30. July 2009
Some time has passed, meantime we have moved to Dubai and my HD is filling up with lots of Gigabyte of unprocessed raw footage shot by the 5DMkII. Just having read an interesting article in a Photography Magazine cT special 02/09 "Digitale Fotografie", I gave it a shot again and have worked out a new workflow. The whole trick is to take the "difficult" H.246 material packed in this .mov container and to convert it into a format (using only "I" frames) which is easier to handle. This in fact is common practice and not subject to loss (in theory at least I guess). This intermediate step can be done with the various SW options. I am using a freeware now called "MPEG streamclip". It uses Apple Quicktime in the background and it works like a charm. You can also convert several movies in a batch function. Really efficient.

I am also adjusting the brightness slightly with an increase of +5, Saturation and Contrast I reduce to 98%.

The new workflow:
1) Copy .mov from Camera to PC hardrive
2) Use Quicktime Pro to cut the mov. (This is optional however it makes it easier to handle later on)
3) Convert into AVI with MPEG Streamclip
- Apple Motion JPEG A
- Quality to 100
- 1920 x 1080 unscaled
- Make sure Interlaced scaling is not ticked.



4) Editing and Final Export into a 1920x1080 mpg via Studio Plus 12 (you need the Pro version for exporting HD)

I was close to buying an iMAC because I was not entirely happy with the performance of the previous solution I worked with. This is now working really well. Happy I read this article in this magazine :-)

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