Tim Wilson: The Wisdom of the COW: Part 2: ProRes for HDV, with a splash of Color

Here's what Apple says about HDV and ProRes

You may have missed a 112-page document called "Final Cut Pro 6: Working with High Definition and Broadcast Formats." 112 pages! The only way to miss something that big is because they've chosen just about the best way possible to hide it: as a PDF on the disk. You can also find it online.

For those of you into reading manuals, it's worth checking out.

Except there's not a word, NOT ONE, about capturing HDV to ProRes, the most talked-about workflow on The COW! Since there's no index for the 112 page documents, you'll have to run the "Full Acrobat Search" so you can see all the occurrences of ProRes in one window: exactly 24 of them in 112 pagesl. In particular, here's the longest discussion of HDV and ProRes we could find, on page 14:

To improve rendering performance while editing, you can render segments of your native HDV or XDCAM HD sequences using the Apple ProRes 422 codec. Because Final Cut Pro supports mixed-format sequences, you can play back the entire sequence, including the Apple ProRes 422 codec render files, in real time.

Okay, sounds good. So what are the workflows you're going to show me?

• Capture Native HDV MPEG to use for capture, editing and rendering
• Capture, edit and render to the Apple Intermediate Codec
• Native MPEG capture and editing, but rendering to ProRes 422
  
  

Your collected wisdom reveals plenty of proponents for the first workflow, which we'll talk about next. There are also plenty of proponents for the third, which we'll also talk about.

But precisely zero for the second.

In fact, where there are 200+ posts about ProRes in one week, there are only 15 mentions of AIC or Apple Intermediate Codec in two weeks. And hardly positive! Hooban sums it up: I don't like it because batch capture doesn't work with AIC. It's just a straight capture. I've also heard mixed things about the quality of that codec. So that's likely not my best option. He's not alone in saying that, either.

So The COW's Collected Wisdom is that, whether planned or not, the Apple Intermediate Codec was a solid intermediate step until the development of ProRes.

Fortunately, you've helped each other fill in the gaps that the Broadcast Formats doc leaves out. So let us fill in the Collected Wisdom gaps for those of you who haven't read all 215 posts in 11 forums last week.

Note: all the posts you'll see here are edited for grammar and spelling, and most are edited for space. As with last time, we include poster's names where we can, but, because we're often summarizing across many posts, we can't include links.

Comments? Corrections? Questions? Post 'em in the COWmunications forum.