Editing sizzle reel with various formats and aspet ratios as source material. What is the best format to use in FCP7? What are the best compressor settings? How do I handle the work flow?

Sorry to ask for answers to the most of basic of questions.
I have asked 5 different editors and received 5 completely different answers.
Guy at Genius Bar told me H.264 was the best to use. I thought that was kind of funny.
I have to edit a sizzle reel using a slew of different formats.
For example;
.mov file with aspect ratio of 720x480
.mv4 - 1282x720
.mov - 720x404
.mov - 960x720
h.264 - 1920x1080
ProRes - 1920x1080
dvcprohd - ?x?

What overall format to convert to for FCP? Using QT export or compressor to get them into FCP? Settings for the app?

Overall cluster f. Any suggestions greatly appreciated.

What do you want to output? Personally, I would make the mp4s and h.264s into prores and go with that. Decide what size you want to output and make that your sequence setting.

The small SD stuff will need a big blowup to fit into the HD size stuff, but you could always box it to one side with some text or something.

By the way, tell the 'Genius' that H.264 is not an editing codec, and that he shouldn't just guess what the right answers are.

We edit with H264 codecs all the time now that we switched to Premiere Pro. It edits quite well actually.

FCP 7 certainly doesn't like that codec, but Premiere Pro is just fine with it.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
biscardicreative.com

Final will be for broadcast, Bluetooth, projection, DVD, Apple TV2, Web, Vimeo, Youtube.

I would love to spit out the highest quality that I can knowing that technology will allow higher res at some point. IE: Vimeo.

FCP 7 is what I have, I know, am relatively happy with.

Thanks, but don't want to invest in AVID express, Premiere, FCPX or whatever next seasons flavor will be. I only need to cut w minimal effects/graphics.

Settings to output from QT Pro or Compressor?

Thanks!

RS

> Guy at Genius Bar told me H.264 was the best to use.

Wrooooong. H.264 can be used with some software (see Walter's post above), but it's not even close to being "the best". In fact, if you're starting out with media that is not already in the H.264 format, you shouldn't touch that codec at all, until the delivery stage. H.264 is very heavily compressed, and if you're using FCP7 or older, it doesn't work as an editing codec; you will have no timecode and footage can move around randomly without warning, especially after a render.

You have to make a decision. Does the final product have to be HD or SD? If you know you only want a 4:3 Standard Def delivery at the end, then you should probably edit in SD 720x480, and shrink the HD material to letterbox and fit it within the 720x480 frame. However, that is almost never the case these days and you'd want an HD master 95 per cent of the time. If you edit in 720 or 1080 HD, you'll have to blow up the SD material.


www.derekmok.com

i did a show last year which was all "crowd-sourced" material, so LOTS of different formats

we converted everything to Prores 1920x1080,
using compressor.
you can create a preset in compressor that deals with all the different aspect ratios by padding (adding black bars, generally to the sides)

because we had LOTS of material, we did a first conversion to Prores Proxy, with the fastest upscaling
then when we had our finals clips, we went back and converted to ProResHQ with best upscaling.

a sizzle reel might not have so much footage that you'd need to go though an off-line / on-line process like that.
it was not completely painless, and i'd recommend you avoid it!

oh, another thing:
occasionally we had shots that had been framed vertically ("portrait" style)
with those, i first changed the geometry in Quicktime, which is very quick and doesn't require any re-rendering,
THEN i'd run them through compressor, so it wasn't padding, then i'd rotate them again in FCP,
so i had more pixels to play with.

and yet another thing:
frame rates?
what have you got & what do you need to deliver?


nick

Hi Everyone,

Thanks for the replies.

Final needs to be HD. What is the best way to "blow up" an SD clip? Tried it before using QT and it doesn't look that good.
What is the most that you can scale or blow up an SD clip? Compressor or QT? Best settings? Seems compressor may be the choice.

Should I just convert all clips to ProResHQ before editing? Will most likely use the complete "up-rezzed" (sp?) videos for other purposes.

Older clips are at 29.9, while newer (better quality videos) are at 23.9 fps.

Cheers.

Compressor would do a better job. But if you're talking 1920x1080, blowing up an SD clip would be well over 200 per cent, plus the aspect-ratio problem. It's never going to look "that good". You may need to consider doing a picture-in-picture to hide the problem (ie. so the SD clip doesn't have to fill the entire HD frame), or editing in 1280x720 instead.


www.derekmok.com

Compressor does give you controls that help the blow-up.
(look in the "frame-controls" pane in the Compressor Inspector)

hardware blowup is arguably still the best, but you have some prey weird formats, not suited to it.
only job the low-res thing was part of the overall look.

compressor does batches, too.
just forget about QuickTime it's a waste of time for you.


MpegStreamclip is supposed to have a pretty good up-scaler, too.
you could do some tests, between it and Compresor,
but my off-the-top-of-the-dome guess is you won't see much difference (would be happy to be wrong on that, though)

re frame-rates, I'm no expert on those frame rates, i come from PAL-land,
but isn't there some neat way to convert 29.97 to 24.276 using CinemaTools?
no that's the other way around, i think.

some NTSC expert will know the best approach there.


re ProRes HQ:
it may be overkill, unless you are doing a serious grade on al the footage. ProRes422 may be fine.


nick

When it comes to THAT many formats, I opt to use Adobe Premiere Pro. It works with them natively. Depending on the time too. I mean, if you are going to use FCP, you need to convert all of those formats to editable ones in FCP...preferrably all the same codec. And bumping SD to HD...you need to enable frame controls, turn things to BEST, and go see a movie, or a few...or wait a full day as it converts.

I just gave a demo at the last LAFCPUG meeting where I demonstrated what I did when given an idea for a sizzle, and a bunch of YouTube links.


www.shanerosseditor.com

Listen to THE EDIT BAY Podcast on iTunes
[itunes.apple.com]