Tips for editing in mixed formats in FCP?

[Duty]

Hi
Me and my friends has recently shot a musicvideo with different resolutions and framerates. We have 2k with 50-120fps, 3k with 50fps and 4k with 25fps. We thought that we could use the M proxies and when we were done with the editing we would reconnect them to the H or even F proxies.

When I made a test by putting the clips with our different resolutions and framerates on the same timeline it didnt work so well. We didnt get any slow-motion on the high-fps clips and it was awfully laggy even though I have a MacbookPro 2,53ghz from november 2008.

Does someone know any better workflow for our mixed format editing?

Another big problem we noticed is when we tried to convert to ProRes to edit that way instead it took almost 1 hour to encode 1 minute of Redmaterial!!
That's just insanely slow. Is there something we are doing wrong?

Thanks a lot for any help!

 

[JD Marlow]

Hi Duty,

Try running the conversion to ProRes using RedRushes with a low debayer setting -- perhaps 1/4 res or something similar -- you also don't need to go to 1080. Try 720, or even SD sizes if possible. Are you running the conversion on your MacBook Pro? How much footage did you shoot?

 

[Duty]

Hi Duty,

Try running the conversion to ProRes using RedRushes with a low debayer setting -- perhaps 1/4 res or something similar -- you also don't need to go to 1080. Try 720, or even SD sizes if possible. Are you running the conversion on your MacBook Pro? How much footage did you shoot?

Hi!
We really like to keep as high quality as possible. Does it take less time to convert to a smaller resolution?
We have 3 hours of material and we have 3 macbook pros that we are converting on. We tried a network cluster with Compressor over our three computers but it didnt go much faster.

 

[JD Marlow]

To my knowledge, what really takes the most time (and is the most processor intensive) is the Debayer level you are using and the amount of scaling work RedRushes (or any software) has to do to transcode your clip.

So theoretically you could transcode to 1080p @ 1/4 Debayer -- but not sure how high a quality that will be either. It's kind of a "you get what you pay for" scenario, in that you are paying with your time to get a higher quality transcode. A MacBook Pro really isn't the ideal machine to be using to transcode anyway.

 

[Duty]

ok. Do you think that transcoding to ProRes is the best way to go for my mixed formats? Or can I work with the proxies in a good way so that I can skip the time consuming transcoding?