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bsilva48
bsilva48
Participant
October 17, 2013
Question

Pro Res vs h.264

  • October 17, 2013
  • 2 replies
  • 30518 views

Hey, I'd like to really clear this up for the sake of my own workflow.

So my company shoots everything on DSLRs (occasionally Canon c300) 1920x1080 compressed h.264 and we've recently switched to Premiere from FCP. When editing in FCP I would convert all of our media to ProRes and edit with that. But more recently in Premiere I've been recommending we edit on the h.264 format to save encoding time and HDD space. But I also know h.264 is a delivery format and not really an editing format. I've had tons of issues with it in FCP but so far so good in Premiere.

So, am I at a disadvantage editing h.264 footage vs ProRes in Premiere? Are there any potential risks in doing this?

Thanks

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2 replies

timothya46344266
timothya46344266
Participant
April 27, 2015

I just want to chime in after spending all my sunday deciding whether to transcode to prores or not with the new Premiere CC on a documentary I just shot.

Decision...I'm transcoding to Prores 422HQ.

Why?

Scrubbing and moving around in the timeline made things so much nicer. My CPU bars went full throttle with H.264 footage. With Prores it was like silk moving through clips, CPU bars had no effect. Also slightly faster rendering.

I'm about to spend a month cutting this Doc and 12 webisodes. Harddrives are cheap, I will transcode overnight. I based my decision on ease of use for THE LONG TERM.

If I shot an event during the day and needed a cut by nightfall I would not transcode.

Hope this helps:)

    E
    excited_Genie16B8
    Legend
    October 17, 2013

    You're at an advantage using PP and editing the original media.

    bsilva48
    bsilva48Author
    Participant
    October 17, 2013

    It would be great if you could elaborate on that. I'd like to know why its better so I can explain myself. Aside from saving HDD space and time encoding, are there any other technical diffirences?

    And thanks, I def appreciate it.

    E
    excited_Genie16B8
    Legend
    October 17, 2013

    Aside from saving HDD space and time encoding, are there any other technical diffirences?

    "Inside Premiere Pro, the images will stay exactly as they were recorded in-camera for cuts-only edits. If there’s no color work going on, the 4:2:0 values remain untouched.  If I need to do some color grading, Premiere Pro will, on-the-fly, upsample the footage to 4:4:4, and it does this very well, and in a lot of cases, in real-time.


    Going to a 4:4:4 intermediate codec does have some benefits – in the transcode process, upsampling every frame to 4:4:4 means that your CPU doesn’t have as much work to do, and may give you better performance on older systems, but there’s a huge time penalty in transcoding. And, it doesn’t get you any “better color” than going native. Whether you upsample prior to editing or do it on-the-fly in Premiere Pro, the color info was already lost in the camera.

    In fact, I could argue that Premiere Pro is the better solution for certain types of editing because we leave the color samples alone when possible. If the edit is re-encoded to a 4:2:0 format, [such as DVD, Blu-ray or Broadcast] Premiere Pro can use the original color samples and pass those along to the encoder in certain circumstances. Upsampling and downsampling can cause errors, since the encoder can’t tell the difference between the original color samples and the rebuilt, averaged ones."

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