• Apple Final Cut Pro Legacy

  Best way to capture DVCam footage

  Posted by Ankur Ahuja on April 21, 2009 at 10:03 pm

  Hi,

  I am currently editing a music video to be screened during a concert. The Footage is DVCam , shot on Sony DSR 450 and I have captured it through Firewire with Easy Setup DV-Pal Compression settings in FCP 5.1 .Now the footage is showing a lot of pixel noise which can possibly be corrected for small screen but for a big projection screening I’m concerned that the noise will be very disturbing. Would it be best to recapture the final timeline at uncompressed 8 bit 4:2:2 settings before color correction, would that then fix the noise problem? If not, please advise on what compression settings to capture it on so as to minimise the noise.

  Thanks in anticipation.

  Ankur

  Ankur Ahuja replied 17 years, 4 months ago 2 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

• 

  Alan Okey

  April 21, 2009 at 11:22 pm

  There is no need to recapture the footage. You can simply drop your edited DV sequence into an uncompressed sequence, do your color grading and render. If you don’t have fast enough storage for realtime playback of uncompressed, use ProRes, which is visually lossless.

  As far as noise goes, it’s unlikely that you can get rid of it. You may be able to minimize it to some extend when color grading (lowering mids, etc.) but working in ProRes or uncompressed will avoid adding any additional compression artifacts. Even though your DV footage is 8-bit, color grading and graphics can still benefit from rendering in 10-bit. You can also apply 4:1:1 color smoothing to any problematic shots (saturated, hard-edged red shapes, etc.) to help get rid of any DV chroma blocking artifacts.

  What is your delivery format?
• 

  Ankur Ahuja

  April 22, 2009 at 6:51 am

  Hi Alan,

  Thanks for the reply.
  The video is going to be played out of a dvd.
  I’m pretty sure the noise is compression artifacts, it appeared only after capturing. I captured directly into a portable 120GB LaCie. Could it be a hardware problem? I must mention I’m not watching it on a broadcast monitor either right now.

  Thanks

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