Memento Without it your EDL

Memento

Without it your EDL wont work, and you will not be able to do an online. If you can not online edit your film you will not be able to do the highest quality transitions, effects etc possible WITHIN the edit because you will be limited to the quality of the compressed codec your original timeline is exported at as your highest possible quality. With ProRes this is not a terrible situation as ProRes is a very good codec but its not the best situation possible the best situation being doing an online edit from uncompressed digitization of the master media. Uncompressed video in Final Cut can be seen by exporting from Final Cut using the None setting under compression in Export to Quicktime/using quicktime conversion. Uncompressed video is VERY memento Assuming you can not get your timecode to capture probably a possibility of HDV robust timecode isnt a hallmark of the format. then the next best thing you can do is keep ALL your effects and transitions as uncompressed video with handles, and keeping two versions of your timeline one that has all the effects and transitionsadded to the timeline at which point they will need to be Rendered into ProRes to play back on the timeline and one that has none of the effects shots added. This way, when you finish the film, you will be able to take the timeline without the effects or transitions on it, export that as uncompressed, then export all the separate effects and memento shots with handles as uncompressed, reasse, ble all that at a top notch post house and then do your grade to keep the maximum quality in the grade. Finally, you could simply edit everything in Prores HQ, export all your effects as prores HQ, and have a master final in prores HQ, then export an uncompressed version of the film to grade from there. However grading this becomes very difficult if you have lots off dissolves/transitions other than straight cuts. Maya, Ater Effects and Final Cut can all render to uncompressed Quicktime Video or Apple Animation Codec or TIFF Sequence all of which should suffice. Once you have your finished, graded, master the next step is to simply Encode the highest quality video version you have to M2V and that will then be your DVD master M2V for Authoring purposes, and the supplying a master they will use to upscale/transfer to film/BluRay. Hi Sareesh, this is going to be a bit of a long reply because what you are hoping to achieve is a LONG way from where you are at and as such there is a lot you need to understand. First thing is the importance of timecode in an OFFLINE/ONLINE workflow. You dont necessarily need to have recorded timecode on the day manually as timecode will have been recorded in your camera on your tapes. Even the time code on your tapes will be of a big advantage if you want to Online Edit at a later date in fact doing an Online edit without time code being correctly on the tapes is practically impossible, as it means manually making every single cut again. What I mean by an Online Edit is when you take all your original tapes, footage and media in your edit to a high end production house who then reassembles your entire film using an EDL Edit Decision List or your original Final Cut Project, but instead of ingesting media in a compressed form such as HDV or ProRess its ingested as uncompressed 10Bit Video. The advantage of doing this, is once your entire film has been reassembled in this format, any further alterations or changes such as colour grades, compositing and effects can be handled at the highest quality possible ensuring there will be no further degradation of footage in terms of recompressing already compressed video. This requires very powerful computers and ridiculous amounts of storage but it also requires that there is a way for the computer to automatically reassemble and restore all the origin footage from the tapes this is where numbering your tapes accurately and making sure you capture the timecode from your tapes is VITAL. Without it your EDL wont work, and you will not be able to do an online. If you can not online edit your film you will not be able to do the highest quality transitions, effects etc possible WITHIN the edit because you will be limited to the quality of the compressed codec your original timeline is exported at as your highest possible quality. With ProRes this is not a terrible situation as ProRes is a very good codec but its not the best situation possible the best situation being doing an online edit from uncompressed digitization of the master media. Uncompressed video in Final Cut can be seen by exporting from Final Cut using the None setting under compression in Export to Quicktime/using quicktime conversion. Uncompressed video is VERY large Assuming you can not get your timecode to capture probably a possibility of HDV robust timecode isnt a hallmark of the format. then the next best thing you can do is keep ALL your effects and transitions as uncompressed video with handles, and keeping two versions of your timeline one that has all the effects and transitionsadded to the timeline at which point they will need to be Rendered into ProRes to play back on the timeline and one that has none of the effects shots added. This way, when you finish the film, you will be able to take the timeline without the effects or transitions on it, export that as uncompressed, then export all the separate effects and transition shots with memento as uncompressed, reasse, ble all that at a top notch post house and then do your grade to keep the maximum quality in the grade. Finally, you could simply edit everything in Prores HQ, export all your effects as prores HQ, and have a master final in prores HQ, then export an uncompressed version of the film to grade from there. However grading this becomes very difficult if you have lots off dissolves/transitions other than straight cuts. Maya, Ater Effects and Final Cut can all render to uncompressed Quicktime Video or Apple Animation Codec or TIFF Sequence all of which should suffice. Once you have your finished, graded, master the next step is to simply Encode the highest quality video version you have to M2V and that will then be your DVD master M2V for Authoring purposes, and the supplying a master they will use to upscale/transfer to film/BluRay. Thank you for the fantastic answer. I did a bit of research myself over the last few days and heres a workflow I found. Please let me know if this makes any sense: Capture. m2t This will consume roughly 150-170GB of storage Edit native HDV only cuts.