EX1 to Digibeta

A

Alicia Ferrows

Member
I recently spoke to a dub-house to transfer a master HD file on to Digibeta tape and they told me that for my project (4 minute music video shot on ex1 and edited in FCP with sequence set to pro-res codec) the master self contained file should be around 5 gig. Now several places i spoke to have told me similar however i have never generated a file so big when exporting from final cut pro (export using current settings) so now im feeling like I'm doing something wrong. My project files are usually around 500-800MB, does this sound right to you?

They actually told me that for my files size to be so low there must be a ton of compression on it however i dont understand how, here is my workflow:

sony ex1 cam transfer to FCP 7 using XDCAM transfer
setup my timeline for EX XDCAM 1080p
quicktime video settings (set automatically): XDCAM EX 1080p 35mb
Render control: Apple Pro Res 422 XDCAM EX only
Render in 8bit YUV
upon export i just export quictime movie using current settings
self contained movie now created.

Upon writing this down i am now thinking for maximum quality i should maybe change my quicktime video settings to uncompressed 8 or 10bit yuv?

Thanks in advance guys
 
You are exporting at XDCAM settings. That's what your timeline is. When I export a 30 sec spot with XDCAM settings the file size is around 117mb. X 8 (4 minutes) that's 936mb.

If you export as ProRez it will be much larger, though I don't know if you will have any boost in quality.
 
Thanks Chadfish, i've been playing around with different settings and i am able to get the larger files when outputting to different formats but im yet to see a real noticeable boost in quality.
 
All you are doing by exporting at a higher quality than what you shot/edited at is adding unnecessary size to the file. You can't make it better after the fact. The XDCAM files are very compressed to begin with, at 35mbps.
 
You can't make it better after the fact, but you can make it worse. If you plan to do a lot of effects and color correction, then it's a good idea to transcode to Prores first, because it's harder to degrade a 10-bit 4:2:2 picture. If your final output is Digibeta, then it's better to just convert directly from Prores to Digibeta, rather than adding an extra generation by going to XDCAM first. You may not see any difference, but at least you know you're getting the best quality that you can.

Now if this is going to broadcast, they'll compress the heck out of it, but that's out of your control.
 
when you say transcode to prores first, do you mean skiping the xdcam transfer utility and by some other means transcoding my footage directly from the BPAV folder to the prores format directly?
 
When you said in the original post that your sequence was set to Prores codec, I thought you were already doing the transcoding. But upon more careful reading, I realize that only your render was set to Prores, and your timeline was XDCAM EX. So if you edit in XDCAM EX codec, then I agree with Chadfish - there's really no gain in quality by converting it to Prores on export. But if your dub house requires Prores, then do it. Maybe their system runs faster that way.

If you want to transcode the clips before editing, you still need to use the transfer utility to get them onto your computer. Then you can use Compressor or Media Manager to do the conversion. Here's a discussion about that on DVinfo: http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/sony-xdcam-ex-cinealta/118313-fcp-how-convert-xdcam-prorez-422-a.html
 
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