•postbrooklyn•

After running a multicam edit with 5 cameras of HD footage compressed to anamorphic SD ProRes HQ files, I’ve definitely gotten my head around the “not all codecs are for all things” idea. While this worked fine, it did limit the amount of real-time playback that the system (a G5 Dual 2.7Ghz) could actually handle. The MacPro seems to handle it better, but it still seems like overkill when you’re working in offline. Perhaps if we were also going to finish it in this resolution, it might make more sense. I think ProRes (and the specs I’ve been reading) make it a great intermediate codec, but not so much for a source codec — the processor load appears to be too great to take advantage of it and the other features of FCP. I will say, though, that for a compressed codec, it does look quite good. The footage would be difficult to spot versus uncompressed footage.

postbrooklyn is proud to announce that we’ll be providing the offline and HD online services for “Good Night with the Sleep Doctor Michael Breus” which will be airing on PBS stations this winter. The show just wrapped this weekend as a five camera HD shoot. We’ve already begun digitizing, using the latest FCS 2 and doing an anamorphic SD downconvert digitize into ProRes files. Those files will serve for the multicamera offline and then will lead to an online file format of DVCPro HD. Why not uncompressed HD? Well, PBS doesn’t accept delivery of these programs in HD, actually, so the added resolution would be lost upon them. Since the online will occur on a G5, though, the ProRes file format at HD resolution doesn’t appear to be qualified for use, so that option might be preferable (we’re going to experiment… stay tuned!). Uncompressed HD would make some sense (and might be the way we end up going), but the quality differential between the two formats upon a hardware downconvert appears to be relatively negligible. More experimentation will be required. There are a number of concerns with creating an HD master, chiefly, HD closed-captioning is difficult to accomplish for our budget (and pointless, considering the final delivery format), but moreover some of the shots may require a slight reposition to frame up properly. Things looked great in 16×9 sometimes, but seemed on the edge of the line when cropped to 4×3. Never looks great when you online that in SD, though, and then try to do a reposition. I haven’t had good success with creating the HD version, then creating a SD safe version in FC — it usually requires a lot of rendering, and when you’re dealing with 90 minutes of final product… a lot of disk space and bandwidth, too.

More as events warrant, of course…