Fast Transcode? - record off camera in the office ?

[morgan_moore]

I dont like the idea of lugging a portable recorder around and relying on HDMI in the field

I also dont like trancoding under time pressure

I wonder if there is a way of playing the footage off the camera..

EG have a recorder and record playback of the footage

or a device that would turn my pooter into a pro res recorder

If you hooked a monitor up to the screen you could playback the rushes on the camera, and grab the bits you want to edit ? ?

SMM

 

[MattDavis]

I've been doing that with a KiPro this week (recording the output of the camera playing back rushes), but one gets no better 'quality' than what the AVCHD codec can supply.

I must admit, though, I've got lazy in these tapeless days, just chucking everything in - even/especially* on Candid/Same-day edits - as the wrapping/transcoding happens faster than real-time. Locating clips and ingesting them (a la the old tape days) took longer and denies me a caffeine break.

* IIRC in the days of tape, if one was selective with one's material, the hateful stressful process of not having a shot or needing a replacement shot, going back to the tape, trawling through and... oh the agony...

 

[morgan_moore]

Hi

Thanks for the response

Firstly Im not expecting a boost in quality

Can you clarify if this is faster or not .. thats the main point of interest

It seems to me a way of gettting to editable pro res in real time, I dont feel like transcode is real time ?

Of course say you wanted three sounbites from a 10min sit down you could get them really fast without doing the whole clip

S

 

[MattDavis]

Okay, thanks to another experiment in a different thread, I 'just happen to have' a clip that's 15mins 44 seconds.

It's being pulled directly of SDHC through a SD to PCI-E adaptor in a 17" MacBook Pro onto an external bus-powered FW800 drive

944 seconds in the clip
174 seconds to wrap to QuickTime (no transcoding, just wrapping), or...
564 seconds to transcode to ProRes LT

But somewhat remarkably...

191 seconds to import in 'optimized' format into FCP-X (it was available to edit almost immediately). Furthermore, this wasn't the 15.44 version, this was the whole clip of some 24 minutes. It recognised a 'split clip' and has joined it perfectly.

Okay, so this is on the beefiest MacBook Pro I could get in February, using the internal 512GB SSD (says he, showing off), but hey. Numbers like that may wean me off FCP7 and away from Adobe Premiere Pro.