We got handed a project to do.  Majority already captured on a 6TB  RAID (Firewire Raid).  This footage consists of:

1) Uncompressed 8-bit PAL (4:3) (45% of the footage)

2) XDCAM 1080p PAL (full raster 16:9) (about 35% of the footage)

3) PAL DV 720×576 (Anamorphic and 4:3) (about 15% of the footage)

4) NTSC DV 720×480 (Anamorphic and 4:3) (about 5% of the footage)

And…just for the fun of it…

5) Canon 5D Mark II 1920×1080 30p (30fps!) H.264 files (full raster 16:9) (less than 1% of the footage)

Currently converting the DV/NTSC to PAL with Compressor (quite time consuming).  Already converted the Canon 5D footage to ProRes SD PAL Anamorphic (quite time consuming).

When editing started, it was decided to work with an XDCAM 1080i sequence.  This cause headaches NO END.  Crashing 4-5 times a day, slow timeline response…for days and days.  NO doubt this was do to the fact that we are taking formats with individual frames and dropping them into an intra-frame, Long GOP format sequence.  Just painful.

So we changed things.  I made a new sequence…ProRes 422 PAL, and copy-and-pasted the cut from the XDCAM sequence into this.  Yes, we needed to render a few things, but we had GREEN and light GREEN render bars, meaning that we could play it fine without stuttering or dropping frames.  And you know what?  We haven’t crashed since.

Now to figure out what to do with the 4:3 and 16:9 issue.  Delivering a 16:9 master.

Got this a month ago with a one month deadline.  Think we might miss that.  Can really go for that Avid 4.0 software on this, BUT…it was already captured in FCP before it was handed over.

Fun times.