Working with BMD ProRes422 .mov in PrPro8.1

Question

Hello forum friends,
(So, this experience has been pretty awful... I've had problems with really all of my media since subscribing to CC - rolled back to previous versions, cleaned, uninstalled, stood on my head and drank water while whistling dixie, everything the forum can suggest, and still glitchy, hanging, dropouts, and other errors in the viewer. Slogging through is terrible, but at least I am not getting crashes. Performance in 8.1 with BMD media has been as bad as with Canon .MXF or the NewTek MPEG2 media I also see in my shop.)
Anyway, this morning I wrapped up a show shot on a BMD ATEM TVS and recorded to a BMD Hyperdeck studio in ProRes422.mov, and I need the advice of someone more experienced with this gear and the media it produces. I am editing in PrPro8.1 on a Win7 machine - even though i do own QT7pro, for whatever reason PrPro can't edit in ProRes422 natively (boo) so the auto settings on this timeline turn out to be "AVC Intra Class 100" and the "match settings" export comes out as a ".mxf". Can anyone with BMD experience tell me if this default workflow is in fact the best setting for this recorder working with PrPro?? Would I be better off choosing a different recorder format (e.g. DNxHD in a .mov or .mxf wrapper) or forcing the sequence to another setting?
I prefer to do my target encodes on a Mac in "Compressor" (I gave up on AME a while back) and I am excited about the possibility of native .mxf import in the apple video apps - I will test the PrPro .mxf on this platform in  just a bit, and will come back here to report.
Thanks!
Eric D - CoralVision

Answer 1

I am trying to figure out how to edit video content I exported from a VOB file that the audio is in AC3.
AC3 content is not editable in QT applications.
I have used tools like StreamClip to export the file into a QT MOV format, but there are no AC3 options.
MPEG Streamclip by default down-mixes 5.1 (3/2) AC3 down to stereo. (Other options include: Front Mix, Surround, L/R Ch., Center Ch., LS/RS Ch., and LFE ch. which can then be exported as stereo or mono.)
So I DEMUX the audio to AC3 and try to add that to iMovie 08 and still no luck.
As stated above, iMovie '08 does not support AC3 as a compression format. In addition, iMovie '08 cannot access third-party components so even if you have an AC3/A52 component installed, it will not work. Further, even if it did support AC3 compressed audio, iMovie '08 itself only supports stereo audio.
Looks like 08 does not support m2v format.
iMovie '08 will support M2V video content in an MOV file container if and only if all P- and B-frames have been converted to I-frames making the file equivalent to a Motion-JPEG video clip.
I have FCE will that help me?
Not Really.
What I want to do is I have a number of HD/SD media that all have 5.1 Surround and I am simply wanting to merge them together into one big clip, with maybe some fine tuning of the clip length nothing fancy, but I want to retain the AC3 5.1 Surround sound content.
In the end, all of the various possible work flows depend on how you plan to play the content. This, in turn, determines which work flow is best suited to your needs. Basically you can convert and then edit in QT editor applications or edit in MPEG Streamclip, (save,) and then convert for a final target use/device.