A ProRes workflow end-to-end

The Video Road by Karl Lee Soule

With the radical change going on right now in the world of Final Cut Pro, I’ve had some FCP7 users ask me about maintaining an end-to-end ProRes workflow in Premiere Pro. There are questions whether it’s even possible. Well, I’m here to show you it IS possible, and how to make it go.

What do I mean by an “end-to-end ProRes workflow”? This means ingesting ProRes clips, dropping them right to the timeline, rendering previews when necessary to a new ProRes file, and outputting back to a ProRes master. While Premiere Pro works great with a wide variety of native camera formats, there are times when this workflow is a good idea. For example, using an AJA KiPro for capture, shooting with the ARRI Alexa, or working with ProRes media from an FCP timeline.

This particular workflow does only work on a Mac system that has the ProRes encoder installed. There are a couple of ways to get this component, but unfortunately, they are not free. For most people using this workflow, you probably already have Final Cut Pro 6 or 7 installed, so you won’t have to worry. If you’re equipping a new Mac, you can also buy Motion 5 for under US$50 from the App Store. This will also get you the necessary codecs.

For Windows users, unfortunately, there is not a ProRes encoder component available. But that doesn’t mean you can’t use ProRes files. QuickTime for Windows does include the decoder. It just means that, if you render preview files in the timeline, you’ll need to use another codec. So, technically, it won’t be a “full” ProRes workflow, but you’ll still get great results. On the bright side, Windows users have more options for Nvidia cards, which is a worthwhile investment, since it ELIMINATES the need to render previews in most cases anyway. Also you won’t be able to output back to ProRes. Until a ProRes encoder is released for Windows, that’s sadly going to be the case.

What makes this possible is the flexibility of Premiere Pro to input and output in pretty much any format that the system has access to. Unfortunately, since Premiere doesn’t ship with ProRes encoding components, this’ll take a bit of time setting up. But, once it’s set up, using it is really easy. read more...