Pro-Res in the real world...

This is the main thing to come out of NAB that i still don't really understand. How is this going to be integrated into my day to day workflow? I'm not ingesting dailies, I don't need to do onlines, I am shooting more and more HD and am curious about how this can help my storage issues.

It was really interesting that Apple brought up that all our new Codecs are developed for camera issues and that this was developed for our end of things. But all I heard about getting video into this codec was through the AJA box, which i don't necessarily want to have to buy. Is this the only way get Pro Res footage onto my G5 , other than converting through Compressor? Perhaps over Firewire? I'm shooting DVCProHD and would like to get some of the benefits of the smaller file size...

Any help is much appreciated...

There are two curves that are very important to editors/producers, quality and efficiency. Simply put this codec provides a better quality image with a lower data footprint.

However efficiency, especially in HD can be measured on a per frame cost. Sure if you purchase the Aja card/box then digitize everything coming into your facility then you would probably see an improvement in efficiency. But what about any legacy content or content supplied from other facilities?

It doesn't appear at this time that Apple has provided the necessary tools to really leverage this new codec. I have been trying to use it with mixed results, the quality is fine but I'm not sure how to get the 20 or so terabytes of legacy content into a manageable workflow. Compressor takes about three or four times as long to reformat DVCProHD and the data rate increases, and I thought that would have been a faster than real time process.

Its not clear to me that if you own and LHe card for example that you can encode to the ProRes codec in real time.

But if you want to work in an IT [tape less] environment this is a step in the right direction.

I'm a ways off from employing ProRes in my own productions. What does your DVCProHD data rate become once converted? Curious.

Is this for standard or high quality?

[Its not clear to me that if you own and LHe card for example that you can encode to the ProRes codec in real time. ]

Not sure about the card. From the AJA IO HD box it is realtime, and over Firewire cable!

- Loren
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AFAIK all blackmagic and AJA cards willl allow encoding to ProRes in real time (on the CPU) in the same way that they can to DVCPROHD, DVCPRO50 etc. The ioHD box has to have an onboard hardware codec so it can transfer HD data over a FW800 cable.

BTW The data rate of ProRes is actually higher than DVCPROHD so you aren't going to save disk space.

Martin Baker
[www.digital-heaven.co.uk]
Unique plug-ins and tools for Apple Pro Apps

Really, ProRes is higher than DVCProHD?? I thought there tagline was HD at SD data rates or something like that. They were saying this could replace DVCPro as an online codec and all that weren't they? oh well, the dream is over...

Yes it's higher. The comparison is uncompressed HD quality at uncompressed SD data rates - ProRes is about 1/6th the file size.

Martin Baker
[www.digital-heaven.co.uk]
Unique plug-ins and tools for Apple Pro Apps

"They were saying this could replace DVCPro as an online codec and all that weren't they?"

used to be some people would convert their HDV (& maybe other formats) to DVCProHD for on-lining. heck, even for off-lining
the idea i think that ProRes would be a good replacement for that.
better quality without *too* much extra bandwidth.
but it IS higher bandwidth than DVCProHD

nick

And in case it wasn't obvious enough, there's no advantage (that I can think of) in converting DVCProHD source footage to ProRes - for storage, for editing, whatever. All you'll get is an unnecessary (though mild) recompression / downgrade and a higher datarate.

Keep your source media in its original native format, unless you have a good reason to convert. Such as having uncompressed material and not enough space for it.

Editing to a ProRes sequence is entirely different - that should be a great way to go for just about any source formats.