Hi guys,

I just wanted to get a general opinion from those who have been working with this footage a little longer than i have.

I have always worked under the philosophy that any re-encode is a bad re-encode in the case of keeping the footage as high quality as possible. I therefore have been assembling in final cut and then using automatic duck/FCPtoAE to move to AE without any re-encode and doing my post and online straight out of there. Do you think that this is better than working in Pro res?

All feedback is appreciated.

Many thanks,

Nick

Stu Maschwitz makes a pretty good case for doing your post in a 10bit format (even if your source is 8bit) in the DV Rebels Guide - essentially rendering back to a higher bitrate codec preservers the original information better and can reduce banding, etc which can appear during color correction. So in your case it would probably make sense to go ProRes with your edited material before doing post in AE (assuming you aren't doing anything in your NLE that requires rendering).

It really depends on what your are doing with the footage. Any re-encoding to a different codec will add artifacts, you might not see them, but they will be there. If a large proportion of you edit is cuts only then I would recommend staying in Native XDCAM mpeg as a large part of the programme won't need any re-encoding. If you are doing a lot of grading or effects then I would work with the native XDCAM in the timeline and encode to pro-res.

Hi,

Going to prores will "soften" the image a bit. But you go to 10 bits 422, which is good if you need a lot of FX.
In fact, as far as I know, you can use the xdcam footage in the timeline, and setthe "rendering" to prores. this way, you don't have to re-encode the untouched footages and, if you apply filter, it goes pro-res natively.
Finaly, I always re-encode to proress the footage I need to work with in After Effect.

Maybe someone else will have an experience on this ?