4 Replies Latest reply: Jun 26, 2013 12:36 AM by Wes Plate RSS

    Codec and Ingest question(s)

    Shane P Community Member

      Hi,

       

      I'm a long time Premiere user dating back to 1997 and I am trying to wrap my head around Prelude. I never really bothered with PL CS6 as it couldn't rename or "stitch" clips. I downloaded  PL CC and have been experimenting with it and am starting to grasp it.

       

      I'm not really concerned with Meta data or all of the various type of comments that can be used. For my workflow I want to be able to set my I/O points for clips and have them stitched into one master clip just keeping the uable portion of the clips to preserve Hard Drive space.

       

      I have been successfully able to stitch clips however I am really struggling to find a good codec.

       

      The other day I shot 26 minutes of HD video using a cheap Sony handycam generating .MTS files. The total size of the various clips that make up the 26 minutes of footage is 4.86 GB.

       

      It was shot in 1080p, 59.94. I tried using QT/Animation and a couple of the DNxHD ones and after just a couple of minutes of transcoded video the file sizes are already past the original 4.86 GB.

       

      I want to be able to stitch together the usable parts of the footage to save Hard Drive space.

       

      I'm on Win 7. I want to keep the transcoded stitched master clip the full 1080p 59.94, I do not want to resize smaller to 720, etc.

       

      Can anyone recommend a good Container/codec to use to retain image quality and not get huge file sizes?

       

      Thank you,

      Shane

        • 1. Re: Codec and Ingest question(s)
          Wes Plate Employee Hosts

          The advantage to AVCHD is that the file sizes are quite small. Codecs are full of tradeoffs. Camera native formats like AVCHD may not be efficient for editing but they are small in size. Codecs like ProRes and DNxHD are much better for editing but the files are larger in size.

           

          DNxHD is a good choice for encoding on Windows, it keeps good quality with relatively low bitrates.

          • 2. Re: Codec and Ingest question(s)
            Shane P Community Member

            Thank you, I guess I will keep experimenting.

            • 3. Re: Codec and Ingest question(s)
              Shane P Community Member

              Wes,

               

              I have found that DNxHD is a nice option. I used the 720p 145 preset and it was about a 1min=1GB...is this normal?

               

              I brought it into PPCC and I was able to shuttle the video beautifully without the stuttering of the navite camera AVCHD.

               

              I would however like to keep the original frame size of 1080, I was looking through all of the DNxHD presets and there are no 1080p/59.94 presets. I tried to make a custom preset however all of the adjust parameters for the DNxHD presets are ghosted out. Are they not customizable?

               

              I apologize if these sound like "newb" questions as I have nevered used DNxHD prior to today.

              • 4. Re: Codec and Ingest question(s)
                Wes Plate Employee Hosts

                Shane P wrote:

                 

                Wes,

                 

                I have found that DNxHD is a nice option. I used the 720p 145 preset and it was about a 1min=1GB...is this normal?

                 

                I brought it into PPCC and I was able to shuttle the video beautifully without the stuttering of the navite camera AVCHD.

                 

                I would however like to keep the original frame size of 1080, I was looking through all of the DNxHD presets and there are no 1080p/59.94 presets. I tried to make a custom preset however all of the adjust parameters for the DNxHD presets are ghosted out. Are they not customizable?

                 

                I apologize if these sound like "newb" questions as I have nevered used DNxHD prior to today.

                 

                 

                Create a new preset and choose "DNxHD MXF OP1a" from the Format popup

                 

                Then from the Resolution popup in the Video Codec section you can choose from one of the 59.94p presets. It will set the frame rate to 59.94.

                 

                If you have deeper questions about AME I recommend you ask on the AME forum. :-)