So I had to do it, with my tail between my legs, I broke down and had to convert my native Canon 5D Mark II footage. This is not something that I wanted to do, but something that I had to do. As a photographer, I work at the highest resolution, bit depth and never worry about the number of layers in project, because I do not want to compromise my work for speed or convenience.

This is something you can do as photographer, but not something you can get away with as a video editor. You computer is rendered to a useless piece of metal when you are editing video, all of it’s weaknesses and flaws show up and you feel empty as you watch yet another progress bar crawl across the screen.

I have two Mac Pro systems that I had been editing the footage in Final Cut Pro and both where chocking on the native H.264 encoded footage. Even opening the project was taking several minutes and rendering effects or transitions would have to be done when I had time to take a break.

There was also the issue of using PluralEyes to sync up my different camera footage and my separate audio files taking far too long to complete. All the demos of the software showed me that I was doing something wrong, as it was taking them seconds and it was taking me minutes.

I would love to tell you that I have found a secret sauce for my problem, that you can punch in settings into Final Cut Pro and you get perfect looking footage, but this issue seems to be of great debate on every forum. However, there is a silver lining to this debate, and that is my tests have returned good to great results.

On the footage that I have shot, I have settled on converting my 5D Mark II footage to the Apple ProRes422 codec using the Batch Convert in Final Cut Pro. I have read about people also using ProRes422HQ and the new ProRess422LT found in the newest version of Final Cut Pro. I didn’t go with the HQ version of ProRes because I have tried it in the past and found the increase system requirements didn’t produces a quality that justified the strains on my system. And since I haven’t made the upgrade to the latest version I haven’t had a chance to try out the LT version of ProRes.

Once I have my footage converted, my computer behaves like it did when I was editing DV or HDV footage. Renders, exporting and saving happen in a normal time span and PluralEyes runs like you see on those video tutorials.

Converting footage is like taking prescription drugs, there are bound to be side effects to cure your problem, in this case there are two. No matter what flavor of ProRes or other type of codec you settle on, or program that you use, there is a wait for the converting to finish. In some cases my footage from a days worth of shooting would take several hours. To compensate for this, I did my converting while I was sleeping so it is done by breakfast.

The second side effect is that the converted files are much larger than the originals. For example, a 410MB file jumped to 1.4GB in size. I have no doubt that if I tried ProRes LT or another type of conversion I would have a smaller file size, but with hard drives being cheaper and cheaper, and the results living up to my standards, I stayed with the standard ProRes.

If you don’t own Final Cut or you are on a PC, give MPEG Streamclip from Squared 5 a try. Their conversion process is faster than Final Cut, and it has the best feature found on all computer programs, it is free. It comes highly recommended from Philip Bloom, who’s blog has become a must read for me during this learning process.

Unless you have some sort of super computer or server farm available to you for your video editing needs, I recommend converting your footage first, before trying to edit, you will save hours of time.