Transferring, Viewing, Transcoding
First things first: if your computer has a firewire port, buy a firewire CF reader (assuming your camera shoots on CF cards). Firewire-based readers are far faster than their USB counterparts, and this simple purchase will save you a lot of time in offloading the sizable movie files. Once you’ve copied the files over to your external drive, you might discover that your computer can’t play back the files smoothly. These are high-resolution, highly compressed files — and while the compression does a good job of keeping file size down, it also means you need a sizable computer to decode them. While you may be able to playback the native files without any stuttering if you have a recent and/or expensive desktop — or if your camera uses an inferior MotionJPEG codec (as do all Nikon DSLRs to date) — if the files play more smoothly on your camera’s LCD than they do on your desktop, try downloading the latest version of VLC (PC and Mac), and follow these instructions to configure it for playback.
The h.264 files that Canon DSLRs shoot aren’t well suited for editing, what with their 4:2:0 chroma subsampling and processor-intensive, interframe codec (the same goes for the files spawned by Panasonic and Nikon DSLRs). You’ll want to transcode the clips into a format that will play smoothly and maintain quality during color correction. If you’re going to be editing in Final Cut Pro, download Canon’s EOS Movie Plugin-E1 for Final Cut Pro. The E1 plugin adds timecode to your footage, transcodes footage as quickly as possible, and brings the clips in using FCP’s native Log & Transfer function. On most reasonable Macs, the ProRes clips are laptop editable in real-time (with the FCP viewer zoomed to 50% or less at Medium quality, my four year-old laptop can edit the 1080p transcodes from an external USB 2.0 hard drive in real-time).
If you’re not editing in FCP, you can use MPEG Streamclip, a cross-platform freeware utility, to transcode footage. Note that Premiere Pro CS4 on a Mac, in my experience, is unable to adequately handle any flavor of Canon DSLR footage, so for Mac users I recommend Final Cut; on the PC, users report good experiences with Vegas, and the Windows version of Premiere Pro CS4 will also edit Cineform files. If you’re going with a PC-based NLE, Cineform Neo Scene is a good transcoding/editing plugin (note the software costs $129 (or $99 at B&H). Here are some Neo Scene workflow tips.
13 COMMENTS
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Good catch, Daniel; I always get the inter/intra thing wrong. The 4:2:0 isn’t what makes it an editing-unfriendly codec, though; my point was, it’s the interframe codec that makes native DSLR footage editing-unfriendly (although computers are getting better at it).
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> Oh I don’t doubt that you know that :). It’s just the way you write it it’s a bit unclear which property of the h264 encoding makes it a poor choice for editing. It could be interpreted that the chroma subsampling is just as relevant for this as the inter frame coding. Anyhow, minor details. Keep up the good work, I’m sure it will help and educate tons of people!
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Ryan
Great site very helpful. I am new to video after years of still photography. When you say that something will work with FCP, will it also work with Final Cut Express as well?
Cheers Ron
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Luke on 04.14.10 @ 3:37PM
Hi Ryan, thanks for an incredibly useful guide! I’ve just recently started getting into filming and editing/compositing, using a friend’s 5D. This may be more specific information than you’re wanting to include in the guide (and possibly somewhat off the topic of DLSR cinematography), but it might be a nice to include some brief comparisons of editing-friendly codecs. On my part, I find Apple Intermediate Codec works amazingly well in After Effects, giving excellent preview performance (although it’s mac-only which is annoying).
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Luke — strange. I used to have a section about ProRes in here but it seems to have gone missing. I’ll try to get it back in there!
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Hey, nice guide,
Maybe you can add that you can edit canons h264 files natively with premiere cs5. They have a new playbackengine, mercury and i can edit h264 on my core i7 notebook without converting.
greets
Marcus -
Eugene on 04.27.11 @ 11:40AM
yes you can edit h264 on CS5 with no problems but not color-grade with greater perfections; for that you need to trans-code to FREE Avid’s codec: DNxHD 10 bit, 4:2:2 or pay extra money for a bit faster codec Cineform Neo. if you have extra $100 go with Cineform if not then just get started with Avid’s DNxHD!
I personally don’t have Mac (ProRes) so for me it was a big deal to find other ways to manipulate h264 on a PC.
here is a link to convert to DNxHD: http://eugenia.queru.com/images2/avid5d.pnghope it will be helpful for those who does not have Mac and does all work on the PC only.
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Eugene on 04.27.11 @ 11:55AM
here is more information: http://www.cinema5d.com/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=24284
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Raphael Ramirez on 09.18.11 @ 4:53AM
Ryan, do you happen to know how to edit a footage from the D90 using Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 I have been trying to research about it but I cannot seem to make things work as it should be. There is a presence of cropping in my footage and I do not know how to resolve this. Please help!
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William Clark on 12.8.12 @ 6:08PM
Hey Ryan, does it damage the coding of a SD or CF card when you copy files to the computer or other devices rather than moving them? Also does it damage the cards’ coding (binary) if you delete pictures/videos from the DSLR itself?
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- Does 5DtoRGB Yield the Absolute Best Quality DSLR Footage? - NoFilmSchool on 09.3.10 @ 4:59PM
Nice overview! One small piece of nitpicking: H264 is an interframe code, not an intraframe codec (it does not store every picture on it’s own). Also, the fact that the 5D records in 4:2:0 is not in itself an editing-unfriendly choice – it is just bad for greenscreening work or heavy colour grading. It might be worth a paragraph to explain to folks who are new to this that converting to a 4:2:2 or 4:4:4 codec will not make the material any better – chroma information that was never recorded can never be retrieved again…