Canon5Dtips Photography is more than words.
I don’t know how I missed this one but Lynda is offering a course for 5DMrkII owners on how to edit their clips with Final Cut Pro. The video only covers the basics but it is nice for someone who never touched FCP and wants to get his feet wet. I even managed to learn something!
The problem is that the tutor does not show how to use proxies or convert clips to another format. 5DMrkII files are encoded in H.264 which makes it impossible to edit them in real time without dropping frames.
While editing in H.264 might work, if you only have to do a quick video from various clips, it falls apart as soon as you have to do anything more serious. The preferred method is to use lower resolution proxies in a non compressed format then export the final cut as a sequence of TIF using the original H.264 clips. You then import this sequence in Affect Effects to apply all the required transitions, grading and effects. Yes, it is a bit “more” complicated but it has the advantages of giving you real time editing plus no lost of image quality.
I wonder if the next Macs to come out will be able to use H.264 decoding chips on video card to do all of this work in real time, making the use of these proxies obsolete.
