> "How do you export ProRes?"

Legally? Buy a Mac with FCP X. The ProRes encoder SDK is only licensed for OS X.

If you want to play with the illegal, then the open source ffmpeg project has reversed engineered the ProRes codec which is against Apples EULA and therefore "of questionable legality" but a lot of people on Windows seem to be using it without loosing any sleep at night. AnotherGUI is a GUI for ffmpeg that has ProRes presets built in.

I haven't seen the ffmpeg ProRes solution work without problems yet and I've tried a couple of them. You have to ask yourself if you trust an open source project to reverse engineer it correctly or if you want "real" ProRes from a Mac.

BTW, I own a Mac so if this is a one shot deal Vic and you need a file encoded contact me and I'd be happy to encode it to ProRes for you.

~jr

JohnnyRoy makes some good points while at the same time pressure selling his scenario.

One of the real problems here for independents (perhaps other than for those with the type of hi-profile that Vic has..) is that there ought to be solutions stateside that exist quite reasonably in other hemispheres. What this boils down to is the concerted attempt by Apple to overtly pressure and control so much of what they see they can control in the continental US>.

If you are just trying to export a file for an FCP user, both of you should download the Avid DNxHD codec.

"both of you should download the Avid DNxHD codec."

+1
+1

Both DNxHD and Cineform can be used in place of the ProRes codec, both of them offer the same capabilities, quality and cross-platform compatibility. DNxHD is intended to be an open standard, but has remained effectively a proprietary Avid format. Nevertheless, DNxHD is completely free for both platforms and is obviously nowhere near as proprietary as Apple's ProRes codec. I really have a problem with many of the ways that Apple does business.

I have read there is also an XAVC/XDCAM add-on for Final Cut.

> Reply by: videoITguy "...while at the same time pressure selling his scenario."

I didn't realize that I had a "scenario to sell". Most post houses use Mac's with FCP and rely on ProRes as their interchange format. I have nothing to do with that. Most post houses also accept uncompressed QuickTime files. I've found one that accepts Sony MXF and that's the one that got our business for the PBS show we were editing. I have nothing to do with this and nothing to sell. This is just a fact of the industry.

> Posted by: John_Cline "I really have a problem with many of the ways that Apple does business."

I'm not sure that I get your point. ProRes is not free. You don't get it when you buy a Mac. You only get it when you buy Final Cut Pro. It's part of the product that you pay for. Why should they give their interchange codec away for free? Would you say the same thing about CineForm (before GoPro bought them)? Should they give their codec away for free? Apple didn't create an industry standard. The industry selected them as the standard. That doesn't mean they should give their product away for free.

Your problem should be is with the industry, not Apple. Go complain to the post houses for requiring a proprietary format and see how far you get. They will just laugh at you and tell you to buy a Mac. That's what they said to me when I complained. Don't shoot the messenger.

~jr

> Posted by: musicvid10 "both of you should download the Avid DNxHD codec."

Vic didn't say if it's for another editor or for a post house, so I don't know what his reason for requiring ProRes is, but I can tell you my personal experience with post houses. You don't get to tell the post houses what to accept. You don't get to tell them to "download the Avid DNxHD codec". They tell you what they accept. Some of them will even charge extra to convert what you have into ProRes because their in-house workflow requires ProRes.

One post house wanted to charge us $300 extra per show to convert our files to ProRes so that they could make HDCAM tapes for us (this was when PBS only accepted HDCAM tape). At 13 episodes per season, that would have cost us 13 x $300 = $3,900! For 1/4 that price you can buy a MacMini ($599) and FCP X ($299) and convert the files yourself. So if you need to continually deliver ProRes and you don't have a Mac, buying a Mac for rendering may be cheaper than dealing with the post houses extra charges. That's all I'm sayin'. For a one shot deal, you find a friend with a Mac, which is why I offered to convert the files for Vic. ;-)

~jr

"I'm not sure that I get your point. ProRes is not free."

There are a number of Apple's business practices with which I have a problem, not just ProRes. Most of the post houses with which I deal are Avid-based, in fact the few that did use Final Cut Pro have switched back to Avid. Obviously, your situation is different.

I don't think for a moment that Apple should give away the codec for free, but you can't buy it from Apple for the Windows platform for ANY amount of money. Yes, there is a way to encode ProRes on PCs, but it is questionable in the legal sense.

JR, mine was a quote from the post above mine; sorry it didn't look "quoty," I sent it from my tablet.
Post houses can be stubborn, I agree, but most should already be set up to work with DNxHD.

>Posted by JonnyRoy I'm not sure that I get your point. ProRes is not free.

I believe this Apple codec pack for Quicktime adds ProRes support. Apple only makes this codec pack available for Quicktime on the Mac.

http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1396

> Posted by: John_Cline "I don't think for a moment that Apple should give away the codec for free, but you can't buy it from Apple for the Windows platform for ANY amount of money. "

That's probably because Apple doesn't sell the ProRes codec alone. It's part of FCP, Motion, or Compressor and Apple doesn't have any video products for Windows that it could be part of.

> Posted by: musicvid10 "JR, mine was a quote from the post above mine; sorry it didn't look "quoty," I sent it from my tablet."

Oops. Sorry. I missed the "+1"... but yea... Post house are an arrogant bunch to deal with. Like I said we finally found one that would accept Sony MXF and that's the one we gave our business to (at the time I didn't have a Mac yet).

> Posted by: NormanPCN "I believe this Apple codec pack for Quicktime adds ProRes support. Apple only makes this codec pack available for Quicktime on the Mac."

Actually that will not install unless you have Final Cut Pro, Motion, or Compressor installed so it's not free for Mac users. It's an update for people with qualifying products and the installer checks. If you don't have a qualifying product installed you get this:



So Apple doesn't make ProRes available for everyone with QuickTime on the Mac.

This is no different than Matrox codecs that only install if you have their hardware installed on your PC. i.e., "you buy my product you get to use my codecs... you don't buy my product, you don't get to use my codecs". Lots of companies do this.

~jr

JR said: [I]"Your problem should be is with the industry, not Apple."[/I]

The industry does have bodies that maintains standards, one being SMPTE. Avid's DNxHD codec is a registered SMPTE standard ProRes is not.
My understanding is that Avid can charge a license fee for their DNxHD codec but they are required to charge the same fee for all users. It's now covered under:

SMPTE 2019-1-2008 VC-3 Picture Compression and Data Stream Format
SMPTE 2019-3-2008 VC-3 Type Data Stream Mapping Over SDTI
SMPTE 2019-4-2009 Mapping VC-3 Coding Units into the MXF Generic Container
RP (Recommended Practices) 2019-2-2009 VC-3 Decoder and Bitstream Conformance

according to Wikipedia.

Adobe have done much the same with CinemaDNG although AFAIK it's not a SMPTE Standard it is free for anyone to implement.

There's no reason why Apple couldn't have followed Avid or Adobe with ProRes. They didn't have to "give it away", they could have made it a SMPTE standard and licensed it to everyone.

Bob.

> [B]Posted by: farss[/b] "[i]There's no reason why Apple couldn't have followed Avid or Adobe with ProRes. They didn't have to "give it away", they could have made it a SMPTE standard and licensed it to everyone.[i]"

I can't argue with you there Bob. They certainly could have done that.

~jr

"Post house are an arrogant bunch to deal with. Like I said we finally found one that would accept Sony MXF and that's the one we gave our business to (at the time I didn't have a Mac yet)."

Most unenlightened indie post-house types sit around half the day looking for a warm home for their thumb, and still turn customers away because they didn't meet their "requirements."

Then there are the ones with the smart business model who are so busy they can't begin to get caught up. They are the same ones who say, "Yeah, we can do that" -- within reason, of course. Never say, " Hey, can you work with WMV?"

;?)

OK -
I'm shooting on a Canon C300 (and 5d mk3) and editing on Vegas using the AVI HQ1080 24p YUV coded and it works like a charm. Vegas reads the files right out off of the camera CF and is a dream to cut with.

But DG media { a well known distirbution and telephone numbering company}, and they only want ProRes for retitling.
I used StreamClip to send a H264 file and they accepted it but inferred the quality was not up to ProRes. My footage is gorgeous and I don't want to lose one "bit" of color and/or sharpness.

If a Mac mini will handle the job for $500 bucks, I will grudgingly buy one, but will I then have to add the cost of Final Cut? And what do you suppose I'll need in total to get these files out?

I guess I would send DNxHD or Cineform to a post house and have them convert to ProRes. Probably cheaper if you're not going to do this a lot.

You could send the lossless AVI if you have some gargantuan drives to send it on.

> Posted by: vicmilt "If a Mac mini will handle the job for $500 bucks, I will grudgingly buy one, but will I then have to add the cost of Final Cut? And what do you suppose I'll need in total to get these files out? "

Vic, The Mac mini for $599 gets you:

- 2.5GHz Intel Core i5 Dual Core (Turbo boost up to 3.1GHz)
- 4GB memory
- 500GB hard drive
- Intel HD Graphics 4000
- OS X Mavericks
- 4 x USB 3.0
- Firewire 800
- Thunderbolt
- HDMI
- SDXC Card slot
- Gigabit Eithernet
- 802.11n WiFi
- Bluetooth 4.0

That should be fine for rendering ProRes files and you could hook a RAID up the Thunderbolt port and have faster storage than on your current PC desktop. Then get Apple Compressor 4 which is only $50 and download the ProRes update and the whole thing will only cost $649.

Compressor is Apple's batch encoder which you would want to have anyway so you could just feed your rendered files into Compressor and it will batch output ProRes files for you.

Here is an article that explains how to use Apple Script to set up a "watch folder". That means you could have the Mac mini watch a folder on your LAN (like a Network Attached Storage (NAS) drive) and every time you place a file in it from your PC it will kick off Compressor and render the file to ProRes for you and place it back on the NAS. ;-)

Send Files to Compressor with a Watch Folder

~jr