More Editing With Canon 5D Mark II
We shot 3 days with the Canon 5D last week. It looks awesome. I highly recommend it. Here was our workflow:
1. Record separate audio at 48048, stamped at 48000. This is possible with some audio recorders even if you’ve never noticed it before. Check your manual.
2. Copy contents of CF card to hard drive.
3. Convert h.264 QTs to ProRes HQ QTs using Compressor.
4. Use Cinema Tools to batch conform QTs from 30 fps to 29.97
5. Sync in FCP.
6. Edit!
I sorta stumbled upon something that seems to be too good to be true in FCP5 the other day.
It normally wouldn’t allow me to do any h264 editing of 5d footage that requires any rendering at all. I’d just get an error message.
Then, I made a multiclip sequence by right-clicking on a the footage…..and, bam, I was now able to do all my editing, including rendering cross-fades and effects and have since rendered out finished projects.
Is there something I’m missing?
I don’t normally use multiclip sequences so……is this okay? It seems okay.
The underlying process of editing interframe compressed codecs like H.264 is computationally difficult. You may have found a way of getting around the limitations in the software that were put there for your benefit. I’d say you should do that at your own risk. It might work fine for a short-form project, but for any project longer than a couple minutes the time you save by not transcoding to a good editing codec is never worth the trouble of editing H.264 video.