Premiere Pro CS4 > CS6 - Raw Footage Codec Suggestions?

I'm about to start editing some footage on my Windows 7 machine at home using Premiere Pro CS6 (Creative Cloud) in the next few weeks, and in the meantime plan to prep my raw footage at the office with PP CS4. I don't want to pull the trigger on a subscription to Creative Cloud until I'm ready to start cutting. This being the case, I want to make sure I'm converting the approximately 30 minutes of uncompressed AVIs (1920x1080 @ 24p) to a format that will ensure good quality & compatibility while not requiring the bandwidth associated with full uncompressed footage.

My initial thought was to convert everything to h264 at around 32Mbps, but I'm wondering if something like Lagarith AVI or Avid DNxHD would be worth looking into. Also, is there any advantage of converting to AVCHD instead of regular h264 (although I can't find a way to do this in CS4 Media Encoder). My storage will be a plain vanilla 7200rpm SATA drive, but I'm not too worried about slightly less than real time performance since I won't be doing any kind of audio other than a music overlay track.

Thanks in advance for any input.
Mitch

Ann,

Thanks for the reply. In regards to choosing between Lagarith, DNxHD or Cineform do you have any thoughts about which ones would be most compatible and easy to manage with PP CS6? Also, will any of these codecs work in CS4?

-Mitch

I just installed the Cineform Studio converter and it looks like you cannot import uncompressed AVI for export (only mp4 and jpg). My source is currently uncompressed film scans, so in order to use Cineform I'd need to FIRST make a mp4 THEN export as Cineform file. Not really ideal since the goal was to avoid h264 compression in the first place :)

Hello

Are you using footage that originated from a go pro hero camera?

Matthew

Angelo,

Thanks for the info. Yes, I just discovered that myself here and was testing doing my intermediate transcoding in PP and AE (CS4). Seems to work fine. One thing I'm wondering if the exact specs on the different quality levels in the codec options (low, med, high, higher). Here are the data rates I'm getting for 1080p footage with no audio...

Low: ~64mbps
Med: ~83mbps
High: ~106mbps
Higher: ~108mbps

Wondering if there are any other difference besides bit rate (color space, etc)?


-Mitch

Using Cineform and really liking it so far. Nice codec...especially for free :)

-M

No, I didn't. I did some research here and elsewhere on web and Cineform just seemed like a better fit for my needs. I tried it first and it worked...so that was that :)

Yes, I downloaded it but haven't installed yet. I'm pretty familiar with the format since we often receive DNxHD QTs from clients at work (vfx studio) for edit reference and such. One thing I like about Cineform over DNxHD on a Windows platform is that you can still export from 64bit apps that don't support QT (since Apple still refuses to release a 64bit version of QT for Windows) such as 3ds Max and Eyeon Fusion.

One hiccup I just encountered with Cineform though is that when I try to export using the QT wrapper I get a "trail has expired" error. Not sure if this is normal. Maybe GoPro is only allowing avi saving in the "free" version of Cineform Studio codecs? Maybe it's the opposite on Mac? Detailed info about all this is sketchy at best on their website.

On a related note...is there a size limitation for DNxHD QTs in Windows? This could be a deal breaker.

-Mitch

Had to install the codecs manually.
Right Click Installer Package > Contents >(Extract the 'Archive.pax.gz') > Archive > Library >QuickTime > (Copy ALL)
then

Finder > Go > Go To Folder > (type: /System/Library/QuickTime and hit Enter) > (Paste All)

I do recommend converting those files to a more up to date and reliable codec (lagarith, cineform, pro res or avid's uncompressed formats should keep em high quality but massive file sizes. No sense in keeping with a codec that Adobe probably dropped form official support.
I normally recommend not installing codecs unless needed but you might want to try downloading the latest Cinepak Codec installer(from a trusted source of course).