ProRes Vs. DV pal

rangrego said:

Hi,
I have 4 hours MiniDV cassette that I want to edit on my machine (FCP-6) .
my record mode on my camera when I filmed was DVCAM (16:9).
some people told me that I need to transcode first my material through compressor to ProRes format,
and than import to the timeline.
First I want to know why I need to resize my video files? isn't it slow the work ? can I work realtime? ProRes is bigger/heavy format than Dv Pal, isn't ??
and second, the quality between those formats is such different ?
finally I need to produce DVD.

Thank you a lot for you friendly help,
Ran.

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In most cases, it's pointless to transcode DV/DVCPRO/DVCAM material to ProRes. You won't gain anything from it but significantly larger files. The quality won't be any different. ProRes is present in FCP for two major reasons:

1. For quality on-line finishes of material that originated from higher bitrate formats (like Uncompressed 4:2:2).

2. As an intermediate codec for formats FCP can't work with natively (e.g. AVCHD, REDCODE, etc.).

Keep the material in its native format. When the project is finished, export a self-contained QT file using the same settings and drop that into Compressor and encode the video and audio for DVD - you should encode a .m2v video file and an .ac3 or .aiff audio file. You would then bring those into DVD Studio Pro for authoring the disc.