1 Correct answer
Hi WCN_Dave!
- My camera produces HD avchd files using h264
- I've started using proxy files instead.
- They are super fast when editing.
- why don't I just convert all the files into a new format before I start my project.
- Sure! This is a common process called "Transcode at Ingest." I use it for almost every project.
- Set up an Ingest Preset or use one of the included presets (they should work fine for you).
- Navigate to the choices in the Media Browser
- Click the "Ingest" box
- Click the "Wrench" to open the Setti
35
Replies
Just as a 'other thing to consider' … not now but maybe at some future date....
I don't know what camera you're using so it might not matter at all … might not be able to do this:
Some cameras ( like my Nikon DSLR D800 ) record to SD cards in mov H264, which I find horrible to work with. It is YUV 4.2.0 8 bit.
Sooooo, I use an Atomos Ninja 2. It's kinda small and since I use a tripod I just mount it on the dovetail ( camera fluid head ).
Using the HDMI output from camera I plug in the Atomos and record DNxHD 220X, 4.2.2 with a higher bit rate. I can also choose Prores but with PC I like the avid codec. Some cameras have SDI outputs and new Atomos things can go up to UHD with SDI connections.
Anyway, the recording is now better than the internal camera circuitry can accomplish and I just put that stuff in editor and it's happy as a clam.
well, it's kinda complicated. In a way yours is better than mine. You can shoot longer without your chip overheating like mine would. Mine is full 35mm equiv. chip size and shoots stills with strobes as well as digital 'film' ( has a mirror that needs to be raised to shoot movie stuff) but if I shoot more than about 10 minutes I'd be worried about the chip overheating.
I'd use yours if I wanted to shoot the town's annual softball game of the local firemen vs. policemen. I would use mine only if I wanted to shoot short clips with various lenses and put a story together with the short clips. Hard to explain.
But, yeah, my internal thing is same as yours re: H264 4.2.0 8 bit.
I understand the money thing. I'm stuck with what I got now. My edit computer ( the PIG in honor of the Empress of Blanding's Castle ) is stuck in full HD land. I recently looked into upgrading ( cause current mobo is maxed out with ram and cpu ) and I not only had a horrible experience looking into replacement motherboard and cpu and ram, but also the slots and pins I need for PCI, USB, SATA, etc... and in the end ( it's custom built computer ) it was like retarded to spend the money on doing that stuff.
I'm 68 years old so I'll just stick with what I got and make proxies if I get 4k stuff and be happy as I can be with it. It's like having a car that works but you want something faster and bigger, but can't afford it... so I just have to deal with it.
P.S.
I also think Neil had good advice re: PUGET guys... one of the microcomputer people I spoke to ( I built my pig with them on Long Island and they have a store in MN. where I live now ) recommended Ryzen and some ram and cpu but it turned out ( after tons of research online ) that I would have been screwed with that stuff... due to lack of slots for 64gig ram, pci slots for x16 graphics card I have ( without sharing that bandwidth with 8X slot I need for Blackmagic SDI output card ) and tons of other problems. Might have been great to play games, but for me it was screwed up. PUGET guys would know a lot.
somebody should start a new TV program called, " THIS OLD COMPUTER" , like " This old house " …. and go around to various computer systems and look at what the current situation is, and just go hog wild and fix it up and make it modern and beautiful and all that stuff..
hehe
I'm getting these results with my 720p proxies from UHD 4K 100 M/bs actually smaller than the source files. Plus I love how my rig flies when creating the proxies... See this post: PP 2019 - Making Proxies - Runs Well wTask Manager
there's this old joke that circulated when a woman cut off her husband's pp while he was comatose in bed. She then drove away and threw the pp out her car window into the woods. The joke was basically, this.
Two guys are driving down the road at night and suddenly they are shocked by something hitting their car windshield... and one guy says to the other, " Holy smokes ! Did YOU see the size of that PP on that FLY ? "
That is like shooting with a BMPCC with my Nikkor lenses. It's cinemaDNG raw, full HD, and with lens adapter I can put on full chip lenses on that camera. It's very small ( the camera ). The lenses are like the giant PP, and the camera is like the fly.
But it looks great ( footage from SD card ) and is raw which has a lot of latitude etc... and it edits nice without proxy or nothin in Resolve. I don't know if PPro had ever managed to get it to work in their own editor ( PPro ), even though that company was the most influential in 'creating' ( inventing ) the codec.
Go figure.
I don't know anything about smart render stuff cause I only have old CS6 version of 'creative suite'. I guess googling that stuff is best if you want to learn more about it. Adobe probably has help files on it.
As a rule you should just edit whatever you want. If it works why not ? The H264 stuff has a 'history'.
Fundamentally, computer were once upon a time not powerful enough to edit that stuff. H264 back then was considered an END PRODUCT. Good for viewing. Not editing.
Why? Because the computer CPU has to decompress the material on the fly to edit it and change things with the edit, which means the older less powerful CPU's couldn't do it. H264 is highly compressed. Guess you could google that too if you want to know more.
Now ( things change fast in computer land ) CPU's are much more powerful and RAM amount is higher etc. etc. GPU's are faster too, with more memory on those cards too. So NOW you can actually edit H264, with the caveat that " you can do it until you can't do it ".
That means, at some point, especially adding effects and filters and fancy type color work, you may suddenly find your program freezing, computer crashing and all sorts of ugly stuff. And most people don't know 'why' it happens. That's where the 'vitriol' comes from. People get sick of posting a thousand times that H264 should not be used for editing.
To get into the specifics and why some other codec is better to edit with it's a matter of really learning some stuff about codecs and the specifications involved with them and how they work, etc. Otherwise you just have to trust that some people know what is best and what road will not lead you to potentially falling off a cliff.
you wouldn't be able to do this using H264 as your source material. Can do it using prores.
original on left
composite on right
camera match move tracked on foreground sign
AdChoices