ProRes vs. Photo-JPEG vs. AIC

O

Oedipax

Well-known member
I'm shooting on an HV20 some lately, always in the 24p mode. For a while I was doing the Apple-recommended workflow of capturing in FCP, then removing pulldown and transcoding to ProRes in Compressor. This seemed to work well enough, except I started to notice interlace artifacts remaining in my inverse telecined footage.

More recently, I've been trying out the JES Deinterlacer workflow, and much to my surprise, the same exact clips that show artifacts after running them through Compressor work fine with no artifacts in JES.

My question is, since JES doesn't support ProRes exports, just Photo-JPEG and Apple Intermediate Codec, will the quality of these files be good enough to do color correction on? In other words, am I giving up more quality by working in either of these two codecs than I am by using ProRes? Also, since these codecs seems to be somewhat more compressed, will this make rendering times longer in FCP/Color/etc?

Just curious if anyone else could share their experiences with this. Thanks.
 
You can export ProRes in JES. Just select Quicktime Movie instead of direct export, and you can export in any quicktime codec, including ProRes. Interestingly, there is a checkbox in ProRes which enables 4:4:4 color filtering, which I presume uprezzes your compressed color channels.
 
Thanks for the tip! Glad to hear I can still stick with ProRes if I need to.

Would you say there are advantages to working in ProRes over the other two codecs? The files I'm getting are less than half the size of the ProRes files so I assume I'm probably losing more to compression. I'd love the additional HD space though.
 
Did some testing in FCP just now - same clip using ProRes, AIC, and PhotoJPEG. Visually, all three look identical, but the PhotoJPEG version seems to need rendering after applying effects much sooner than ProRes or AIC. Threw some color correction on the ProRes clip then copied it to the AIC and did a Difference comparison and there's not much difference at all that I can see. AIC seems good enough to me.

Edit: And it renders a heck of a lot faster. Same shot in a ProRes timeline vs. an AIC timeline (using native clips): 26 minutes vs. 8.

Ah, but zoom in at 100% and look at the same frame on each timeline - a lot noisier on the AIC. Dang.
 
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AIC is 4:2:0, ProRes id 4:2:2. even thought you can never get more resolution than the source footage ProRes is better for any image processing.
 
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