EditShare and FCP

Hello,

I have been put in charge of our Editshare System, and I'm currently investigating new codecs to use for digitized footage to enable us to maximize the capacity of our system.

Is anyone using Editshare for media storage? If so, what codecs are you using? ES suggests a few different codecs such as: DV-25, DV-50 (which I'm not actually aware of sadly), Photo-JPEG, or IMX. We are capturing to external hard drives and then uploading the footage to our ES system and ES suggests to use such codecs to preserve TC and Reel names, however since we are digitizing to external drives as opposed to ES, we aren't having a problem in that department. Just the space issue.

Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance for any help you can give.

There are a lot of variables, what is the source footage, what do you need to deliver etc., that help you decide which codec to use.

Most of the codecs you mentioned are generally developed by camera manufacturers, its the standard they use to put video to tape. The NLEs conformed to the same standard to be able to edit it. So if your shooting DVCPro50 use the corresponding codec.

However recently there have been codecs developed that are more uniquely suited for the post-production process, Sheer Video, Cineform, Apple Intermediate Codec (AIC) and more recently the Apple ProRes codec. These codecs do not have the same bandwidth constraints the camera manufacturers have when recording video onto tape, all of these newer codecs enable you to to encode at higher bit rates and color fidelity that is better suited to editing.

Also using a common post-production codec allows you to share your content much more efficiently, which is kind of the point of Editshare.

Amy,

You may also want to consider apple's "Off-line RT" codec. This is an EXTREMELY compressed photoJPEG codec that reduces the frame size to 320 X 240, and steps on the picture so much that calling it "Blocky" is an understatement. Having said that, we use it exclusively for our off-line format. It saves a ton of storage and bandwidth making certain workflows quite easy.

The down side is that you must "uprez" your final project back to the original "uncompressed" format. We're set up for that workflow. You may not want to deal with it. In that case, all of the above suggestions are good.

Mark