Over this past summer I worked for a group of producers who shot an independent film on a low budget (a little less than $1,000,000). They shot on high definition, full 1080p quality. Right now I'm assisting one of the producers in his attempts to sell the film for distribution. I'm also editing together the EPK for the project.
A little while ago we held a screening of the finished film at a large venue for cast/crew/friends/distributors, and we got a lot of comments about how the film looked flat and lifeless. And we were showing it on a fully calibrated deck straight off an HDCAM SR tape. A few people even said it looked like a movie shot for a lot less than what we spent. Up until now we have been blaming the movie's bad look on the camera and lighting crew and on the color correction. However, recently I took possession of a hard drive containing a copy of the finished, fully rendered Quicktime file from which the SR tape was made, full 5.1 mix and everything. I've been using it to source clips for the EPK.
To some extent the "flat" look is definitely the fault of the DP and coloring, as the sets were definitely overlit and the colorist definitely didn't have enough time to do much more than a first pass. But after learning more about the codec used for the file (ProRes 422) and after examining this file itself I'm starting to wonder whether
overcompression is part of the problem with the movie's visual
appearance.
The file has a running time of almost 104 minutes. My understanding of ProRes is that a "regular" quality 1080p movie would be encoded at 145mbs, and a "high" quality movie would be 220mbs. By my calculations that would mean that, had the finished file been rendered at those bit rates, its final size would have come out around either 904 GBs or 1.37 TBs, respectively.
The actual size of the finished file that I've got? A measly 137 GBs. Which would mean the bitrate would be more like 22mbs.
Are my calculations accurate, or am I way off here? I've never worked with ProRes, so can anyone tell me more about the usual bitrates that finished files are encoded in? Are lower bit rates than those I've mentioned permissible? Are my suspicions well founded or am I barking up the wrong tree here?
