Jaggies are much better. Moire still there.

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  08/30  at  09:18 PM

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Hi Matt

There is another aspect to transcoding which is difficult to get consensus on. How necessary is it to transcode video for colour correction?

Adobe says if you have CS5 you need not transcode, but the pros doing the CC for the Zacuto DSLR shootout seemed to emphatically say it makes a huge difference.

Editing is really only part of the workflow so is there any downstream benefit to transcoding?

thanks for posting!

trev

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  08/31  at  02:55 AM

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Hey Trevor, I don’t personally transcode from H.264 (or any format for that matter) because of color correction, per se. I choose to transcode for simplicity of editing and realtime performance, and the benefits of quicker render times while editing.

I don’t push my images that much, generally, and haven’t noticed any improvement in CC results in transcoded footage (ProRes generally) vs acquisition footage (H.264 generally). Ultimately, even if you take H.264 into ProRes 444, you are still originating your material in an 8-bit codec, and you’ll never just magically make those extra bits of color info appear out of nowhere. Beyond a small benefit of chroma-smoothing or slight jaggy reduction that seems to happen in the transcode, there aren’t any appreciable image quality benefits to transcoding.

The benefit of transcoding to me is the realtime performance and quicker renders. And since I generally just set my machines to transcode/ingest overnight, I’m not sitting at the edit desk waiting for renders…it’s not on my schedule…I just push that render time to the machine’s schedule while I do something else, and then get realtime performance when I edit. I feel that’s a better use of my time.

It’s my experience that H.264 timelines on FCP are slightly slow on renders, and occasionally wonky when outputting. I’ve had issues with General Error on export, or effects that just simply quit working. The fix is nearly always to take it into a more editable codec like ProRes, and everything just magically seems to work. So that’s what I do now, unless it’s a very simple and short cut and I’m comfortable knocking it out from the original H.264s.

Hope that makes some sense,
-Matt Jeppsen

Posted by Matt Jeppsen  on  08/31  at  09:04 AM

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Hey Trevor - I spent some time wondering this myself. I started a few conversations in different places and did some of my own testing and the general idea is pretty much exactly what Matt says. I couldn’t tell any differences in the quality of the renders, or in the ability to ‘push’ a grade, but CPU load is another story. In my own testing, I found that even on a fast system, h264 at 1080p just isn’t responsive enough for the way I work (even in Premiere CS5). I tend to shuttle back and forth pretty fast when I’m working and need it to be instant - probably from my days editing tape-to-tape - and h264 simply wasn’t responsive enough for me. In After Effects, renders took about 1.5x longer with the h264 footage.

Like Matt, if the edit is quick and simple, then I will consider native, but usually I transcode to Prores when working with most any heavily compressed format.

I’m very curious to try out this tool though.

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  08/31  at  10:06 AM

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Thanks for the great answers guys. I’ve been experimenting with this tool for a while now (even when the beta was very limiting) under the impression that there was resolution to eek out or degradation to limit. If I’ve been deluded, I’m overjoyed. Thanks again for participating in the debate… I follow with interest.

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  08/31  at  12:38 PM

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Since I dived in and acquired a 550D for shooting I’ve been transcoding in MPEGStreamclip constantly, but recently we’ve been shooting a lot of green screen for compositing and while the result is pretty good, I’m wondering if using Rarevision will significantly improve keying?

I’m having to seriously choke the mattes in AE to get clean edges. Does anyone know if this improves matters?

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  09/01  at  11:36 AM

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Hi Richard - I haven’t tried any greenscreen with it myself, but looking at the results of 5DtoRGB conversions vs others (on my own footage as well as tests posted), it has less noise - so it very well could be a help. I’d say it’s worth a download and a test with a few clips at the very least!

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  09/02  at  11:53 AM

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After giving this a test I can say that the quality is noticeably better than MPEGStreamclip. I cranked out a DPX of some greenscreen footage we shot a couple of weeks ago using the 550D and the keys were spot on. Very little choking and feathering needed. The one drawback I’d say 5DtoRGB has is the lack of batch processing that is available in MPEGStreamclip, it’s a pain to go into the Terminal and raise numerous instances of 5DtoRGB. Hopefully they’ll release a version with this feature soon.

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  09/03  at  09:22 AM

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