Mike-the-cat
Captain
Flight distance : 21621841 ft
Singapore
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Flightgeist Posted at 2017-4-24 09:11
Mike (and others): for those of us with some decent computing power and wanting to shoot the highest quality without paying for the pro codecs, would you say that the quality difference between h264 and h265 is worth the transcoding time? Say, at the end of a day of shooting throwing all the h265 files into Adobe Media Encoder and doing an overnight render to ProRes 422 for editing? I've got a fully souped up 27" Retina iMac that has no problem editing real time with 4K h264 files from my Inspire 1, even with color correction added. About to upgrade to I2 and debating spending the $$ for ProRes Codec vs just shooting h264/h265. Thanks for your insight
The cost / value trade off would vary from person to person but if you care for quality, get the ProRes or CDNG license.
I have a MacPro with a 6Core Xeon processor and dual GPUs and it still doesn't playout h.265 at 4K smoothly Things won't get better until the next gen of Intel processors, Kaby Lake or later incorporate h.265 decoding into their innards. You can as you suggest, transcode everything up to ProRes but its from an 8bit 4:2:0 . source. I mean it works but you are down 2 bits from ProRes.
With the workflow you propose working with CDNG is workable and gives you far superior grading options.
Now this is not to say you cannot get marvellous footage on h.264 itself. shot under good light. It really depends on how fussy you are (or your clients) about little details, what you want to do in post and how much time you are willing to spend. If you just want cuts edits with minimal grading, stick with this and focus on flying and photography skills.
However, since I suspect you want to experiment with colouring and different looks, and If you keep your I2 for say two years, I'd say bite the bullet and get those licenses, you won't regret it. Especially since you have an I1 Raw already and are familiar with the Raw workflow (easier on the I2). |
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