Working with Apple ProRes

Question

Working with Apple ProRes

Hello, first off I want to apologize for not being terribly active except to ask questions... at times I try to answer a few questions, and either there is an error so I give up or else I have 3 different profiles on here... (or else I am thinking about Creative Cow...)

Anyway -

So I have many thousands of hours of video. Most of which was saved on DVCams. I need to make a few copies on a hard drive of these for someone and he wants Apple ProRes...

Yes I can capture straight to the computer Apple ProRes from tapes, but if I wanted to adjust the audio or edit anything, for example, in Final Cut and then re-export this it gets a bit crazy... like 8 hours for one half hour program export crazy.

Am I doing something wrong here? No matter what I do, it still takes forever, so what was the point of encoding in real-time from the DV tapes if I have to re-re-encode it? How did that do anything except get my hopes up and then smash them to pieces?

I might get a new computer and/or, though I am skeptical it will help out... I read a review that said that Compressor 3.5 and 4 have exactly the same encoding times... so that would be mostly pointless.

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BTW - Does anyone have a solution for storage of thousands of hours of ProRes files? (as it seems like the file type everyone is using now... even though it's huge)

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.8), Final Cut 7

Posted on Feb 18, 2012 8:40 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

David Harbsmeier

Level 7

30,089 points

Feb 18, 2012 9:34 AM in response to watchingcartoons

If the source footage is on DVCam, converting to ProRes wouldn't help the quality in the least. IMHO, in your case, the only advantage to converting to ProRes would be if your edit will include heavy use of graphics/titles/etc, Don't worry so much about what everyone else is using ... use what works best in your situation.

-DH

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Answer 2

Feb 18, 2012 9:40 AM in response to David Harbsmeier

yeah man... totally agree but that's what they ordered. It makes more sense to just give them the DV video which is all ready to go, but I am thinking that they are insisting on ProRes.

They even went so far as to tell me to take what is on a hard drive, export it to tape, then reimport it as ProRes as it would save at least 5 hours of work but it seems silly to do that.

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Answer 3

Feb 18, 2012 9:43 AM in response to watchingcartoons

If you're doing this for a client, and they insist on ProRes, you gotta give 'em what they want. Hopefully they are willing to pay your normal rate for this (and supply the cost of the hard drives required) ... otherwise I'd send them to someone else.

BTW, which of the many ProRes flavors do they want?

-DH

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Answer 4

Feb 18, 2012 9:53 AM in response to David Harbsmeier

their specs - Apple Pro Res 422 (HQ) 853 x 480 29.97 fps

I guess the main question is hard to articulate beyond "***"... but why does it take so long to make these things when it is captured in real time from tapes? Is there a way to make this go by faster? two programs I put out to Compressor 3.5 yesterday are still going... 22 hours for two programs and I still got 63 more to go!

I can get another computer but even then... it is insane!

Thanks for answering!

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Answer 5

Feb 18, 2012 10:03 AM in response to watchingcartoons

FIRST: it really doesn't make any sense to convert from your original DV to Appleprores. Its like creating a TIFF from a JPEG, you always have the original quality even if your export is a more powerfull codec - maybe you should explain this to your client.

The only reason to go out of your original format would be in the case that you're working with several different formats (let+s say part in dv, part in HD, etc). In this case it would make sense to conform everything to the same formar and using the one which has more quality (like to hd for ex.). We do this when we shoot with 5D which is h264 and FCP has trouble rwading this. So we just convert everything to apple pro res 422.

Anyway, clients aren't always right but we can't tell them so, so my advise is to use a freeware software MPEGSTREAMCLIP which is much more faster than compressor, allows batch processing and on the tests we did, there's no quality difference between mpegstreamclip or compressor results.

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Answer 6

Feb 18, 2012 10:20 AM in response to toni ferrino

Thanks for your support! Haha... yeah totally agree with what you guys are saying but sometimes trapped in this small editing office I doubt my own sanity in these matters.

I believe I have Mpegstreamclip on my computer already... for some reason I was thinking that it wouldn't be as good as Compressor but I will take your word for it and try it out!

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