I though I'd start this thread to gather some intel on video conversion that also might help others in the process. I've been shooting a lot of (cloudy) sunsets lately practicing timelapses for the day it gets clear. I now shoot in RAW files. My question is what do you guys do to convert to video. I'd be interested to hear different approaches.
The target ultimately will be YouTube or Vimeo or Smugsmug but the source before the final encoding has to be the best quality, resolution and color depth you can get. This can be achieved in a variety of software packages with many different encoders. Here's what's working for me so far, correct me if I'm wrong.
1_ I shoot RAW at the best resolution/quality the camera will allow.
2_ I do a quick pass on the RAW files to lower the blackpoint, tweak saturations, levels, lens correction if necessary then export the lot to JPEG files with the same native resolution. Nothing dramatic. I save JPEG because TIFF files just get too big. The images are typically 4592 x 2576px true color so 24bit by the time you get from RAW to JPEG.
3_ I then load the sequence in Premiere or other package. The sequence resolution is typically 1440 x 1080px. Square pixels which is HDV 1080i, your typical plasma display.
I don't use sound yet but you can sample up to 48kHz.
4_ I use a codec named H.264 which is pretty popular for high definition output. There's a variety of flavours to export to YouTube, Vimeo, Tivo, etc... Most digital output formats go to NTSC so ~30fps. I don't use frame blending as I found it often trails the stars in between frames.
The file output is an *.mp4 (MPEG-4). I've found that it will also play as FLV or F4V file but with horrible pixelation depending on which player you use. That's pretty much all I've got so far.
Looking forward to hear what others do, tips and trick etc...
