(or How to edit at Starbucks... or the cottage... or the airplane...)
We've got a major heatwave going on up here in the Vancouver area, and seeing as I don't have air conditioning, I decided to do some prep last night so I could edit away from my home office.
I'm editing a 720P24 DVCPro HD project, and didn't want to lug a hard drive around with me. The solution was to recompress all of the footage into a codec that would takes up less space. A lot less space.
H.264 right?
Well, yeah, except it wasn't as straight forward as I thought it would be, due to what general googling revealed to be a bug in Compressor.
Here's the problem: Compressor 3.0.5 doesn't read timecode the same way Final Cut Pro does. Some say this is only with 24P footage. I've seen this in both DVCPro HD and RED. The result for me was that Compressor was seeing timecode as 5 seconds (!) earlier than FCP, and therefore any H.264 files created in Compressor would have the wrong timecode, and would therefore be useless.
The Solution: Use FCP Batch Export
First problem is that FCP doesn't have an H.264 sequence preset, so you can't Batch Export to H.264. You can try doing an MP4 mashup, but you won't get timecode.
So the first thing we have to do is create a sequence preset for the format we want. Then that preset will appear for us in our Batch Export settings.
(1) Create H.264 Sequence Preset
In the Final Cut Pro menu, click on
Audio/Video Settings. Then click on the
Sequence Presets tab. Click on
DV NTSC 48 Khz (it doesn't really matter, but that one is a good start), then click the
Duplicate button. A new window will pop up. Copy these settings (these settings assume you are using 16x9 footage, such as 1080P, 720P, or DV Anamorphic). Then click okay. You have now created a new setting called
H.264 640x360.
(2) Batch Export your footage
Import your footage into a new project. Select it all, and choose "Batch Export" from the File menu.
In the resulting
Export Queue window, hit Command-A to select all of the clips, then hit the
Settings button.
First choose your destination. This is where the new files will go, and should be a different folder than where the original files are. I made a folder called "proxy".
Next, select
Quicktime Movie for Format, and
H.264 640x360 for Settings.
Next, click on
Set Naming Options..., and click the box next to
Add File Type Extension.
Then, make sure
Make Self-Contained is checked, and click "OK" to return to the Export Queue window. Click the
Export button to begin exporting. Depending on how much footage you have, this can take awhile, but possibly not as long as you might think. It was about 1.5x realtime for me on my 8-core Mac Pro.
(3) Prepare your project for proxy editing
This assumes you haven't done any editing yet. Logging, but not editing. (If you already have sequences going, use the instructions in section 4 in reverse.)
The easiest way to set everything up is to copy your new proxy files to your laptop (note: my 98GB of DVC Pro HD footage was now about 6GB of H.264). Then, copy over your FCP project file.
Open the FCP project file on the laptop. When asked to reconnect, find the proxy files and reconnect. Done. Go away. Go to Starbucks. Go to the lake. Go to France.
(4) Edit
You'll find that editing with H.264 files is a little different than normal. You have to render if you want to do any transitions or anything, but it's great for assembling a cut.
(5) Reconnect your HD footage
You're back in your edit bay now, so stop using those proxies.
First, in your Proxy project, select your newly made sequence (or sequences) and export to XML by choosing File, Export, XML. Use the default settings.
Next, in your
OLD project
Import the XML file. What you're doing here is bring in the sequence(s) in a way that you can modify the sequence settings (because we don't want 640x360 anymore!). Copy the settings in this image, but be sure to select your own settings under
Sequence Settings. Click
OK, and your sequence(s) will be created in your old project, with media offline.
Note: If you're not sure about what settings to use, find out by first creating a new sequence, dropping some of your footage on it, agreeing to change the sequence settings, then right click on the sequence and choose
Settings....
Now, select all of the sequences that were imported, choose
File,
Reconnect Media, and reconnect your original footage.
(6) All done
If you did step 5 correctly, your sequence shouldn't need to be rendered. If you have a green or red bar above your timeline, simply delete the sequences and try again.
Despite this being a huge post, this process only takes a few minutes to complete (plus computing time to recompress footage).
I'll update this post when I have a chance to test the process with the new ProRes proxy codec in Final Cut Studio 3. I have a feeling it won't come close to these files sizes, but it would be much better for editing in general.
When working with the new RED quicktime codec, I've had an issue where rendering in Color would produce quicktime files that are full of gobbledeegook. After much searching, I found the solution in the Apple forums. It seems to be related to having two monitors set up. If you do your grading, save, close Color, unplug the second monitor, open Color again, and Render, it works perfectly. Must be a video card issue, but what?
