Mixing either prores or dvcpro hd with AVCHD?

[firehawk]

If I will be using AVCHD footage which is the format that will cut more friendly with it on the timeline for multicamera shoots?
Dvcpro hd and AVCHD.
Or pro res and AVCHD?

I'm using windows primarily. Cs5.

 

[Jim Simon]

Either will work. But DVCPRO HD is a camera format and can be used directly, whereas ProRes is more often the result of a conversion, which takes time and additional hard drive space.

ProRes also requires QuickTime to be installed. If you on a Mac, you'll have that by default. But it's a fairly old and buggy container best not used if it can be avoided.

 

[Exact]

Either will work. But DVCPRO HD is a camera format and can be used directly, whereas ProRes is more often the result of a conversion, which takes time and additional hard drive space.

Both statements are true, although more and more external recorders are supporting ProRes and DNxHD natively, so there's not transcoding involved.

ProRes also requires QuickTime to be installed. If you on a Mac, you'll have that by default. But it's a fairly old and buggy container best not used if it can be avoided.

Jim is definitely anti ProRes and anti Quicktime on all the forums, and that's fine, because everyone has their opinions and reasons for it.

On a Mac, I've found no problems using ProRes at all, evening within Premiere Pro. However, the Mercury Playback Engine is not optimised 'as-much' to work with Quicktime files as it is with 'some' native media. I say 'some' because Adobe (or third party codecs) have broken some aspects and I'm finding myself having to transcode more and more footage for use within Premiere Pro, even though I bought it for it's 'native' editing abilities!

One of the nice things about ProRes is that you could (if you wanted) transcode to ProRes 422 and put it in one folder and ProRes Proxy and put it in another folder. Within Premiere Pro you could swap between folders at-will (take footage of line then point it to the new folder, or simply rename the folders as needed) and so be editing easily with Proxy Files then switch to the full ProRes 422 for export.

Working with native media, this becomes a lot harder to do. While some will claim it's not needed, I've found that editing multicam with more than 2 or 3 cameras can cause Premiere Pro to run less that smoothly, even on fast CPU, supported CUDA card and fast RAID HDDs. Yes it will work, but it's not butter smoother and rewinding the timeline can result in some unexpected pauses that aren't there when using ProRes (or DNxHD).

At the end of the day, you should probably try BOTH routes and see which one works for you on 'your' hardware because it could be a different experience to ours.

 

[firehawk]

Thank you both. Good ideas there.
If I use ProRes it would be from an external recorder.
What I'm trying to determine is which camera (hpx170 with onboard dvcprohd or hmc150 with ninja2 recorder) would be easier to mix with existing hmc150s (AVCHD).