Best codec for 4K editing on Mac

[danielpape]

I shoot 4K footage on a variety of cameras and am looking to see if I can improve my editing performance by converting my footage to a single format and codec prior to editing.

I shoot with Sony (MXF) and DJI (MP4/H.264) primarily.

I have had success with proxy files, but I am hoping to avoid the data redundancy if I can.

Admittedly, I do not know a ton about codecs, so I am wondering if Premier Pro on Mac has a preference that would allow it to perform at it's best. Is ProRes best suited for Final Cut Pro or does Premiere utilize it well too?

Computer Specs:

MacBook Pro Retina Mid 2015

2.8 GHz i7

16GB

AMD Radeon R9 + Intel Iris Pro

Thanks for your advice.

[Meg The Dog]

What is your media stored on and how is that storage connected to your Mac?

MTD

[danielpape]

Good point. For small projects I will work off the internal SSD then archive to external drives. For larger projects I work off USB3 SSDs.

[Meg The Dog · Accepted solution]

Best practice is to never place media storage on the system drive; it is preoccupied serving the OS and the running application(s).

MPEG formats are very difficult/intensive formats to edit with. They are primarily designed for acquisition and  delivery. By converting the media to ProRes you will be unburdening the heavy demands placed on your computer by MPEG needing to be "unpacked" for editing in real time - but it will require more storage space.

You should do a test. Convert footage to ProRes 422 (not ProRes LT or ProRes HQ) and see what you think. My expectation would be there will be some improvement at the expense of disk space, but that improvement will not be as great as using the proxy workflow which is specifically designed to circumvent hardware issues with difficult codecs.

MtD

[R Neil Haugen]

MtD has a good couple questions there.

In general ... don't know about which Sony you're using, but the drone and most DSLR footage is heavily compressed long-GOP. That "interframe" type media is stored with a complete frame ("I" frame) every so many frames, maybe every 9-15 or so, and then a data-set is created of only the pixels that move for a few frames before & after (p & b frames). The CPU takes an I frame decompresses it, storing it in RAM. Grabs the data set for another frame ... recalls the full frame, computes the new frame, sends it to RAM ... grabs the next data, rinse & repeat. VERY CPU/RAM, threads & cores intensive.

And it's of course several magnitudes more work when using 4k media.

Intraframe codecs which store every frame as a complete frame, just compressed ... take more space on disc but process through the CPU with vastly less work. Cineform, DNxHD/R, and ProRes being the most common of those.

A workable workflow is to take 4k long-GOP media, put the original media into your Archive folders, transcode it to the same name on ingestion in your working folders but into something like Cineform which edits so sweetly, and then make proxies at 1/2 or even 1/4 resolution (frame-size) of also Cineform ... don't make the mistake of using an interframe codec for proxies!

Edit your project, and when done, simply delete the transcoded files. You can always make new ones if you need to re-edit anything, as you've got the original media still to make them from.

Neil

[danielpape]

Great feedback guys. Thanks very much. I will do some experimenting and let you know how it goes.