Rendering Uncompressed HD

I started editing an HD animation show recently and during the online I've been receiving Uncompressed HD files to edit with. Although I'm working on an 8 core Mac Pro 2.8ghz with 16gb of ram, Kona 3 card, and two 1TB HD's spanned as a RAID 0, whenever I drop a file in the timeline, I get the red render bar which halves my editing speed. We're supposed to receive a 5TB Raid 5 machine to speed things up, but I'm not sure whether that will get rid of the red render bar.

I'm beginning to wonder how efficient this workflow is. The previous editor output the final Quicktime outputs to Prores HQ which then go onto HDcam.

My questions are:

1. What's the point of receiving Uncompressed if we're gonna output to Prores HQ eventually?
Would be there significant quality degradation if I received the online files in DVCProHD or Prores HQ?

2. Given my setup, is there any way to avoid the red render bar, so I can preview footage without rendering each time?

3. When we have shot fixes I've needed to create H.264 lorez outputs that include shot and frame # over the footage so the director and animators can review the material. These come in the form of Outline Text tool. That would affect rendering as well, correct?

Any advice would be much appreciated!

Thanks,
Alex

One more thing...

The show is a CGI 3D animation show in HD. The characters are rendered in 3D, but it will not be broadcast in 3D, if you get my drift.

If you're going to deliver ProRes HQ files then why not convert now?


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The main point, is whether you have storage and the data throughput and edit everything in Uncompressed HD. I doubt you have. You should check with your post sup.



www.strypesinpost.com

Quote

2. Given my setup, is there any way to avoid the red render bar, so I can preview footage without rendering each time?

your timeline settings do not match your clip settings.
you shouldn't have to render,
UNLESS the previous editor set it up so you were cutting in a Prors tieline and rendering into ProRes??

Quote

1. What's the point of receiving Uncompressed if we're gonna output to Prores HQ eventually?
Would be there significant quality degradation if I received the online files in DVCProHD or Prores HQ?

in some cases it can be better to grade from the full res files.
but i'm thinking RED raw files verses uncompressed HD or ProRes.

uncompressed HD vs. ProRes i suspect would not be such a difference,
and you might as well convert to ProRes before you edit.

Quote

3. When we have shot fixes I've needed to create H.264 lorez outputs that include shot and frame # over the footage so the director and animators can review the material. These come in the form of Outline Text tool. That would affect rendering as well, correct?

sure, if you have to add TC filters & text overlay, you'll have to re-render those sections.

if you've got a fully rendered timeline, it's quicker to export (maybe as a reference move)
then bring that back into FCP, add the new overlays, and re-export.



nick

>you shouldn't have to render

I'm under the impression that Uncompressed HD is only supported with the right capture cards. With an AJA or BMD card, Uncompressed HD is a blackmagic or AJA preset. You don't get it without a capture card, and when I try to select a clip and change the codec to 10 bit uncompressed, I need to render when I reimport the clip to the sequence, and according to FCP, it's 66MB/s, instead of 130.



www.strypesinpost.com

Shane- I want to ask the production manager to have files delivered as ProRes, but the problem is this studio uses all PC's. They told me they use Maya to animate, Nuke to composite, and then Fusion to output to Quicktime HD uncompressed mov's.

Strypes- I am the post sup! :-p That's why I'm trying to figure out a more better solution because this uncompressed HD workflow seems inefficient.

Nick- You're right, the timeline setting is ProRes (Proxy). Also, the files that I'm receiving I don't know exactly how they're encoded. I was told that they're uncompressed HD files but don't see that setting under FCP. The file extension is .mov and the data rate is 177MB/sec. Compressor is none, pixel aspect is square, field dominance is Upper (Odd)

I was just told to disable those title cards when I receive the HD files. Separate the title cards and overlay if needs be, very clever! :-)

My editor friend recommended ProRes 4444 as super high quality if they're gonna be sticklers about quality. Hopefully they'll accept HQ though. I'm wondering if their PC's can't output ProRes, whether Avid DNxHD codec would be a good alternative.

>Compressor is none

It isn't "uncompressed". You are working with the "none" codec. Convert all of that to ProRes.



www.strypesinpost.com

That makes sense. If they cannot give me the files in ProRes HQ then I'll just have everything converted with Compressor myself when I get it. Will save me a lot of time rendering. Such a simple solution, but in all the confusion I didn't think about that. Thanks guys! :-)

>I am the post sup!

That sounds kinda scary. You should never be the post sup on your first broadcast project.

And yea, double check a clip with the animators, because Compressor may mess up the gamma on conversion from RGB sources.



www.strypesinpost.com

I'm in Beijing, China. We're lucky to have 1 Mac Pro in the studio. Welcome to my world :-p

Will do Strypes! :-)

If the sequence is ProRes HQ with ProRes HQ footage and I export a self-contained QT movie and then do a ProRes HQ output with Compressor, would that be a 2nd generation or would it retain the exact same quality of the original?

01. sequence is ProRes HQ with ProRes HQ footage

no rendering (other than effects), everything 1st gen.

02. export a self-contained QT movie

again no loss

03. and then do a ProRes HQ output with Compressor

why do this?
yes, compressor will recompress the frames.
it will be practically un-noticeable,
but again: what is the point of this step?


nick

Strypes, going back to what you said about gamma, it's imperative that the Alpha channel is retained as we often superimpose the animation over stock footage. So hopefully ProRes HQ will be able to retain that data.

No, you need to use ProRes 4444 or Animation with colors at Millions+. There is no alpha channel with HQ.

All the best,

Tom

Eh?! So ProRes 4444 contains alpha channel, but ProRes HQ doesn't?

Or perhaps I can do most work in ProRes HQ and for the rare shots that require an Alpha channel then I'll do those in 4444 or Animation with colors at Millions+ as Tom stated.

Nick- You're absolutely right! Don't need to go to Compressor now as everything is in ProRes already, duh! :-p I'll just go direct to a self-contained Quicktime movie which will still be 1st gen, awesome! :-)

Huh? If your source footage is None, you need to convert that to either ProRes HQ or 4444. Staying in None means you need to render.



www.strypesinpost.com