PerroneFord
Deals in Lead
Yes, that is precisely what I meant.
MPEG Streamclip quality comparison
- Thread starter Lucas 7D
- Start date
Yes, that is precisely what I meant.
ChuckS
Veteran
H.264 is not an editing codec. If you place an H264 in your timeline you will have to render it and then your basically editing from preview files. However every time you make a change that goes outside the boundaries of an edited clip you will have to render again, any time you make a change to any motion parameters you will have to render again and any time you use a filter [realtime or not] you will have to render again [notice a trend].
So can you edit H264, sure if you've got nothing better to do with the rest of your life.
You need to find some application that is acceptable to you that can encode to a codec that is efficient for editing. There is no reason to have to settle for less quality.
I'm on a Mac, I use MPEG Streamclip to encode to ProRes, which is apples digital intermediate codec used for editing. The ProRes is indistinguishable from the original. Apparently there may be some issues with MPEG S, when I used Premiere I encoded everything with Cineform, it worked as well on the PC as as ProRes does on the Mac. There's ProCoder, XMPG and I'm sure there are others. Your just going to have to find something that works the way you want to work. And there's no substitute for trying it yourself. There are too many variables so no one can [or should] really tell you what to do.
If you happen to use Premiere instead of FCP then you can just render once. It will remember that render even if you make cuts or bring clips on top of it. That's how I've done it without re-encodings. And when I export it to AE to do some cc it just uses the original clips as I can copy/paste the clips straight from Premiere. Works good enough.
ChuckS
Veteran
Doesn't it have to render every time you place a new [not used already] clip on the timeline?
The same is true for FCP, and that's fine for a short project which doesn't have a lot of source material, like I said you can do it. But if its a longer project with hours of source material this is a very inefficient way to work which ultimately costs you much more than the money your saving by not purchasing something like the Cineform codec.
Its that old saying. "Penny wise, pound foolish."
visugeek
Well-known member
Using MPEG Stream clip and saving out with DNxHD 10-bit 175 seems to create a version that when viewed in Premiere's waveform monitor is within the NTSC legal limits, and does not clip at the top an bottom.
Comparing the original with the avid codec version in a Quicktime viewer, they are visually identical to the eye, but the Avid codec version now fits within NTSC legal color space.
Comparing the original with the avid codec version in a Quicktime viewer, they are visually identical to the eye, but the Avid codec version now fits within NTSC legal color space.
Are you on a MAC?
On a PC it definitely compresses the dynamic range and overbrights when encoded through MPEGStreamclip or AME