I'm having problems with editing my 5D footage that I have converted to ProRes 422 and am editing in FCP 6. I have Canon XHA1 HDV footage on the same timeline. The 5D stuff keeps skipping and is not smooth, and the render time is long.

I was told that the skipping might be happening b/c I do not have a RAID drive and my ProRes 422 HQ files won't run smoothly without a RAID. But there are not other ProRes codecs in Compressor that I can see. Or, does the choppiness have something to do with my mixed source timeline? Or is there SOMETHING I can do to fix this problem?

Looking forward to hearing from anyone who can help! Thanks!

Nil

What speed of computer are you using? What drives are you using? How are they connected? Firewire? SATA?

You can try using ProRes, instead of ProRes HQ. You probably won't tell the difference. But if you're system is choking on ProRes HQ, I'm not too hopeful for other flavors of it.

-steev

Yeah you can easily edit HDV through slower drives, but once you get to ProRes or XDCAM, etc, you are going to need at least internal SATA drives, and if its not going to be an internal drive connected through SATA, then you will need a RAID.

once you get to ProRes or XDCAM, etc, you are going to need at least internal SATA drives

Should also mention hot swap external SATA drives connected to a SATA->PCI-E Card.

I'd say you don't need RAID for ProRes, unless you're doing multicam editing.

ProRes HQ is around 18MB/sec. I can easily single track edit that on firewire drives.

Computer might be the issue but I'm editing on a Macbook Pro 2.4 with no issues. I use Firewire Drives for editing have have no issues editing with Pro Rez, you might want get a good firewire had drive, I use the Western Digital MyBooks and they do fine, I also just bought a higher end one with firewire 800.

From what I understand you can edit with the normal Pro Rez codec no problem in lost of quality, when I first started editing I was using the Pro Rez HQ and things still worked ok.

So you do not need a raid drive just get a good firewire one.

I'm also using Pro-Res (standard and HQ) on a macbook with firewire 800 drives, non-raid, with no problems, even the small bus powered ones (actually only tried standard on those).

if you're not editing on a 30fps (I.e. you're editing on 29.97p) timeline, you'll get those issues.

^^^^^Yep^^^^^ This is what I was thinking the problem is as well.

I have notised this skipping as well.

It is definitely a 29.97 / 30 fps issue.

Use Cinema Tools or equivalent to conform to 29.97 before importing into NLE and you will not have the skipping problem.

Or a mismatch timeline/footage codec.
With Prores footage you need to work at a Prores timeline.
Please check timeline settings.

What does the 5D record? 30p or 29.97p?

Without any doubt 30p. There are a number of threads out there that claim 29.97. They are absolutely not correct. I have personally tested it.

The upcoming firmware will add 23.976 and 25p. I'm optimistic that 30p will be replaced with 29.97. I only know of one person who wants both 29.97 and 30p, but I doubt that Canon will provide both in order to minimize customer confusion.

The big question is whether the 5D2 will get 720p at 50 and 59.94. I've heard a rumor that "the 5D Mark II will get the same frame rates as the 7D", but I'm not willing to put money on it. I think that if they can do it, they will for consistency across the lineup, but I don't know that it's possible.

We will see...

Thanks Jon. I'd love 29.97. It would be great if it would record at higher frame rates too. Doesn't the 7D do 50 fps? That would be nice.

Yes, the 7D does 50 fps and 59.94 fps, but only at 720p.

I'm also hoping for the feature on the 5D2. I don't use slow motion often, but it would be nice to have.

The one thing that kind of bums me out is that you can't use 720p at 30p (or 29.97). There's some of us out here that would take advantage of that for certain everyday shooting opportunities (sometimes 1080p can be overkill but 480p 4x3 pretty much never cuts it). I've got my fingers crossed we get all of the frame rates of the 7D on the 5D2 next year, and with some extra luck, maybe 29.97 at 720 too (although I'm not holding my breath for that one). The other thing I like about 720p is that it boils down to a nice even multiple at 640x360 for certain online multimedia uses, but I digress...

Bill,

It would be nice to have a transcoding product that lets you transcode and scale in one go. You could batch process your video and immediately start editing 720p (or whatever) content.

I own NeoScene and it doesn't scale the output. (Though, to be fair, wavelet coding scales nicely when decoded.) I'm not sure what features the other Cineform products offer.

I have my old Neo HDV still on my system, and it does downscaling. The rub of that is that it won't handle the 5D files. When Cineform went to NeoScene, the crippled that capability, so they could sell it with their higher priced products. Guess you can't blame them for that.

Yes, I know. I've complained in the Cineform forums about this multiple times, and it's pretty much the only thing holding me back from buying NeoScene. Sure, I could rescale after NeoScene, but then again, that's another whole transcode in my workflow and I'm just not that die hard (one transcode is bad enough, lol), plus it makes re-doing a previous workflow that much more of a PITA to actually replicate years down the road if needed (I only save my originals).

The sad truth is since I'm mostly a serious hobbyist with a focus of online distribution of my somewhat serious archival project in the SF jazz scene, I've just been using the old built-in Cineform in Vegas Pro 8. I just drop my 5D2 files onto the timeline, run an events to regions script, and then batch render everything out to 720p30 Cineform from there. Then I do my projects in 720p and often frameserve out to a Flash encoder at half-scale from there (640x360). I then save and backup all of my project files, the original movs, and my final renders. Everything works flawlessly, so I'm not much inclined to change anything at the moment, but I'd buy NeoScene in a heartbeat if I could downscale on ingest/transcode. That just doesn't seem like a "pro" feature to differentiate on, but what do I know? I mean maybe downscaling 4k to a more usable resolution, but most "pros" aren't taking 1080p sources down to 720p, so why not?

Bill, your approach saves about $100 and some hard drive space, but that's about it. Hopefully, you're archiving the original MOV files to keep the maximum quality in the smallest size, as compared to the Cineform 720p AVIs. Sure, you can edit the AVIs immediately, but they're more bits for fewer pixels.

Since Cineform uses wavelets, you could transcode to 1080p, put that on the timeline of your choice with the preview quality of your choice, and the playback will be nice and smooth. When you do your final render for the web, you won't lose any visible quality.

Of course, the 720p Cineform files are half as big as the 1080p Cineform files, based on fewer pixels.

For saving hard drive space, I'd just archive the MOV files and blow away the intermediates. They can be regenerated later, if needed.

I'm not sure about the transcode time. On a fast quad core system, I can transcode at roughly real time. On my crummy old system at home, it's ...slower. I'm not sure if your 720p transcode is faster or slower.

So you use cineform to convert your 5D files from 30p to 29.97 or 23.976p. However as Cineform themselves claim it is not really the ideal way to do so. Then what?

Cineform Tech Blog Blog Archive Canon 5D Mark II and 24p (http://techblog.cineform.com/?p=2406)

NeoScene converts 30p to 29.97p perfectly by slowing both the audio and video. (This is still only a problem when cutting with 29.97 cameras viewing the same scene, due to the speed differences.)

Converting to 23.976 is another story. If there is no dialog, you can slow to 80% speed. It gives a dreamy feel. If there is dialog, it's more challenging. I produce stuff with dialog at 29.97, since I'd rather have a 30p look than 24p with bad interpolation.

Jon. After you convert you 5D files using NeoScene. I believe you ended up with cineform codec avi/mov file. How do you edit this? What editing application do you use for this cinefrom files?

I wonder if we can use VirtualDub to convert 5D files to 29.97 720x480 NTSC PAR with ms dv codec (PC running windows). That way we can edit on a system without using cineform. Anyone tried this before?

Hi Desmond,

I use Vegas. There is nothing unique about the workflow. With Cineform's free decoder on the machine, I can just drop the content on the timelines and edit.

Encoding to Cineform at 1080p requires the purchase of NeoScene. Decoding and editing can be done for free on any machine.

Jon. Thanks for bringing this up. Good to know. I don't use Vegas therefore I did not know that you can put movie files with cineform codec into the timeline and edit away.
In my case I'm on the Adobe's family. We can only do that if we have ProspectHD. Kind of lame huh??

I believe that it works in Premiere as well. You just need to have the decoder installed on your machine.

Jon. Yes it actually does work on Windows Premiere Pro CS4. I downloaded the trial version of NeoScene. However all the converted clips needs to be rendered in Premiere. They're all RED in the timeline indicating they need to be rendered in order to display preview correctly.

Wish to have a workflow that can convert those 5Dmk2 files into something that can play in realtime in Premiere. And convert them from HD to SD in pre-process before editing. That way when I know the final product won't be in HD, why edit in HD.

I'm using Vegas but I think NeoScene-converted files shouldn't have problems with Premiere either. With recent horse-powered computers, it has become easy to edit HD files and convert 'em to SD later :D

Heeeyy... Ian. How's it going bro? Haven't heard from you for like centuries :o)

In reply to your comment. I just think that there's no point editing in HD environment if your client only asking for SD. It will speed up our work even more if we just edit in SD for SD output.