Color, ProRes and HDV
We're going to note again that this week, just as it was last week, the number 1 forum for HDV/ProRes questions was the Apple Final Cut Pro forum. Sound about right.
Number 2 was NOT the HDV forum, but the Apple Color forum.
Now, a number of the discussions were about whether Color handles HDV at all. Here's one thread we can point you to, called "Color will not work with HDV?!?"
Turns out that it can, but you get the idea. This is a very sore subject.
On a thread about codecs in Color, Floh points out that, Since when working with FCP->FT->FCP via XML you have to render back into the original codec (so when coming from DVCProHD720 you're rendering back into DVCProHD720 losing both the colorspace plus recompressing in terms of video resolution), in this case it would make sense to conform the timeline to ProRes in FCP before going to Color.
Several others repeat the same idea with HDV as well. Getting back and forth from Color with HDV is going to go better with ProRes.
No questions about the codec advantages of ProRes. No questions abut the ideal workflow. P_Worm just hasn't seen it work in practice: It appears that what I render from color is the same as I was working with in color, but that isn't the problem. Somehow, between FCP and Color, color does a 'slip' edit on all of my clips. This is so baffling to me.
P_Worm, meet chawla (aka Professor Charles Roberts) who, as he prone to do, puts it more directly. He renames the “which codec” thread to "have you actually tried this? It's WILDLY messed up"
Every single clip of every single HDV sequence I've passed to Color from an HDV sequence and then rendered out in ProRes and then sent back has been consistently out of sync with the original clip, by like 20 frames on average. When Color renders, it's flubbing which frames to send back somehow
Hmmm! You should indeed be sending whole sequences into Color, and not just clips. So what happens with the unrendered clips? The not rendered ones are fine on return (which makes sense seeing as how Color hasn't had its dirty little hands on them yet).
Wow. This sounds bad, chawla. Clips don't get out of sync all that often anymore, but when they do, it's often a timecode clash with 29.97. It ain't the the DF/NDF thing, I'm only working with 720P24 and rendering to same in ProRes which also ain't DF.
After his best efforts (and we're not kidding, he's a smart guy), chawla asks, Seriously, does anybody have this HDV>Color>ProRes workflow going?
Well, do you? We haven't heard anyone step up with the final answer
We heard some great suggestions, though. We hope that this summary of Michael Sandness's articulate, helpful and altogether sympathetic post doesn't give anyone the idea that it wasn't all those things, but he has a great bottom line: If you need to only touch a few shots, stay in FCP for correcting, save yourself some heartache, make your deadline and get some sleep!
He compassionately and sympathetically concludes: I totally dig this doesn't help now...but...I feel one of the best ideas behind ProRes is to digitize to it rather than HDV.
Capture HDV into ProRes? Where have I heard that before?
That's The COW's Collected Wisdom so far. For most projects, capture and edit native HDV, render in ProRes. Unless you plan to spend a lot of time in Color, in which case you should capture straight to ProRes.
We're sure you'll tell us if you figure something else out.
At least that's the Collected Wisdom of The COW so far. The changes are coming fast, especially as people are trying to actually hammer all this out, so stay tuned.
Again, please post any questions, corrections, comments or cookie recipes to the COWmunication Feedback forum!