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Best format to compress raw T2i footage to for editing?

fuzzybabybunny

fuzzybabybunny

Moderator<br>Digital & Video Cameras
Moderator
My videographers shoot with the Canon T2i which shoots 1080p H.264 Format .MOV @ about 330MB/min

My problem is that I need to deliver a final video as quickly as possible. My videographer shoots maybe 30-40 1080p 10-second clips that will eventually be used to create a 3-5 minute video. But after a long day of shooting the last thing we can do is stay up all night to cut and encode. She can't do it during the next day because she's out shooting again.

So, I want to outsource the video editing. We simply cannot handle uploading 4GB of footage a day, and downloading 4GB of footage a day for the processor. The final 3-5min 1080p movie exported in YouTube bitrates will only be 200-300MB anyway.

1. What format and bitrate should I have the videographer convert the T2i video into so that the size becomes more manageable and still retain good quality and still be easy to edit and work with in Premiere?

2. My goal is to have those 30-40 clips be a grand total of 300-400MB. The final movie being 200-300MB.
 
1. And here's what I don't get.

The T2i shoots at 330MB/min. Just 3 minute's worth of video clips could be 1GB.

Yet, after all the clips are put together, titles are added, an audio track is added, etc. the resultant 3 minute video is only 250MB. And the quality is fine.

1GB for 3min of original clips vs 250MB for the final 3 minute movie.

What gives? Why can't I just get 250MB for 3min of original clips, and then come out with a 250MB finished movie?

Currently the final format is:

.mp4
H.264
1080p
29.97fps
VBR 1-Pass Target: 12, Max: 17 mbps

Can't I just have my videographer convert all the clips to these specs which will result in a 4x size decrease, send over the clips, and then have the processor do his/her thing?

2. Proxy Media: Is fascinating. So they send me super highly compressed footage (with the exact same filenames as the original), and we have our processor cut and do everything, then we send over the project file.

BUT: what if there's processing that has to be done on the original media? We run some of our clips through Mercalli camera stabilizer. We cut, then run Mercalli on the clips, then add the transitions.

3. But at the end of the day it's still too much work for my videographer to process *anything*. She shoots all day, and then she's tired, and then she repeats. I don't want to work her to the bone. Short of having her hire her own in-house assistant (literally in house, processing off of her hard drive) just to do the processing... what else can I do? Plus having local processors brings up huge issues with consistent quality.

In the long run, I want to have a consistent video product throughout the nation. I don't think I can easily do that with 50 different individual photo processors working locally in whatever region the videographers are shooting. I'd much rather have a central processing unit that all the videographers send their files to. It's much easier to control quality and much easier to synchronize any changes and improvements that we roll out in the future.
 
The Canon shoots 45MB/s (if the info I found online was accurate) and you are encoding down to a variable bitrate with a target of 12 and max of 17. So 26% to 37% of original size. So that is why your source video is so much larger than your final product.

It depends on how much post processing you do, but its generally not a good idea to throw out all of that data and then edit. But if your editing is really as simple as cutting, add titles, music and done, then it probably wouldn't hurt you to convert them down before editing. Or you could find a happy medium and convert it to around 22 MB/s so you get a smaller file but aren't completely compressing it down.

Like you said, the proxy method would work fine until you need to run it through a 3rd party product before taking it into Premiere.
 
sswingle said:
The Canon shoots 45MB/s (if the info I found online was accurate) and you are encoding down to a variable bitrate with a target of 12 and max of 17. So 26% to 37% of original size. So that is why your source video is so much larger than your final product.

It depends on how much post processing you do, but its generally not a good idea to throw out all of that data and then edit. But if your editing is really as simple as cutting, add titles, music and done, then it probably wouldn't hurt you to convert them down before editing. Or you could find a happy medium and convert it to around 22 MB/s so you get a smaller file but aren't completely compressing it down.

Like you said, the proxy method would work fine until you need to run it through a 3rd party product before taking it into Premiere.
Click to expand...

Thanks!

Is there any software that you recommend that can take a batch of T2i .MOV video clips and just convert all of them at once to 22 bitrate h.264 mp4 for sending to the processor?
 
sswingle said:
The Canon shoots 45MB/s (if the info I found online was accurate) and you are encoding down to a variable bitrate with a target of 12 and max of 17. So 26% to 37% of original size. So that is why your source video is so much larger than your final product.
Click to expand...

FYI, the T2i does shoot at roughly 330MB/min. I just checked. I have a bunch of 1080p video files totalling 11:31 (11.5min) and the total file size was 3.68GB....

When I ran it through Media Encoder the file size went down to 948MB at:

.mp4
H.264
1080p
29.97fps
VBR 1-Pass Target: 12, Max: 17 mbps
 
sswingle said:
The Canon shoots 45MB/s.
Click to expand...

No, it shoots at around 45Mbps. There's a big difference between Megabytes and Megabits. 45MBps would be in DVCPro HD territory.

Regardless, any of the tools you mentioned (Adobe Encoder or Compressor) will do exactly what you want. Create an encoding template, drop them in and output them each night. Should be fairly easy to do.
 
Using MagicLantern, which QScale should I pick (-16 to +16) to best match YouTube's VBR 1-Pass Target: 12, Max: 17 mbps?
 
fuzzybabybunny said:
Using MagicLantern, which QScale should I pick (-16 to +16) to best match YouTube's VBR 1-Pass Target: 12, Max: 17 mbps?
Click to expand...

Not sure about QScale (VBR), but w/ CBR @ 0.1x, it does ~6500kbit/s w/ peaks up to ~40000kbit/s.
Regular CBR 1.0x does ~48000kbit/s w/ peaks up to ~90000kbit/s.
I downloaded a youtube 1080p video and its around ~5500kbit/s w/ peaks up to ~15000kbit/s
 
AkumaX said:
Not sure about QScale (VBR), but w/ CBR @ 0.1x, it does ~6500kbit/s w/ peaks up to ~40000kbit/s.
Regular CBR 1.0x does ~48000kbit/s w/ peaks up to ~90000kbit/s.
I downloaded a youtube 1080p video and its around ~5500kbit/s w/ peaks up to ~15000kbit/s
Click to expand...

Interesting. I guess I have the wrong idea of CBR. I figured that CBR is constant with no variance and no peaks.

Hmmmm... I always thought that YouTube did 12mbps average and 17mbps peak.

So I was going to be on the safe side and go with CBR 0.4x?

The whole scaling doesn't make sense. 1x is 48mbps, so 0.1x should be 4.8mbps. Instead it's 6.5mbps...
 
I'm 99% sure YouTube recompresses all videos. It doesn't matter if you match their bitrate, it will be recompressed. Even if you upload a lower bitrate, YT will recompress. That's why you should upload as high quality as possible. The same goes for uploading photos to Facebook.
 
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