Should I be transcoding FS100 footage for Premiere Pro?

D

dskessler

New member
Hi. I made a lot of changes recently. FCP to Premiere Pro CS5. 7D to FS100. With the 7d an FCP I know I had to transcode to Prores. Besides the fact that FCP7 couldn't handle h264 very well, it was thought that transcoding made color correction much better. I'm wondering what people's workflow is with the FS100 and Premiere Pro. Clipwrap can rewrap the files very quickly without making any changes to the data. That's nice and convenient but am I losing something by not transcoding? Also, is Prores still my best choice. I find it a bit sluggish with PPro compared to FCP on the same system.
 
I just rewrap my files... regarding prores; it doesn't matter much does it? If you recorded in AVCHD, then you will only get as much as that offers, just because you code to prores it doesn't mean you magically get more information to work with. Atleast that's what I always hear. Maybe you get a little more play when grading hard, but not as much as if you had shot in 4:2:2 to begin with.

Please correct me if I'm wrong...

I haven't really used FCP, but I find PPro quite fine.
 
legrevedotcom said:
I just rewrap my files... regarding prores; it doesn't matter much does it? If you recorded in AVCHD, then you will only get as much as that offers, just because you code to prores it doesn't mean you magically get more information to work with. Atleast that's what I always hear. Maybe you get a little more play when grading hard, but not as much as if you had shot in 4:2:2 to begin with.

Please correct me if I'm wrong...

I haven't really used FCP, but I find PPro quite fine.
Click to expand...

I never did any tests myself but I did read in many places that transcoding to 422 does somehow - and i have no idea how - give you more color space allowing more control in color correcting. That at least was the theory that I was working with with FCP. But I'm seeing that PPro CS5 seems to automatically detect and stretch the color range of the footage so Pr Res no longer has that advantage.
 
I switched about a year ago from FCP to Premiere Pro, now I'm on Premiere Pro CS 5.5 on a Mac. As long as you have a fast enough computer, you really don't want to transcode with Premiere Pro. It's best to just import the FS100 footage right in. For one it's a to quicker workflow as you don't have to transcode anything, also you save hard drive space as the 24mbs files don't blowup to 100mbs or larger files. This was one of the big reasons for me to switch. Now that the FCP10 debacle occurred, I'm pretty glad I did. On my Mac Pro 2008 8 core it's good with 24P / 30P, can get a little sluggish with 1080 60P. If you have an Nvidia approved CUDA card you can also get real time effects for many common effects. Good luck with it.
 
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