How do you like to Transcode your HDSLR footage? FCP's Log and Transfer or Compressor?

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How do you like to Transcode your HDSLR footage? FCP's Log and Transfer or Compressor?

posted in Film / TV at 4:12pm Sunday, April 18, 2010

Happy the Clam

Now there are pro's and cons to doing each one.

With Log and Transfer you can use Final Cut Pro's log and transfer window to bring the footage into your project as a PRORES. Now this is easy and simple. You simply put your CF card into an external reader (it will not work with your camera). Final cut will automatically see the files and you can choose with your preferences what Prores you want to process the footage to. The Big draw back to this is you have to load your footage off and external Card, so when it comes to wanting to work offline or using the PRORES Proxy codec, it means you'll have to reload the source footage back onto the card to re-encode the footage to a higher res. Now if your project isn't very big and you have the hard drive space then you can just load all the footage in as a ProRes(HQ) and call it a day or maybe three. Since FCP only uses one processor to encode the footage, and most CF card readers still only use USB 2.0 this can take a very long time. Maybe one day FCP will use multiple cores to process information. Let's keep our fingers crossed.

With Compressor there are a few different ways to do it. One is to bring all the footage into compressor, make a setting for a format you want to work in and render it across all your cores or even multiple computers with Qmaster. The second method is to make a droplet where you can select all the footage you want and drag it onto the droplet and it will render to the droplet's settings, also using Qmaster. With Studio 3, there is also a way to create a watch folder. Method three is probably one of the best way's to deal with the footage since it gives you full control of your codec's and frame sizes. The only draw back is you have to know how to use compressor, and you can't just throw 300 clips into 1 batch. I've tried it, you'll become the pin wheel wizard in no time. So this just means you'll have to drag 20-30 clips at a time onto you droplet so compressor stay's happy.