PP cs4 Intermediate codec help required

J

Juicebuster

New member
HI Guys

I'm new to this board so a big hello from me to all and letting on a bit about myself I shoot diving footage and am at present looking to move this forward into short documentaries and reality doco stuff :-) .

My problems are in colour grading as my footage I record (on an Sony Sr11 hard drive camera) shoots in AVCHD (h.264) which is a degrades as soon as I try to touch it up. Reading about bit I think I need to convert/transcode it to an intermediate codec then edit it, then convert it to my final delivery codec (H.264 again).
So my questions are:
1: which codec should I convert it to
2:where do I find the codec, links happily accepted :-)
3:Once converted which preset settings do I use to edit it? (as they are all HDV, AVCHD etc etc)
4: can all this be done in Premiere Pro? (I have production premium but don't know how to use the other software like AE)

I think that covers it but I'll probably remember something vital once I submit this lol

Thanks for any and all help in advance.

Jools
 
Two free recommendations for lossless intermediaries are Lagarith and UT codecs. Both edit fine inside of PP in YUV mode, though I find UT performs better at HD resolutions.
 
Juicebuster said:
My problems are in colour grading as my footage I record (on an Sony Sr11 hard drive camera) shoots in AVCHD (h.264) which is a degrades as soon as I try to touch it up.
Click to expand...

Then that's a problem with the way that the footage was shot and the codec on which it was recorded on. Transcoding into another codec is not going to help matter because you're not improving on what's already there. It's basically like taking money out of one pocket and putting it into another pocket; there's ultimately no difference. You would transcode to another codec when

1) You're planning on doing multiple generation of CC or VFX (multiple render) in which you require a lossless codec that doesn't take up too much space.
2) You need to be able to edit faster by using a less CPU intensive codec.

So basically what it comes down to is that if your current codec can't survive the first round of grading, an intermediate codec won't do anything for you.
 
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