H264 4k, few computers are fast enough to edit this smoothly, especially multicam. Even Adobe (who long claimed proxy was unnecessary) has finally added this to Premiere.

Since 4k files are so large, transcoding to optimized ProRes takes a lot of space. By contrast transcoding to proxy gives similar or better performance and takes a fraction of the space. Except for alpha channel, all editing operations work fine in proxy -- including cropping into the underlying 4k frame for 1080p distribution. In general I'd recommend transcoding to proxy over optimized media.
 
Thanks,

Im still working this out. I thought I could get away with doing my first few edits on the boot drive on my iMac cause Sheesh! Its bran new! Yes I'm always learning. With only 600gigs of footage on my 2T drive the footage doesn't play so well mixed with DVX200 and DJ ll Phantom footage. In FCPX settings I didn't turn on proxy or optimized footage. Tomorrow my external drive arrives and I can set things up a bit more proper. Ill take the above notes and any additional- Thanks guys!
 
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