Loss of video quality transcoding to ProRes

AVCHD is a very compressed and lossy format. Original footage shot in AVCHD will mostly look good, but the trouble begins when you start recompressing the footage. Recompression happens whenever you convert the footage to another format, or whenever you use the footage in an editing environment and you have to render your video.

When you edit AVCHD natively every time you add an effect, title or whatsoever you will lose quality and this will get worse the more generations you make from your original footage. That's why effects, titles etc. are always rendered to ProRes 422 (or higher) in FCP10. Because ProRes withstands multiple re-encoding much better than AVCHD.

When you first convert your AVCHD to ProRes you will get a first generation loss. But the advantage of ProRes is that it is a transparent format, i.e. once your video is in the ProRes format it will not further degrade even after multiple re-encoding. ProRes LT runs at 82 Mbps but that does not mean anything. The LT codec is much more lossy than ProRes 422 and 422 HQ, which means once again that it will not withstand multiple generations. That's why the best workflow is to convert any lossy format to a transparent format such as ProRes 422 and up. You will always lose a tiny bit of sharpness during the first conversion, but from there on you will be safe even when you use the ProRes footage in complex projects with multiple filter stacks.

Best wishes,

Ronny

Thanks so much Ronny, once again your response was an amazing help for me. It really answered all my doubts. The thing is I was swinging between Premiere and FCP because of the native Import in Premiere. But the Premiere editing flow on my machine (MBP 2011 i5 8GB) is just not as smooth as with FCP.
But if I understood you well, in both editing systems I will have a quality loss anyway (titles, effects, color correction, neat video, rendering etc). With FCP you loose it in the first conversion (ProRes) and thats it - with Premiere (Native) you will loose it in the end when you will do further processing with the footage. So I think I will stick with FCP ProRes 422 for the documentary project I will start to edit now. Please let me know if I it makes sense what I am saying. Cheers
P.S. I use quiete basic editing tools anyway with my documentary or narrative stuff - a few disolves, titles, neat video, etc, what do you think, is FCPX "ready" for use, or should I still stick with FCP7?

You have understood it correctly. If you consider video quality as your primary target native editing only makes sense when you work with very high quality formats from the start. For lossy formats such as AVCHD, HDV and the likes the whole "native editing" talk is a scam. When you edit a lossy format natively, every time you add a filter (color correction or anything else) your original footage will get re-compressed to the lossy codec introducing further artifacts and softening, and your beautiful video will degrade very quickly.

We have seen this many years ago when DV became a popular shooting format. FCP could handle DV natively, but as soon as you started adding stacks of filters onto a DV timeline you could clearly see the footage degrade. Because DV is a lossy codec. That's why after a certain time we always converted DV to a higher format prior to editing. The same is happening now. The popular shooting formats (good old HDV, AVCHD, EX, AVVCAM and the likes) really can deliver high quality video at moderate bitrates from the camera, but the footage quickly degrades in the editing process. That's why it is still good practice to get out of such a format as fast as you can. Converting it to a higher quality format prior to editing is one possibility, editing natively but rendering it to a higher quality format is another possibility. Both FCP and FCP10 are perfect for this.

Wether you should go for FCP10 or stay with FCP for the time being really depends on you. If you can take the time to carefully learn FCP10 (and this may take a couple of weeks of intensive work) you will see that even in its current 1.03 version it offers new workflows and features that you cannot find in any other current NLE. Its speed is unrivaled at this moment and once you get to understand how this app really works you will only reluctantly go back to a classic editing environment.

But if you don't have the time to learn it in depth before using it on a real project I think it is better to stay with FCP7 or any other classic NLE until you can really learn this new way of editing. In the past year I have cut many different projects on FCP10 among which a couple of feature-length television docs. I really have started liking it very, very much and we will use it in the upcoming Olympic Games to deliver three broadcast programs each day for our national television. Just like any other software it still has some bugs (even Photoshop still has bugs after all these years) but if you know where they are you can easily get around most of them. The only way of finding out if FCP10 fits your specific workflow is to start learning it.

Best wishes,

Ronny

Hi Ronny,
I took your very helpful inspirations and tried out FCPX yesterday. Very quickly, I was able to play around and I like it a lot. It works very smoothly and easy on my MBP, even using native avchd footage directly imported through cam-import. I decided to give it a try with this new doc-project, which gives me a bit of flexibility to try out things. I imagine also with FCPX its better to use the ProRes transcoding (?), considering your advice, even if native works so easy, much easier than on Premiere. Already found a point where you need a workaround, like audio only crossdissolve which is a very common tool. I wonder if Apple will give us back that important simple button like in FCP7. In the meantime I will try out Alex Gollners plugin for sound only cds. I also love that everything is much more visual, so the footage and images are much more present, important for a creative workflow. Cheers

Hi Ronny,
I restarted my doc-project, learning the event library, which looks like a great feature. I can understand now, that FCPX is moving into a much more modern way to organize and edit.
While importing, I was confused about something: you were saying in my last post to leave "Optimiza media" un-checked, so FCPX would decide whether to transcode or not, if my MBP was strong enough to deal with native footage. On my research about "Importing settings" I dropped into Ken Stones explanations (http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/fcp_x_media_management_stone.html) where he says, to leave it checked, and then the system would decide whether to transcode or not. I tried it out, and when I left this button checked, FCPX did transcode automatically my AVCHD footage to ProRes. But I had the impression before, that my MBP could deal with native clips easily without transcoding. Maybe I was wrong? And please let me know Un-ckecked or checked?
The other thing was if I left the other Import settings checked (like stabilization, color,, audio defects etc), it would take ages to import the footage. I thought it was easier to first import the footage as it is, and then eventually correct some stuff if necessary.
Thanks again for your help

Hi Ronny,

in the meantime another issue came up, which I saw in the apple community, is also quite a diffuse problem. After a short while all the 8GB RAM is literally eaten up, filled up with inactive memory and the performance of the machine slows down. You have to restart the computer in order to have a normal performance again. There are doubts if it is a Lion problem or not, because other people have it with Safari. Is it possible to control for FCPX?

Thanks a lot for your help

Thanks a lot Ronny, for your very helpful infos. I am really getting into FCPX and understand more and more its philosophy and enjoy it. The more I know it the more I think that this will be the way to go for the next years.

Creating the event library for my doc-project with the keyword collection was big fun. So quick and also so much what you really want. As I had converted the whole footage previously into ProRes, thinking of editing with FCP7, I reimported it now into FCPX as it was, no copy into the event folder.

The little sound only plugin works fine eventhough I understood that audio dissolves can be done manually and more acurately if you don't have to create a lots.

I tried a small native-editing test today with the avchd footage, it works so amazingly smooth with my 2011 MBP i5 8GB RAM, its a joy. I will try it out properly for my next project.

Yes, I thought the RAM thing was a bug, I talked to a senior member at Apple support, he said he hadn't heard about it. Well, whatever, so many people have this problem, incredible, everybody has his way to live with it (the "purge" command in terminal is somehow not really healthy for the Mac, I was told). But I hope they will have an update soon to fix that thing. Can seriously trouble your workflow.

Looking forward to start to edit, very excited, thanks to your great help
Cheers

Hi game-b

The question is: what is a bug? In theory a bug is a problem in the source code or the design of the application. This RAM issue has nothing to do with the application itself, only with the way your OS and the available memory interact with it. So in theory this is no bug.

Apparently 8GB has become the new minimum spec for working professionally with 64-bit editing applications. I started using FCP10 on an 8 core Mac Pro with 6GB RAM and it worked quite well until I started editing a quite complex long form program with tons of 1080p clips. I had to quit and relaunch every hour or so to be able to continue my work. Although this procedure only takes 20 seconds it is frustrating having to do this. Soon I discovered that RAM was the issue and I moved the project to another machine with 16 GB. All my problems were gone in a snap.

Just one more remark: when yo experience RAM issues also make sure to check that you don't have any background processes running, and turn off background rendering. The beauty of FCP10 is that on any decent machine your video will playback smoothly even with the render bars. Many of us hardly ever render anymore, unless when working with very complex compositions. In these cases it is better to manually render only the comps you want to view.

Happy editing!

Best wishes,

Ronny

Hi Ronny,

Just an update. I finally got my 16GB RAM ($70) shipped over to Costa Rica, where I am editing/shooting a documentary. My Macbook Pro 13 i5 early 2011 works really amazingly fluent with FCPX now. The "eating up" of the RAM (LION 10.7 Problem?) stopped totally. Inactive RAM is now always very low (Activity Monitor) having enough headroom to do any operations. Thanks again for your great assistance. I badly recommend upgrade your MBP to 16GB for anybody, as there were a lot of complains in the Mac Community about it, using several other applications.

Thank you for this information. I a m happy everything works as expected for you now. The additional RAM surely will have helped and it's a good advice for anyone who wants to work with 64 bit applications.

Best wishes,

Ronny

Hi Ronny,

Thanks for your reply. For now, I will try to live with it, as it should be difficult to put another 8GB RAM on my MBP 13 to have a total of 16GB? And I hope Apple will be able to fix this problem, as you said they are working on it. I think, it must be something with the OS, as people have the same issue with Safari, I had it also using Premiere (when I was trying to deal with native footage on the 5.5 version). The other strange thing I read, was that people start to have this problem from the moment on they upgraded from Snow Leopard to Lion. I was directly on Lion and I had it ever since.

Today I will start editing and let you know how it goes.
Have a nice day
Cheers

P.S. Surprisingly, it is possible! MacbookPros from 2011 on, can recognize 16gb (around 100$), so I might try it out