H264 or Prores

T

therussian

Well-known member
Should I transcode my D7000 H264 footage to Prores for better editing? I understand that earlier when editing programs couldn't handle H264 natively it was advisable, but what about it today? FCPX and Cs6 can handle it natively, so why bother? Faster editing? More precise color grading? What's the reason?

And.. if yes, then which Prores format is adivasble?
 
Yes H264 isn't a great codec for editing, vfx or color grading. This is a predictive frame format ie each second doesn't carry a full 24 fps but a calculation how many frames per second are required this takes processing power as well makes for not great VFX. Heavy Color correction or pushing of H264 will result in banding & a whole lot of other surprises.

Its a while since I've done it but transcode using something like 5D2RGB will yield better results to Pro Rez...but that was FCP7. Not so sure of the workflow now maybe others will know who work with HDSLR footage
 
Definitely imo. I started off with my D600 transcoding straight into Avid and it came out with badly crushed blacks and over saturated, even when shooting on neutral profiles. I found that transcoding in 5DtoRGB before the edit gave a massively better result, with better colour space and dynamic range available. Download their free version and see for yourself. As to versions, there's no point using ProRes HQ, and in fact ProRes LT would do fine in terms of the data rate - I use ProRes 422 for safety.
 
TomLenham said:
easily - I use it for broadcast TV work.
Click to expand...

That's great! As I read at other places its really good to transcode because it will give better performance, because the GPU doesn't have to decode continuously the h264 compressed file, + better quality for grading...
 
I have to say that all of this is dependent on a lot of things, e.g. camera, software, color processing depth, OS, H.264 encoder, settings, project size, etc.. You really need to do your own tests to see what works better. Which is easy to do. Just apply the same extreme color grade to both native H.264 and H.264 converted to ProRes clips and see which looks better. You could even share the results. ;)
 
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Avid reads H.264 natively, and from what I've experienced, blows CS out of the water in terms of H.264 playback performance. In terms of color science, it's best to AMA link to H.264 instead of importing it in Avid. But should you stay in H.264 or transcode after AMA linking is a ? I have no definitive answer to.
 
I haven't ever used AVID, so I have no idea about that one. In any case, the main thing is not whether it can read it, but whether final IQ will be better with H264 or with an initial transcode to something like prores.
 
Right, and that can get very tricky. Especially b/c it might include an 8 bit to 10 bit remapping. Which begs ?'s about dithering and interpolation.
 
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