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Editing H.249 DSLR footage in Pr CS6

I

iampaulb

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jul 23, 2012
136
0
London
I have just been exchanging some emails with a good twitter friend. He advises that I shouldnt be editing in H.249 and to use ProRes (he is a FCP7 user). He converts all recorded footage to ProRes via MPEG steamclip, then converts back to H.249? As the Canon 550D records in the H.246 codec i would like to start off the batt with the best chance to bring the best quality of the footage out in editing.

With Apple making the ProRes codec now free and with the help from these pages Would working in ProRes be a good idea?

What would be the best workflow with Premiere cs6?
 
Last edited:
simsaladimbamba

simsaladimbamba

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Nov 28, 2010
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located
The codec you mean is called "H.264", an MPEG-4 codec, which is not suited for editing, but on highly powered computers it can be done, as H.264 does not store every frame, only keyframes, in between those keyframes the other frames get interpolated, thus frame precise editing is highly CPU intensive.
Adobe Premiere can work with the ProRes codec, but it can also work with the free Cineform codec from GoPro.
In MPEG Streamclip just use the Batch List (CMD+B), add your H.264 encoded files and add one setting to export the files to, either using Cineform or ProRes as video compressor and Uncompressed for Sound.
 
MisterMe

MisterMe

macrumors G4
Jul 17, 2002
10,709
69
USA
simsaladimbamba said:
The codec you mean is called "H.264", an MPEG-4 codec, which is not suited for editing, but on highly powered computers it can be done, as H.264 does not store every frame, only keyframes, in between those keyframes the other frames get interpolated, thus frame precise editing is highly CPU intensive.
...
Click to expand...
Minor quibble. H.264 and similar compressed video formats do not interpolate frames between keyframes. One keyframe is recorded each second. Between keyframes, H.264 records the the differences between the last keyframe and the current frame. At playback, these difference data are used to mathematically reconstruct the frames between keyframes.
 
simsaladimbamba

simsaladimbamba

Guest
Nov 28, 2010
22,670
31
located
MisterMe said:
Minor quibble. H.264 and similar compressed video formats do not interpolate frames between keyframes. One keyframe is recorded each second. Between keyframes, H.264 records the the differences between the last keyframe and the current frame. At playback, these difference data are used to mathematically reconstruct the frames between keyframes.
Click to expand...

No problem. Interpolate might be wrong word then, but thanks for providing a more precise explanation.
 
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