This IS the Avid L2: Re: [Avid-L2] best editor for H264?

Friday, September 19, 2014

Re: [Avid-L2] best editor for H264?

I work with GoPro footage in FCPX quite often mixed with other camera AVCHD/H.264 footage in 1080p multicam clips. No transcoding. Just import (don't have to wait for import to finish), sync for multicam, and start editing. I can add GoPro lens correction, sometimes some scaling/positioning, source side color correction, audio sweetening… still no need to transcode.

When done the export is very fast. I used to transcode to prores proxy for multicam editing, but with my new MacPro I don't find any reason to anymore.

James

On Sep 19, 2014, at 5:33 AM, paulsulsky@comcast.net [Avid-L2] <Avid-L2@yahoogroups.com> wrote:

Hi Michael,

I recently did a test with Go Pro footage on AVID, FCPX, and Adobe on one video layer only. Adobe is the best. You can link to it immediately in the camera without copying it to a hard drive and it's off to the races. FCP X wanted to transcode it in the background, but you could stop the transcode and still work with the footage real time off the camera. Avid MC 8 can't handle the footage period no matter how short the clips are and this includes copying the files to a solid state hard drive.

Exporting:

I export H.264 footage from Premiere Pro. I created a template for it. I took a 100 minute AVCHD recording of a live event, dropped it on a Premiere Pro time line and exported it as H.264 for upload to youtube. It too 60 minutes for the encode on a Macbook Pro with a solid state drive, 16 GB of RAM and an AMD card with 2GB of video RAM.

An extra comment on Avid:

Media Composer 6 could AMA Go Pro footage directly off the camera. Three years ago I taught a group of students Final Cut 7 and Avid. The machine was a two year old, 24 iMAC with 3GB of RAM. They liked FCP much better. One asked why would you use Avid. I AMA'd a Go Pro camera and edited the footage live. I then showed how FCP had to import each file first. It was really impressive and he edited his Go Pro projects on the Avid. This is really embarrassing now since I am editing a documentary with one of my ex-students now. She has a lot of footage from sailboat mounted Go Pros. We can play the footage back from th e camera on everything from Quicktime to FCP X. It will not play on an avid. The video keeps freezing and and jumps forwards to catch up to the audio. Clip size doesn't seem to make a difference. Neither did copying the footage to the internal solid state drive (I had the Desktop Play Delay set to 28 frames for the latest test - apparently I didn't drag it all the way to 30 frames. - didn't matter.)

Hope this helps,

Paul

From: "Michael Brockington mbrock321@gmail.com [Avid-L2]" <Avid-L2@yahoogroups.com>
To: "Avid-L2" <Avid-L2@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Friday, September 19, 2014 4:10:21 AM
Subject: [Avid-L2] best editor for H264?

I need to do the following:

Take sets of 4 clips from gopros covering the same event. Sync them
from audio-only cues. Trim the head of each clip so they all start from
the same sync frame, and export the trimmed clips - preferably without
having to re-encode or transcode to a different format. Each set of
clips is at 48 or 60 fps. Some sets are 1920x1440, others 1920x1080.
I'd also like to add warps/pips to each set in the editor so I can
review all 4 at once (or multicam them.)

It doesn't seem like Avid is the best tool for the job. AMA performance
of H264 is still pretty bad with even 1 clip on the 24-core Westmere Mac
Pro I'm using. I don't think Avid can export AMA H264s same-as-source
after trimming, and certainly can't do it with odd raster sizes and
frame rates. Transcoding for something so simple seems like a waste of
time and space, and the non-standard rasters and frame rates will be a
pain there too.

Can Premiere or some other editor deal with this sort of task natively
and gracefully? What would folks recommend?

Thanks,
--Michael