H .264 Workflow on Final Cut Pro

D

dadirector89@yahoo.com

Active member
Ok. So for the longest time I thought that I couldn't edit HD footage on my mac that is about 8 years old. It's an older version G5. When I would try to edit HD footage Final Cut Pro would run choppy and errors would constantly come up. But I'm just discovering that FCP doesn't do well with H .264 codecs. I'm using MPEG Streamclip to convert the footage to Pro Res 422. Do you think this could fix my problem?
 
h.264 isn't an editing codec. Convert to Pro Res 422 to edit, and use fast internal SATA 7200 rpm drive to edit.

But working with an eight year old computer with pro res will present throughput issues.
 
So I was compressing my .264 mov files with MPEG streamclip in order to edit them on FCP. One of my files compressed fine, but it wasnt an HDSLR file. It was a 720x480 movie file that went from 192.1MB to 2.09GB. When I try to compress my HD DSLR files it goes from 14.7MB to 72MB. I am converting these files to Pro Res 422. Any idea why they are getting larger?
 
David Saraceno said:
h.264 isn't an editing codec. Convert to Pro Res 422 to edit, and use fast internal SATA 7200 rpm drive to edit.

But working with an eight year old computer with pro res will present throughput issues.
Click to expand...

Ok...so would I have to get this drive installed into my Mac? And should this help with some of the issues I'm having due to this computer being so old?
 
seem like your SD video file and dslr file have a low sampling rate
when transcode, transcode to proress LT or proxy is enough for smaller size
your system should be able to edit SD quality video with transcoded files.
and suggest you read more about how to edit in final cut there are lots website that will help with your learning.
 
If you're on a G5, you only have access to ProRes 422.

The files grow larger because you're going from a Long-GOP format, where not every frame has the total data for that frame, to an all I-Frame format, where every frame has 100% of the data for that frame.

That's why H.264 and other Long-GOP formats (AVCHD, HDV, etc) are stressful to edit with. The CPU has to read a full 18 frames just to reproduce 1 frame of video. That's an Inter-Frame coded. They're used for low bit-rate, low bandwidth, small file size needs. Mini-DV tape can't read/write enough data fast enough, so they came up with HDV (MPEG-2 Long-GOP). DSLR cameras have limited space to write and store video on, so they use H.264 (MPEG-4 Long-GOP).

And Intra-Frame coded has all the data in each frame of video, so the CPU only reads one frame to recreate one frame. They use higher bit-rates, require more bandwidth, and create larger file sizes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_of_pictures
"Long"-GOP means it uses like 8-15 frames to the group, something like that. As opposed to Short-GOP which uses only a few frames per GOP. The longer the GOP, the more highly compressed the video is, the smaller the file size it makes.
 
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Yep this is as good a reason as any to upgrade. I blow edits through in record time to ProRes using my current MacBook Air. Even a present-day iMac will be a massive improvement over a G5 class system.

Noah
 
Apparently on the new macbook pros you can actually cut in H.264. Of course you're looking at half a day to render maybe 15 minutes of footage, but it can sorta be done. I know someone who under the really limited information of basically "it can be done" actually converted all of the HDV footage that we shot TO h.264 to match it up with the 60D footage that we shot. I think this was an effort to save hard drive space. I just remember that the second you add a color correction filter, even with no adjustments, it needs to be rendered before it can play back at all, which takes a very long time.
 
You can in fact edit H.264, or any other type of QT video file inside FCP. "Supported" means "Real Time Playback Engine" supported. Sure, I've seen someone edit DSLR H.264 on a Mac Pro with a USB drive. It was dog butt slow and needed every little thing rendered. He thought that's how all NLE's work until we got him on a Mac Pro with internal SATA drives editing ProRes LT files.
 
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