Att: Graeme, Walter, et al – HDV/DVCPRO Workflow, etc

[Steve Connor]

If it was me I’d go with your original idea. It’s not ideal recompressing HDV material to DVCPro HD but in reality the quality doesn’t seem to suffer that much and the DVCPro HD codec is easier to work with than native HDV.

[Walter Biscardi]

Get a Kona 3 and ingest everything as DVCPro HD. Uprez all your SD footage to HD on the way in. I just completed the first episode of “Assignment Earth” which was shot on HDV, but captured in DVCPro HD througth the Kona. Network told me it’s the best looking HD they’ve ever seen.

General consensus in post production is convert HDV to DVCPro HD for the edit. That’s what I recommend and it’s what we will continue to do with this series.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Food Network’s “Good Eats”
HD Editorial for “Assignment Earth”

“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters

[Max Frank]

Gents,

Thank you for your valuable input.

Can you please clear up a couple more things:

1. I’ll be doing a lot of color grading [Magic Bullet], transitions, picture-in-picture stuff. I heard that DVCPRO HD doesn’t handle the renders well – ie, it loses a lot of quality after being rendered. Any truth to that?

2. Can I edit DVCPro HD with a regular FW800 drive, or do I need a RAID and other fancy stuff.

Thanks for helping me with this – I’ve been seeing a lot of conflicting/confusing reports on these issues.

Thanks,

Wayne

2DP G5, 3.5GB RAM, FCP HD

[Graeme Nattress]

It might be a consensus, but it doesn’t make it right from a picture quality POV. If you’ve got mixed sources, and want to edit them “all as one” in HD, go uncompressed – no quality loss at all, and you can just not worry about it.

People use DVCproHD as an “intermediate” codec, usualy because it’s fast to decode and is very well supported by FCP, but really, it’s a camera codec, and never was designed for editing, and especially not for intermediate codec work:

1) it’s too compressed. You’ll see artifacts in camera original footage, never mind after a render
2) it’s not full HD resolution, but either 960×720 or 1280×1080, thus complicating things further with pixel aspect ratios, and it reduces the resolution of all footage coming into it , HDV being natively 1440×1080.
3) it’s not the usual delivery format for broadcast, that being HDCAM (hopefully the nicer SR version) or D5. That would mean, in my mind, for best quality that you do your final render of everything in a uncompressed timeline.

Apple, in their infinite wisdom, have had a superb intermediate codec for years, called “PhotoJPEG” – but they fail to RT enable it or give it the ful support it deserves. Although it’s compressed, it’s full raster 4:2:2 and mild with it’s artifacts, and fast too. But it’s not a choice as Apple don’t RT enable it. That leaves you with sub-par DVCproHD (best used in situations where that’s what you shot) and Uncompressed, with it’s massive file sizes, and nothing in-between.

I’m not saying you can’t get good looking results with DVCProHD, but I am saying it’s not without it’s obvious flaws. If ease of editing is your primary goal, then DVCproHD on the current FCP platform is about it for HD (due to Apple’s infinite wisdom – even Avid people now have DNxHD), but if picture quality is our ultimate goal, there’s only one answer – uncompressed.

Graeme

– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP

[Jerry Hofmann]

Graeme’s right about compressed video, and yes, uncompressed HD would be prefereable to DVCPROHD. However this option isn’t availalble to just everyone… so it’s still better than editing native HDV if your time is worth anything to you. It is to me, so I’ll be the first in line to NOT edit with it.

Jerry

[Tom Meegan]

DVCPRO HD renders look pretty good. The only way to tell whether they are up to your standards is to do side by side tests between DVCPRO HD and HD 10 bit 4:2:2 (usually called “uncompressed”.) Make sure you view the tests on a calibrated HD monitor in a decent viewing environment.

In my opinion, the difference is subtle, at least when viewing HD. I haven’t done film blow ups, so I can’t speak to that.

You can edit DVCPRO HD with a FW 800 drive. You will need a much faster solution for uncompressed HD.

If I were you, I would edit DVCPRO HD.

If you find you need uncompressed quality for final output, buy the heavy duty RAID solution then, and use your KONA 3 to recapture at the higher data rate.

Or, take your project to a post house when you finish editing in DVCPRO HD, and let them do the final conform. If you think you might want to go this route the time to start talking to the post house is now. Communication, early and often, is the key.

Good luck.

Tom

[Walter Biscardi]

[Wayne K.] “1. I’ll be doing a lot of color grading [Magic Bullet], transitions, picture-in-picture stuff. I heard that DVCPRO HD doesn’t handle the renders well – ie, it loses a lot of quality after being rendered. Any truth to that?”

Not in my experience. We’ve delivered something like 36 HD Broadcast shows and both networks absolutely love the quality of our work. We use both Final Cut Pro and Final Touch HD (when it works) for color correction and we stay in the DVCPro HD codec from start to finish.

[Wayne K.] “2. Can I edit DVCPro HD with a regular FW800 drive, or do I need a RAID and other fancy stuff.”

Yes, but something like a LaCie Big Disk Extreme with two drives RAID’ed together via FW800 is better than a single drive. Also, with more drive speed, you get more RT in the timeline, including the FCP 3 Way CC in my case running a Cal Digit SATA array for this last project.

If you look closely at the scopes and go through all the compression math, Uncompressed HD is always preferred over any other compressed format. But for day to day editing and looking at the image on the screen, DVCPro HD is an outstanding codec that delivers a high quality finished product. We’ve been using the DVCPro HD workflow for almost 2 years now and I don’t plan to change a thing.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Food Network’s “Good Eats”
HD Editorial for “Assignment Earth”

“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters

[Walter Biscardi]

[Graeme Nattress] “1) it’s too compressed. You’ll see artifacts in camera original footage, never mind after a render”

I’ve done test renders of DVCPro HD captured into Uncompressed HD and you will see artifacts from the original DVCpro HD material in any areas of heavy, solid red. The artifacts are there from the original capture and bringing it in via Uncompressed HD won’t hide any artifacts from the original camera recording.

Uncompressed HD material brought into the DVCPro HD codec will pick up some artifacts, but I’ve not really seen any examples of Uncompressed HD ‘hiding’ native DVCPro HD compression.

Added artifacts using a DVCPro HD workflow for DVCPro HD material are so minimal they are not noticeable unless you zoom into the material on the computer. As far as looking at the material on a broadcast monitor and our 50″ Pro HDTV plasma screen, there’s no difference in the original and color corrected material. I’m not saying they’re not there, but you have to really go in on the computer screen to see them, at least in my experience.

[Graeme Nattress] “2) it’s not full HD resolution, but either 960×720 or 1280×1080, thus complicating things further with pixel aspect ratios, and it reduces the resolution of all footage coming into it , HDV being natively 1440×1080.”

Mixing HDV and DVCPro HD has not been a problem in our experience. Both are anamorphic formats and in the case of Assignment Earth’s first episode, they cut very well together bringing in everything as DVCPro HD.

I’m not sure how the pixel aspect ratios add complications, but maybe you can explain it here. We added After Effects comps, Photoshop graphics, etc… to our project and pixel aspect ratios weren’t a problem.

[Graeme Nattress] “3) it’s not the usual delivery format for broadcast, that being HDCAM (hopefully the nicer SR version) or D5. That would mean, in my mind, for best quality that you do your final render of everything in a uncompressed timeline.”

That’s changing. Discovery Channel recently started allowing DVCPro HD as a Mastering format and we’re delivering Assignment Earth on DVCPro HD. We’re going to be delivering test masters to several other networks over the next few months for Quality Control tests. If DVCPro HD is our workflow, especially in the case of Panasonic aquisition, we’re not adding anything but cost by mastering the shows to HDCAM and the networks are starting to see that too in these days of shrinking budget. Everybody wants champagne on a beer budget and delivering on DVCPro HD masters is a signficant savings for a 22 episode series.

[Graeme Nattress] “I’m not saying you can’t get good looking results with DVCProHD, but I am saying it’s not without it’s obvious flaws. If ease of editing is your primary goal, then DVCproHD on the current FCP platform is about it for HD (due to Apple’s infinite wisdom – even Avid people now have DNxHD), but if picture quality is our ultimate goal, there’s only one answer – uncompressed.”

If you have the drive space and the budget for an Uncompressed HD project, I absolutely agree with you, as I usually do. But for day to day workflow, the DVCPro HD codec is a real workhorse in HD Broadcast production, at least from our perspective and from speaking with several other HD broadcast shops in our area.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Food Network’s “Good Eats”
HD Editorial for “Assignment Earth”

“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters

[Tony]

Long before you get all bent out of shape about what will codec will offer you super duper image quality I would be more concerned about establishing a common frame rate for the majority of all the elements.

Any frame rate conversions will be a major part of the workflow in the long run.
Given the amount of low res source crap you already have to deal with you need to seriously address avoid recompressing it over and over again. Maybe you could consider off lining in dvcproHD or photo jpeg then uprezzing to uncompressed if and when you need to for a film out.

Graeme is just telling it like it really is regardless of what others say. You personally have to decide what you can really afford versus what how good an image quality you want to retain if and when you do a film out.

FYI everyone doing a project always dreams of a filmout but once they figure out the cost and workflow involved that “vision” it easily goes out the window for all but the serious.

If I was really concerned about image quality I would shoot dvcproHD instead of HDV. The Varicam is not the only option for dvcproHD as the HDX 900 and HVX-200 are options.

Tony Salgado

[Graeme Nattress]

Jerry, whenever I’ve edited HDV as HDV it’s been practically as easy as editing DV. Renders take a bit longer due to you rendering 4 times as many pixels, but the HDV codec as Apple implements it is not slow by any means.

Going back to HDV tape sucks a lot, but hey, HDV is NOT a mastering format, so I just bump timeline to uncompressed, re-render and output.

Graeme

– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP