People playing darts at the Lark Tavern in Albany, NY. Thank you for your patience, random serious people :) This is my second video test with a Canon 5D Mark II, at a higher shutter speed this time, with the same Canon 50mm f/1.4. Once again, nothing interesting going on here, but an opportunity for me to describe my workflow in more details. Or lack thereof. Here are my first experiments taming the beast. Update May 1st, 2010: THIS IS IT guys, Adobe released the Premiere Pro CS5 Trial today, and they delivered! I just installed it a few minutes ago, and CS5 plays full-resolution original 5DMII files out-of-the-box, no proxies needed, and that was in software mode only. I can only imagine how fast hardware-acceleration will be with one of the supported NVidia graphics card. This is great news and absolutely worth an upgrade. Update November 12, 2009: Great news, Adobe's new playback engine, Mercury, looks fantastic and may just save us from those pesky proxies. Check this preview here: http://tv.adobe.com/watch/davtechtable/sneak-peek-at-the-new-adobe-mercury-playback-engine-technology/ Update January 01, 2009: Augment the "Create Proxy Files" section with a comparison between several codecs and several frame sizes. Update January 30, 2008: Add a "About previews and pre-rendering" section. Update January 29, 2008: I found out how to auto-scale low-res proxy files to the project's frame size, and updated this document accordingly. This fixes one major issue. The issue: -------------------- As I described in my first video test (http://www.vimeo.com/2624143), the amount of data captured by the 5D is hammering both my computers at home (see hardware specs at the end of this document). At 1920x1080p 30fps, the H.264 codec used by Canon seems to push about 39 Mbps of video down the pipe. Ugh. While I can *replay* the clips nicely from Quicktime or Windows Media Player, I'm not able to perform any native editing from Adobe Premiere CS4; the first few seconds play fine, but it's a complete halt soon after that, even in Draft mode. Basic tasks like trimming assets, tweaking ends points, adding and previewing transitions are out of my reach. While this could be blamed on the H.264 MainConcept codec used in Premiere (ffmpeg's x264 in WMP and Quicktime's H264 codec replay fine), and/or my specs, I'm doubtful I will be able to do any serious work on native 5D's video files at full-res anyway, short of buying a very expensive rig and/or a compatible H.264 hardware decoder card. One solution: -------------------- This is, however, not a new problem; people have been dealing with high resolution files in the past through clever use of proxy files and offline editing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offline_editing From what I understand, proxy files are alternate versions of your original clips, either re-encoded for faster access and/or resampled to a smaller, lower resolution frame size (preferably with the same aspect ratio). Editing, pre-viewing and draft rendering are performed using those proxies; once you are happy with the results, the final high-resolution movie is created by first replacing the proxies with the original full-res clips. Easy enough. H.264 is not a slow codec per se, but the bitrate in the full-res 5D files is really high, at about 38.6 Mbps, about the same as a Blu-Ray DVD, more than a HD DVD. I'm not going to re-encode 1920x1080p clips using a different codec at full-res; a faster decoder would only mean more (i.e. less compressed) data. Not only would I end up with a huge amount of video but I'm actually not even sure either my hard-disks or Premiere could sustain that much. Storage is cheap, but at 1920x1080 30fps, this is still a lot of image processing going on. Resizing the clips to a lower 640x360 frame size seemed the way to go in my situation, and I'll describe shortly how I created my proxies and switched between full-res and low-res. Now if that whole proxy switcheroo seems to make reasonable sense to me, why is it so tedious to set up in Adobe Premiere CS4? Granted, I'm new to Premiere, but from what I gather on Adobe's "About online and offline editing" help page, I'm not the only one to struggle: http://tinyurl.com/9jzdhk My workflow: -------------------- Here is quick overview of my workflow: 0) Create proxy files for your original 5D clips (I'll go over this in a separate section, let's just stick to the workflow). 1) Create a new Premiere project. The "New Sequence" video and audio settings should match the settings of your original assets, i.e. your native 5DMII files, 1920x1080p @ 30fps. Check my detailed "New Sequence: Canon 5DMII native settings" preset at the end of this document. 2) Drop a few native 5D clips in the project. Important: do *not* put them in the timeline. 3) Switch to offline editing. a) In the left panel, select all clips, right-click and select "Make Offline...". No deleting the originals! The full-res clips are now disconnected from your projec