t2i records .mov?

[Dennis Stevens]

Getting very serious about getting the t2i for filmmaking, so I find myself asking very noob questions. Just making sure before spending the $$.

I have Adobe PPro CS4 with Cineform. Do I understand correctly the t2i records video to the SDHC as Quicktime files?

I should be able to copy the .mov files from SDHC to my harddrive, and use Cineform to convert to Cineform files? Then edit away?

[Colin Rowe]

Yes. depending on the spec of your PC,

[Matt Davis]

Here's my 'trademarked' rant on this subject:

When your camera records video, it needs to be space efficient as it has to deal with a lot of frames every second. Merely recording every frame does not leave enough time to actually capture subsequent frames and compress them nicely. It needs to do some Ninja Chops to do video.

Firstly, it does not record each frame as an image. It records a frame, and for every subsequent frame it only records the changes from the first frame. This may go on for, oooh, 20 frames or so. Then it takes a breath and records a full frame, then does the differences from THAT frame onwards.

Now imagine you are an editing application. Scooting around in that framework means you're spending most of your time adding up on your fingers and toes just to work out which frame you're supposed to be displaying, let alone uncompressing that frame to display it.

Oh yes. In order to edit, you have to DECOMPRESS frames to show them, and that takes time. It's like making 'packet soup'.

Your editing software is trying to snort up packet soup - dried bits of vegetable and stock - it has to add a specific amount of water to that mix, allow the dried bits of aforementioned stuff to absorb the water, then compartmentalise the soup into spoonfuls.

Lesser compressed soup (not H.264 freeze dried but ProRes/DNxHD 'just add hot water' concentrate) can do this quicker and better - and some say it tastes better too. If only these newfangled cameras stopped freeze-drying their soup and just stuck to boiling off the excess water like MPEG2 does, dang, that would be nicer.

So, when you take your camera originals in H.264, you have to carefully re-hydrate your freeze-dried movies, and allow them to slowly absorb their moisture in a long process called transcoding. Then gently simmer them to a stock soup concentrate, so your editi system can easily serve them up in 1-frame, 1-spoon servings so you can edit them between the many hundreds of thousands of bowls that maketh the feast of your film.

(please read that in a Samuel L Jackson kind of way)

You can have QuickTime soup. You can have Cineform soup. You can have DNxHD soup. H.264 soup is freeze dried and acquired through a straw. But H.264 soup is the size of a stock cube, and (for want of a better example) R3D is like canned soup - just requires a little reheating and a cup of cream.

Which ever way you capture and store it, we all watch soup.

Take your T2i footage, rehydrate it into the editing format you choose (can be ProRes, DNxHD, Cineform, hell, even XDCAM-EX) and then dish it up by editing and add your secret sauce to make it look/taste even finer. If you try to edit raw footage on most edit systems, you're making soup into a condiment.

Okay already, enough of the metaphor. CS5 can do it, so can others in the future, but consider transcoding unless you have the latest in high end edit software.

[Jon Fairhurst]

And even if you can scrub MOV files on your $2,000 CS5 machine with a Quadro video card, did you really spend all that cash so your CPU could burn power decoding video streams? Why not transcode to something less stressful and keep all that CPU and GPU power available for more streams, color correction, graphics generation, etc. With NeoScene available for about $100, it's quite the bargain compared to CS5 and matching hardware.

The only exception I see would be where you do little more than cuts only on a time-critical schedule. In that case a CS5 setup is buying you time, rather than creative power.

[Bryan Cantwell]

Originally Posted by Matt Daviss

(please read that in a Samuel L Jackson kind of way)

Matt! You're supposed to put that disclaimer at the top!! I had to read the whole thing over again when I hit that line... lol!

[Howard Neill]

Originally Posted by Matt Daviss

Here's my 'trademarked' rant on this subject:

When your camera records video, it needs to be space efficient as it has to deal with a lot of frames every second. Merely recording every frame does not leave enough time to actually capture subsequent frames and compress them nicely. It needs to do some Ninja Chops to do video.

...... Okay already, enough of the metaphor. CS5 can do it, so can others in the future, but consider transcoding unless you have the latest in high end edit software.

Thank you, Matt. That is so funny, but I understand it better, now.

Cheers

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