5D video work flow

I recently shot a friend's wedding on my 5D. It has been a valuable exercise in terms of establishing a good workflow when using this camera.

It was a Chinese wedding meaning it was long and it was frantic! In the end 2.5 hours of rushes in HD1080p totaling almost 52GB of data.

The 5D records quicktime movies using H.264/MPEG-4 compression at 38 Megabits per second. You can work with these file directly in Final Cut Pro but playback is jerky and soon becomes infuriating. By the way I am using a Macbook Pro 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo with 4GB Ram.

The most common solution is to convert the files into Apple ProRes 422 using compressor which comes with Final Cut Studio. Thus maintaining HD resolution and working well in FCP. The only drawback is the ProRes files are about 3 times larger than the H.264 files. So you will need a decent amount of space to store them.

Once edited I now wanted to create a DVD for my friends. Having shot in HD naturally I wanted to give my friends the best quality video possible. At the moment you have the option of burning HD video to a Blue-ray disc or down-converting to SD video and burning a standard 4.7 DVD.

Since I don't own a Blue-ray burner nor do I think my friends own a Blue-ray player I have decided to down-convert to an SD DVD. I will also give them a copy of the HD video file to view on their PC.

I also came across this interesting post by Ken Stone about a possible alternative.

In Compressor i used the first DVD settings preset dragging the whole folder up and applying to my clip.

I created a simple DVD menu in DVD Studio Pro and changed the settings to SD 16:9. This needs to be done in the preferences and on each menu under display mode.

Again refer to Ken Stone's Setting up DVD Studio for 16:9.

Now I am in the final stages of creating my DVD. I will post an update once I have finished.