Uncompressed HD or Pro Res HQ in AE/FCP

S

svwj

New member
Hi all,

I am currently transferring S16 mm footage to HD stock. To be able to fit the whole neg we had to squish the image a bit, so I would have to play with that in post to get it right. The company is going to digitize to my hard drive. The question is: to what? I can choose between uncompressed HD, Pro-Res HQ, HDDVCPro....

Looking at the footage in the telecine today, I think I will have to do both some advanced color correction and some masking due to unwanted reflexions here and there. This means I would go into After Effects, but I will also try Color in FCP.

I edit on a new (2009) Macbook Pro laptop, 2.66 GHz, 4GB RAM and a 1 TB external Lacie hardrive via Firewire 800.

My end product is Blu Ray (from Encore), DVD NTSC and PAL (from Encore or DVD Studio Pro) and a possible blowup to 35 or 16 mm.

Company say to go with ProResHQ, but the photographer in me is worried about starting with compressed footage. Will the material start "falling apart" ie artifacts after advanced effects work? I heard about some trouble when going from AE to FCP with Pro Res... If I edit without compression, can I handle the uncompressed files in AE and with my editing system?

Should I have the company digitize uncompressed HD to my drive and then create a ProRes version via FCP (can this be done in Compressor?) and then do my editing and then just swapping the ProRes footage with uncompressed HD towards the end (and how do I do this exactly)?

Any advice on workflow from you pro's would be soo appreciated... I have been pulling my hair out trying to figure this out. :undecided

I just want my beautiful 16 footage to come out nice and crisp!

Thanks!
SJ
 
You won't be able to handle Uncompressed with your current setup. You'd need to get a very fast (and possibly large) RAID via Express Card to have any chance of that. You'd probably still have the occasional dropped frame then as well. You can do an offline with ProRes using an Uncompressed master, but why would you want to? I don't think you'd ever notice the difference, and ProRes is a pretty strong visually lossless codec, a 10 bit one at that that is easy on disk space and bandwidth. Depending on how much you shot, Uncompressed 10 bit HD will eat up your hard drive space quickly.

If you really want the highest quality possible go with EXR or DPX image sequences. You can do a ProRes offline from that.
 
Thank you!

Thank you!

I went with ProRes HQ and will test Color. I guess I am just more used to AE, and I need to use Mocha for some motion tracking/advanced masking. I am always concerned when transferring between programs, I hate rendering in AE. If anyone knows a good guide to video rendering and compression. I would kiss them! Well, at least virtually.

Just curious, what is DPX image sequences? How do I get that from HD stock?

SJ
 
svwj said:
I went with ProRes HQ and will test Color. I guess I am just more used to AE, and I need to use Mocha for some motion tracking/advanced masking. I am always concerned when transferring between programs, I hate rendering in AE. If anyone knows a good guide to video rendering and compression. I would kiss them! Well, at least virtually.

Just curious, what is DPX image sequences? How do I get that from HD stock?

SJ
Click to expand...

It'd be useless to pull DPX sequences from HD footage, you'd want to get them scanned as DPX sequences. DPX is a 10 bit log image file format. It's akin to Cineon, which is a format Kodak introduced as part of the first digital intermediate system.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DPX

Are you using the Render Queue in AE? The best way is to render out in an uncompressed format like QT Animation or ProRes then render out whatever else you need from QT Pro or some other compression software.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top