Best way to convert to apple pro res 4444?

mpeg streamlclip, hands down.

Compressor.

Do you really need 444 for video coming from a DSLR?

He said don't ask. FCPX will also do a quick and fine job of transcoding to ProRes444

While it may take longer than MPEG Streamclip, it gives much better results, which may "warrant" ProRes 4444.

• 5DtoRGB - The original 5DtoRGB is still free!
• 5dtorgb-batch v1.5b - a batch process Terminal script

But as already mentioned, ProRes 4444 is overkill, especially since the source is 4:2:0.

PS: HandBrake does not offer the .mov container and ProRes codecs as output options.

4444 is going to create larger file sizes without gaining anything in return. That camera doesn't capture that much color data. 422 is all you need and that is even a bit of overkill.

More is not always better.

salacious said:

i know, hence why i said dont ask, its for a project and we have to show our understanding of how to work with 4444, in the end i used mpegstreamclip.

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At the risk of getting beat up on, maybe the project is actually about making a clip with an alpha channel? That's the only thing I use 4444 for, although I do know it has other features 422 doesn't have (but may be irrelevant to the source material in question).

but out of curiosity you say 422, what about 422hq?

Im a believer of preserving quality so what warrants the 422 favoured over other pro res codecs?

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422 HQ has more "headroom" than standard 422 and will retain more fine detail when transcoding from high-quality sources (like uncompressed 8/10-bit, RAW wavelet, etc.).

But when you're coming from a highly lossy H.264 codec (this is practically all DSLRs recording straight to card), you'd be hard pressed to see a visual difference between standard and HQ; you'll only end up with file sizes that are needlessly larger.

Most of the DSLR stuff I work with is encoded in standard 422 (mostly for workflow compliance with other editors that may still be on FCP 6), and it's still a bit overkill, considering that DSLR video is generally 4:2:0.

ProRes 4444 is the only option we use for R3D export in 4k format.
Can't see any other use for it for us here.

There's a plug-in by Canon for FCP 6 and 7 that does that upon import.

I don't know about FCP X.

If you're using Final Cut, then forget about MPEG StreamClip and Compressor. Those will take a lot longer. FCP will do it for you.

If you're using FCPX, it'll convert them in the background. It should ask you upon import if you want it to transcode, and you should choose a ProRes codec.

If you're using FCP7, go to file>media manager. From there you can transcode right in FCP, to whatever ProRes codec you want.

salacious said:

i know, hence why i said dont ask, its for a project and we have to show our understanding of how to work with 4444, in the end i used mpegstreamclip.

but out of curiosity you say 422, what about 422hq?

Im a believer of preserving quality so what warrants the 422 favoured over other pro res codecs?

Click to expand...

422 HQ is better than 422. I have noticed a distinct difference especially in hi res animation or motion graphics sequences. I shoot with Canon XF 100s and I use ProRes 422 HQ. RED? Yeah 4444 or even 4444 XQ now that FCPX offers it. However for your personal use you'll want to use 422 HQ, for the class just use Compressor to convert to 4444, easy as that.

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CaptainChunk said:

But when you're coming from a highly lossy H.264 codec (this is practically all DSLRs recording straight to card), you'd be hard pressed to see a visual difference between standard and HQ; you'll only end up with file sizes that are needlessly larger.

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One peculiar benefit of using 422 HQ over 422 is that in my experience, let's say you take a 422 export of a project and a 422 HQ export of a project, and you use Compressor to do a Best quality automatic multipass h.264 encode. The resulting files are the same size ex. 3.22GB and 3.22GB.. meaning the 422 HQ encode to h.264 is actually higher quality theoretically and as I said it is noticeably sharper with animated sequences. With 4:2:2 footage I haven't really noticed a big difference however a digital delivery company called for 422 HQ format when I dealt with them.

OneAnswer said:

Isn't one a codec and the other a file format?

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Correct.. Pro res.. in all its flavors is a codec.. wrapped in a quicktime file format..

All those others (avi, mp4, mkv, etc) are file formats (or wrappers) and can all be created with any number of codecs (h.264, mpeg4, cineform, etc)

Chad3eleven said:

Correct.. Pro res.. in all its flavors is a codec.. wrapped in a quicktime file format..

All those others (avi, mp4, mkv, etc) are file formats (or wrappers) and can all be created with any number of codecs (h.264, mpeg4, cineform, etc)

Click to expand...

Thanks, wasn't that sure. I am new to this, and that software the poster I quoted linked to looked a bit generic and a lot like other software, but I guess all those software titles have to look the same to get noticed nowadays.
Maybe that poster will be back one day to explain it a bit better.

Or it could be just advertisement, it is a big message board after all and only ten or so moderators.


EDIT

Just tried the software, and while being very ugly, it looks like a 1997 Windows application, and very intuitive, it does allow the MOV container, but not ProRes as output codec.
I checked with MPEG Streamclip, I can convert to ProRes with that.

I guess we should check such links more often.

And it has a wonderful and unnecessary installer, one can just extract the app package and go with that.