@bubba

That's interesting... why wouldn't you do it during recording? Say a redundancy situation where you're still shooting to the card, and at the same time recording to 4:2:2 specifically for VFX/Keying work? Is there an issue with that?

I should test with a 4:2:2 external recorder just for this type of production. Would be another reason not to break 4K/5K out for extremely low budget situations... although if it's just green screen then it may be unnecessarily crippling.

@Swiss_Boy I puzzled over Vimeo exports a while before giving up and just enabling download of the original. In terms of streaming reliability, most of the time I'd rather watch YouTube 720p than Vimeo 1080p.

Mainconcept.

@TrackZillas
If you have a fast workstation, the Mainconcept renderer may be just as fast as the Mercury Engine. If not, go with Mercury.

I'm using Premiere Pro CS5, but exporting via Frameserver to MeGui for x264 encoding. So far I'm happier with the results from this workflow vs the built-in Premiere encoders. Have not tried the Mainconcept Plugin which you can purchase.

The 176Mbps GOP1 might not need transcoding to intermediate format. Just pure I-frames. But the MainConcept encoder sounds interesting.

@TrackZillas
I'm still testing and evaluating the MainConcept H.264 settings - particularly the adaptive quantization features. I'll can IM you a beta 1080p24 settings file to try out in the meantime.

Color Finesse's full-screen interface is indeed quite heavyweight. It runs fine on my Win7 workstation, though you'd expect it to with a six-core Intel i7, 12GB RAM, and an SSD drive used as a CS5.5 cache disk.

@LPowell Color Finesse is a beast use it sometimes on my mac, but the only thing is that it uses so much power that sometimes my computer freezes mind you I'm running on an I7-3.6ghz chip with 12gb of ram. Are you having the same experience?

@TrackZillas
Actually, it is the MainConcept plugin's seamless integration that enables me to transcode the footage to H.264 Hi10P as an Export from Premiere Pro, rather than doing it in a separate step beforehand. This allows me to Dynamic Link a clip in a Sequence to an After Effects Composition, which I can then grade using Color Finesse, and apply AE filters to it if desired. Back in Premiere, the footage is automatically replaced by the AE Composition, and I can Export the clip as a 10-bit H.264 file. I can then use the Replace Footage command to replace the original footage with the H.264 footage in the Premiere project.

While it is possible to simply leave the Dynamic Linked footage in Premiere without Exporting an H.264 version, I find that transcoding it makes it much easier to both manage the footage and preserve Premiere's responsiveness. Once I have a working set of color-graded H.264 footage, I can archive the original footage and make the H.264 files available on the server for editing in projects. This eliminates the chore and confusion of duplicating color-correction settings when reusing footage in multiple sequences.

@TrackZillas
The MainConcept Codec Suite 5.1 plugin for Premiere Pro CS5 provides both decoder and encoder components that are integrated into Premiere's Import and Export modules. When you drag a clip into Premiere, it detects its video format and uses the appropriate decoder from the ones installed in CS5. The decoder will not alter or transcode the clip, it will simply decode it to Premiere's internal workspace.

When you export a sequence from Premiere, you choose which encoder to use in the Export Settings dialog box. Each type of encoder provides its own individual interface for setting parameters. The MainConcept plugin's H.264 interface provides access to a much wider range of encoding parameters than any of CS5's bundled encoders. You can get a good idea of whether these features will be of value to you by studying the operator manual for the MainConcept Codec Suite 5.1:

http://downloads.mainconcept.com/CodecSuite5_en.zip

Thanks for this post, Matt. Very helpful and useful insight.

I use the staxrip h.264 encoder ui to encode my final stuff, using the 'placebo' render setting (highest quality encoding). Slow as heck to encode (I'm talking 1.5fps on an i7 @4.1GHz), but you can get the bitrate as low as 10mbps (sometimes lower) and it looks NO different from the HUGE .mts 85mbps files that come out of the GH2. Can upload some samples if anyone's interested.