Timeline setting - ProRes or DVCPRO HD? which is better?

what settings should I use for my timeline when i've got ProRes 422 HQ and DVCPRO HD footage to edit with?

is it better to go with a ProRes timeline setting and render out the DVCPRO HD footage or vice versa? Not sure which route would produce the best quality having to work with the two different formats.

Suggestions? thx.

You could just put both on an open format timeline, edit in DVCPROHD and then render out to ProRes when you're done for even quality.

Noah

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ProRes HQ (it's a 220 mb/s vbr format vs a 100 mb/s format), but more info will be good. What kind of ProRes (there's all sorts of frame sizes in ProRes), what kind of DvcproHD are you talking about, and how much of each?



www.strypesinpost.com

thanks for the input guys.

the formats i have are:

ProRes 422 hq
2048 x 1152
23.98 fps

DVCPRO HD 1080p30
1280 x 1080
29.97

....i've got pretty equal amounts of footage of the 2 formats.

RED footage? Mixing framerates? Not very good... What's your final output?



www.strypesinpost.com

Looking at the framerates of your two types of footage, and I gotta think that the codec is the LEAST of your problems.

Andy

I think the most technically correct answer is going to make you very unhappy.

In order for your 2K footage to intercut pleasingly with your DVCPRO HD footage, you should first downconvert it to 1080p24, then add pulldown to get it to 29.97, then convert it to DVCPRO HD.

DVCPRO HD, for all its virtues, throws away a lot of image resolution. Even intercutting DVCPRO HD stuff with full-raster 1080 stuff creates noticeable jumps across every mixed-format edit, and to my eyes, the end result is that the DVCPRO HD shots end up looking slightly out of focus.

There's basically no right way to convert 29.97 to 24, although there are a number of technically wrong ways that can still produce decent results. But all of them involve interpolation, which softens the image even further, so the difference between your 2K material and your DVCPRO HD material would be even more striking.

You asked specifically about "best quality," but that's ambiguous. If you set your timeline up to 2K ProRes 24p, obviously your 2K ProRes shots will look their very best. But all your other shots will look craptacular by comparison, and that will reduce the perceived quality of your whole show.

I think in this case, converting to the least common denominator is the way to go. At least then everything will be consistent.

(Of course, you omitted any mention of what your deliverable is. If you're delivering 2K, maybe it makes more sense to find the very best way to upscale and frame-rate convert the DVCPRO HD stuff, and just live with the fact that it'll look soft compared to the 2K stuff.)

thanks everyone for the feedback.....it does suck having to work with a couple different formats like this but that's what i have been given so i'll have to make it workable.

Thanks Jeff for the breakdown of things...yeah the picture quality will be a lot different but i think the best option will to work downwards to the DVCPRO HD setting....my final output will just be 1080 and not 2K.

If this were my project, and the finished deliverable was an HD file [of any kind] I would encode all of the source to 1920x1080 ProRes 23.98 and edit in a ProRes timeline. Unless your writing this out to film you don't need ProRes HQ.

Keeping it in ProRes will provide the best resolution, converting to DVCPro HD does not, and it also provides the best latitude of color fidelity.