Uncompressed to Pro Res

tom.wong

tom.wong

Well-known member
So finally buckled down and bought myself a new 17 inch macbook pro, and wanted to run some rough tests to see how practical it would be to shoot/record uncompressed on set (via hyperdeck or gemini) and encoding it with a laptop to pro res as your master files and dumping the uncompressed. This would be workflows that are lower on the budget side and can't, or don't want to deal with uncompressed. drives are cheap yada yada, but there's enough people that don't want uncompressed for most situations.

so specs are quard core, 2.3 ghz, 4 gb of ram (my ram upgrade is in the mail so i expect speeds to be faster once i pop 8 gb in there) osx 10.6.7, using adobe media encoder, because it's a full 64 bit piece of encoding software, and I find it produces better transcoding results as it bypasses mac os quicktime render engine and uses it own, leaving less issues for gamma and color shifts. (i find none at all)

obviously these won't be final results until I can get a TRUE RGB uncompressed source, this is just me playing around right now. I'll have to dig out some old hard drives of some phantom footage I have to do a more accurate test.

I took a 4 minute quicktime I had, already cut and graded, and transcoded that to uncompressed rgb. it was almost 40 gb, and I then transcoded that to pro res 4x4. obviously results will vary when there really is a full amount of color information in there, but I don't really expect it to be THAT different.

Results were pretty good, a 4 minute clip took 6:18 to encode. and there was plenty of movement and big landscape shots full of detail. Roughly 1.5x slower than real time. Shooting narrative I think this is perfectly doable. Encode directly from the SSD to your back up drive. than do you duplicate drive for backup. throw back ssd back into mix for them to format and shoot on. Depending on your shooting pace this maybe too slow though.

Little more accurate testing to come when i get my ram upgrade in and I pull some rgb footage. I'll also be testing compressor, and mpeg streamclip.
 
Hi Tom,

This is question for your about your new 17" MacBook Pro...

Did you opt for the antiglare display or the glossy one... and why?

Thank you very much in advance for your inputs.

Looking forward to your uncompressed recording tests.
 
This is more of a test for people willing to go for a uncompressed workflow. I'm mainly discussing what it would be like for the Gemini, but since the BM hyperdeck shuttle is in the mix now, people are getting it for whatever reason, so I just mentioned it, including the fact of, you have an option of uncompressed if you ever so need it. Ram came in yesterday, gonna do more tests this week.
 
Viddovation said:
Looking forward to results on this! Hyperdeck Shuttle is a very real consideration for me...
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I've received my Hyperdeck Shuttle one week ago. I spent one more week to buy on eBay all what I needed: USB 3.0 express card, usb 3.0 docking station and a crucial 256 GB SSD. I am encountering problems to receive 1.0/2.3 connectors: I suggest all people who is interested in this recorder to order the connectors at the same time they order the recorder: I am still waiting (but I live in Italy).

Anyway today I have connected the recorder to my camera (AF100) via HDMI and I have recorded the first clips. This toy is very very simple to use and it seems to works perfectly. It is essential: you cannot delete any clip, for example, but it seems to work fine (I need to perform more tests for a serious opinion). I have recorded and I have played the footage immediately on a 50" TV using the Hyperdeck as player and it looked great.

This is all I have made for the moment. I am going to try to encode on the field from uncompressed in Canopus HD losslles codec (I use Edius for editing) using my notebook. An uncompressed workflow (and archive) is not possible for the moment for me.

Regards

Gary
 
Your render times Tom seem to jive with what the Convergent Design people were getting which was about real time on an 8 core Mac Pro. I think they were using Apple Compressor in their tests. Given that you are probably going to Pro Res it would probably be worth the exercise to give Compressor a go. The new version in the App Store is, I believe, $49.
 
the new compressor still isn't 64 bit, which sucks. i'll still have to run a quick cluster to get it at full speed, and in my experience it tends to glitch out all the time, resulting in the need for a full restart. and that's gonna hold you up when you have encoding to do on set. but i'll try results with everything today or tomorrow.
 
tom.wong said:
the new compressor still isn't 64 bit, which sucks. i'll still have to run a quick cluster to get it at full speed, and in my experience it tends to glitch out all the time, resulting in the need for a full restart. and that's gonna hold you up when you have encoding to do on set. but i'll try results with everything today or tomorrow.
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That to me makes it unusable. I've never had Compressor choke or crash on me ever but I'm not using the new one. Just checked... version 3.0.5 from FCP Studio 2.
 
Andrew Stone said:
That to me makes it unusable. I've never had Compressor choke or crash on me ever but I'm not using the new one. Just checked... version 3.0.5 from FCP Studio 2.
Click to expand...

funny you should say that, had a completely clean install of compressor and fcp7, along with the new compressor, and quickclustering chokes up maybe 1 out of 4 times. it doesn't close out the quicktime when finishing up encoding the file, have to force quit, and reboot because the compressor kernals are still running. regular encoding is fine.

and as of now, I'm really not happy with encoding results. full uncompressed RGB quicktimes, definitely take a lot longer to encode to pro res 4x4, almost 2.5x slower than real time. while uncompressed 10 bit YUV is more like 1.5-1.8x slower.

specs are quad i7, mbp
8 gb of ram, on snow leopard


compressor was THE slowest, if you combine how long it takes for it to spin up the encode, and then closing it out, with the chances it will glitch out. the results were so slow, i stopped my testing almost right away once a 1 minute clip was at 2 minutes 56 seconds of encoding and still wasn't done.

media encoder was by far the fastest, since it was full 64 bit eating way at all my cores, and that's where I got my final results.

keep in mind this won't be the bible on how fast the laptop can encode the files until something like the Gemini actually comes out. i have no idea what flavor of uncompressed they are using, i was using the blackmagic rgb quicktime, and the codec is already a bit funky so I'm not sure how much I trust the results. it compresses down the color and blacks a lot, and it's a lot harsher on the system than i expected it to be. I had a easier time dealing with DPX and TIFF sequences.

but with the current limitations of pro res recorders too (no super whites, and no high speed with log in single link) might be cheaper just to do laptop capturing...
 
yep, def taking that into consideration.

mbp, some ssd's, and the ultrastudio would still be cheaper than gemini without media. but you'll always have to be tethered for a laptop. some productions don't dig that.
 
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