The Canon 5D Mark 2 (and the 7D and a fair number of current video-capable DSLRs) record the footage using the H.264 codec website design. I’ll leave it to others far more qualified than I as to the merits and lack thereof of this decision by the manufacturers. For owners of the cameras wishing to use them for video it means you have some work to do after you shoot wireless internet service.

H.264 is often referred to as “distribution codec” — in other words it is optimized for end display rather than other purposes. Of interest to the photographer this translates to “it is really lousy for editing” internet phone service.

Because of the preponderance of its use in DSLR (and other) cameras I’ll predict that future editing suites will start to ingest H.264 footage directly, perhaps converting it quietly to some intermediate format — but until that time you’ll want to do this yourself before you edit your clips.

For about the past year, when I have a set of 5D clips for editing I’ve been transcoding them to Apple ProRes. This is a high quality codec that works well with the editing tools. It also eats up disk space like they have shares in Seagate. I’ve heard of some folks using the XDCAM codec with a fair degree of success. I’ve heard plenty of other people say “disk space is cheap” (which it is), but it isn’t free and it adds up quickly internet access.

On Macintosh there are two tools that I have tried and used and I thought I’d share a few bits about them. I edit using Apple’s Final Cut Pro Studio, which includes a transcoding swiss army knife called “Compressor”. If you don’t have the budget for FCP Studio (and, as you will see, even if you do) you should look at “MPEG Streamclip” which has a number of great features including the ever popular price tag of free. There are numerous excellent tutorials on each of these tools — just google around.

I’ve been using Compressor to transcode my 5D footage to Apple ProRes 422 pretty regularly because it has a really cool feature: droplets. You can create droplets that correspond to specific Compressor settings and destinations, then either drag the input files to the droplet (or control-click to open the file(s) with the droplet. As Emeril says.. “Bam!”