h.264 and prores proxy question

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h.264 and prores proxy question

I've read through a ton of posts about proxy and h.264 workflows but didn't find any that answers my specific question.

My raw video from my camera is mp4 (h.264). I understand that h.264 is not good to edit with, so I have a few options. I use a macbook pro for editing so I have been toying around with prores proxy for editing and it makes a difference on RT playback and rendering while editing, so that's good. When I get ready to output my movie after editing, I relink my project back to the original h.264 source files and that seems to work fine.

I'm wondering if that's not the right workflow though. Should I transcode the h.264 into prores HQ or LT and then ALSO to proxy, edit with proxy and then relink my project back to the HQ or LT files to output? Or is linking back to my source h.264 files and outputing the right way to go?

Since the original files must be in the best possible quality that I'm going to get (since they're my original clips), I assume that relinking to them right before output is the way to go but I really don't know much about codecs to know if I'm missing something.

Thanks in advance for the advice.

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.2), FCP 7

Posted on Dec 27, 2009 8:50 PM

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Answer 1

Tom Wolsky

Level 10

152,809 points

Dec 27, 2009 11:35 PM in response to kenmoberg

What's the camera? The more specific you can be the easier it is to answer you.

There is most likely no point in using Proxy with this media nor ProRes HQ. There is also no point in going back to the original MPEG-4 media. It's very heavily compressed, and you want to stay out of it if at all possible.

If you can edit standard ProRes, that will be sufficient and save you any further steps. If LT is good enough, and a small test of some of your most difficult material will tell you that, then you can save yourself quite a bit of drive space and processor overhead.

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Answer 2

kenmoberg Author

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Dec 28, 2009 7:27 AM in response to Tom Wolsky

Thanks for your response. I'm shooting with a Sanyo FH1, mostly in 1080p, but I've scaled back to 720 since 1080 was overkill for what I'm doing to save some space.

The thing I don't quite understand yet is the issue with pointing my project back to the source files after all the editing is finished with prores proxy and just before output. That way, FCP would only have to uncompress the source files to render for final output only one time (besides the initial transcoding), albeit, probably longer than it would be for prores. I'm sold on proxy because it was so much faster to edit with than h.264 and I didn't have to keep any video files after I was finished except my source files....trying to budget hard drive space. I transcoded one file a while back to prores but the file size was more than I wanted to deal with since I only edit on my macbook pro so I didn't try to edit with it. Like you said, maybe just converting to prores and dealing with the space juggling would be the best way to go, or try prores LT to see how the quality is.

Does converting from h.264 to prores buy me any quality or a better final result, or just a cleaner workflow? Don't misread my questions, I'm not arguing, just trying to understand from you guys that know a lot more about this than I do. Making my living as a developer, it's just ingrained in me to understand this one 🙂

Message was edited by: kenmoberg (updated macos version)

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Answer 3

Tom Wolsky

Level 10

152,809 points

Dec 28, 2009 7:51 AM in response to kenmoberg

ProRes will give you better results if you have an compositing or effects to do. It would also be a simpler workflow. If you work in Proxy I'm sure how you're going to re-ingest your media from the camera in ProRes unless you keep an accurate record of clip names as, I believe, the clips are simply numbered sequentially and have no real timecode when they're converted. Each clip begins with 0:00:00:00.

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Answer 4

kenmoberg Author

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Dec 28, 2009 9:20 AM in response to Tom Wolsky

Thanks Tom

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Answer 5

Jan 8, 2010 12:15 AM in response to kenmoberg

hey kenmoberg, i don't want to hijack your thread but I also have a bunch of footage of 1080p footage from the sanyo fh1 and i am new to fcp 7 and cannot figure out how to ingest the material with the correct workflow to allow me to edit. i have all the mp4's on my hard drive but am not sure how to ingest it correctly to edit in fcp. All in all i don't know what sequence settings, log and transfer settings and codecs to use. your wisdom would be much appreciated or answer in a new thread as to not take over this one. thanks

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Answer 6

Tom Wolsky

Level 10

152,809 points

Jan 8, 2010 3:44 AM in response to Dmonkified

First, start a new thread.

Second, I don't think that's an AVCHD camera. If it isn't its media doesn't work with log and transfer and has to converted with Compressor.

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