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Att: Graeme, Walter, et al – HDV/DVCPRO Workflow, etc
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Now Tony has hit the nail on the head….
I would be more concerned about the conforming.
I have seen some great HDV/DVCPRO HD/Uncompressed you name,
get stepped on and screwed up more by bad frame rate changes.
And depending on what you need to deliver….
talking about going to film???
Then you would probably want to edit in 1080 24p….
And all the sources would need to be de-interlaced.
And Graeme…will projects like this be able to be
encoded with REDCODE using REDCINE? Is REDCODE
better than DVCPRO HD? -
Good perspective there Tony.
Video editing is all a series of compromises, and it’s wise to know where the sweet spots and dangers lie. Framerates are a killer. For filmout you need everything 24p in a 24p timeline. This is easy enough if you shoot 24p and make sure it’s all pulldown-free. There’s starting to be real good HDV options for 24p now, but you’ve got to be careful as they only capture on some decks or cameras, and FCP doesn’t yet support (am I right here??) the newest ones.
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP
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REDCODE is unbelievably nice 🙂 But it’s quite different and very modern in how it works. It’s a quality-first format that’s designed for camera and editing. And that’s the other issue – working with compression and super-high quality ultra-high definition sources warps you. What was once great quality HD is now “what’s that – it looks like VHS”. I remember when I first taped a programme off the TV onto VHS, and upon playback it looked “perfect”. I couldn’t see the loss in quality we can all now see quite clearly. And then Laserdisc was perfect, and now, to some people, DVD is perfect, and HD is just the bees knees. And now I’m actively involved in ultra-high definition, and that resets your own internal picture quality calibration yet again. It raises the bar of perfection one step further (actually, more than one step further).
So probably not to ask me about HD or SD compression any more, as I’ve moved on to a new level of quality. Best thing to do is to do the workflow test yourself – from source, through edit, to master and viewing, and perhaps make a MPEG2 of it to simulate what broadcast will look like.
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP
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Most of my delivery these days is DVD’s or betacam. In either case the “conforming time” can be incredibly slow. So I don’t like the format from a post production point of vew… renders are a lot slower than DVCRPROHD render times. 8 times slower in my tests here. I guess my time is more important to me than the picture quality difference, which is pretty small from what I’ve seen. I really don’t see a ton of differnece between DVCPROHD captured HDV and native HDV. I’m sure it’s technically there, however if you can’t see it…
Jerry
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[Graeme Nattress] “and perhaps make a MPEG2 of it to simulate what broadcast will look like.”
..and therein lies the problem. In order for me to simulate the MPEG-2 compression that is heralded in the great city of Chicago by our ‘local’ cable conglomerate, I have to turn up the compression so much it bothers me and it would surely bother my clients, even the most inexperienced ones. The amount of sheer compression in my home tv market is ridiculous and makes me wonder if there are broadcast standards at all. You mentioned VHS, Graeme, this is worse. I was watching a movie not too long ago and the compression was layered on so thick, that Danny Glover was walking around a dark subway in the blockbuster hit Predator 2 (don’t judge me on my movie taste, I was collecting my thoughts by watching a mindless action flick and there it was on cable) and you could barely see anything as Danny moved cautiously through the corridor. The background and almost everything around him would remain still and motionless and jump to a new background frame every second or so. Long GOP compression…lovely… Even parts of Danny would remain frozen in little bits of time until the GOP presented us with another glorious I-frame. I would liken the amount of compression to trying to fit 6 hours of MPEG-2 on a single layer DVD-R. The opposite of beauty. Buy hey, the absolutely ridiculous amount of money I pay a year in cable bills doesn’t grant me automatic access to quality now does it?
Jeremy
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Jeremy, it’s so sad isn’t it. Everything the director, producer, cameraman, editor does to maximize PQ just goes down the “drain” of broadcast, where very few broadcasters actually care. I’m lucky enough to have grown up in England with the BBC at the height of it’s powers and PQ, and was always terrified at the quality I’d see of broadcast TV in the USA when I was on holiday. Now I’m involved in the whole process and I’m trying as hard as I can to put the very best picture quality I can in to as many hands as I can. I shudder to think what it will look like on so-called “HD” broadcast.
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP
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FCP keeps picking them off, I figure about the time all the RED owners
start screaming for REDCODE support – FCP will have all the HDV flavors
supported. But yes, you have no control over the broadcasters and how
they show work….
We have Dish HD with a 52″ Toshiba DLP…I get a better picture than
any other source I have seen anywhere….perhaps looking at a live HD
feed would be better. I have also been delivering HD for clients
using Adtec HD servers playing MPEG transport streams….for now that is real-world
HD deliverables….it will be another couple of years until Ultra-HD will
be deliverable from a set-top box….I could see where shooting and editing
in 4K could produce some fantastic 1080p images…..
I have also been working with shooters who supply timelapse footage from
2K still images….very nice results when shown on HD. -
[Graeme Nattress] “I’m lucky enough to have grown up in England with the BBC at the height of it’s powers and PQ, and was always terrified at the quality I’d see of broadcast TV in the USA when I was on holiday”
You should see what the BBC are doing with their HD test channel – unbelievable quality. “Planet Earth” Brodacast in HD is simply the best HD I have ever seen. Apparently a lot of it was shot with Varicam.
To be fair they are really cranking up the bandwith, probably more than is commercially acceptable, but it really does make your jaw drop sometimes.
I’m looking forward to seeing what you and the team have done with your codec.
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A friend sent me some grabs from HD Torchwood and they were pretty crummy. I sure am hoping that the rest of their output is better. That said, most HD TVs and monitors hide, to an extent, what’s really going on with the picture. Having multiple HD standards that are all somewhat incompatible with one another doesn’t help people get the best, either.
https://www.cinematography.net/Red/comp-matrix.html
has some early tests of the compression. We’re now getting a fair improvement on what you see there. That said, we’re also moving forwards on the camera too!
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP
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I am in this situation right now. Well, not this EXACT situation, as we aren’t dealing with downloaded video and we won’t be doing a film out. BUT, we did shoot DVCPRO HD with the Varicam and have many MANY sources on VHS, DV and BetaSP. We are capturing everything as DVCPRO HD and working there. OUr finished product will be D5, so we’ll output via a Kona 3 to that format.
We don’t have a Kona 3…We have a Kona LH. What are we going to do? Well, the DV was easy. The AJ-HD1200 deck upconverts DV to DVCPRO HD upon output, so we transferred all the VHS to DV and captured it all that way, using a center extraction. It ended up 720p60 when the rest of our stuff was 720-24, but we render and are fine. But, a lot of the footage we don’t want center extractions. We need to reframe higher or lower in the frame. Sooooo….Terranex.
We are going to string together a selects reel of all our stock footage, captured at 8-bit uncompressed. Then output this to tape. Have the tape ran thru a Terranex three times. One pass, lower framing. One pass center framing. One pass high framing. The Terranix has noise reduction so that will help the footage considerably. Then we will capture all passes at DVCPRO HD resolution, choose the shot with the framing we want, cut it in…then color correct and output. Tedious, but…
You are working with HDV and a variety of other sources. I recommend capturing at DVCPRO HD resolution….unless you can afford the TERRABYTES of storage needed for uncompressed. Yes, quality is an issue, but not as much an issue as ease of workability. If your story is good people tend for forgive quality. Hoop dreams was shot DV, transferred to film. 28 DAYS LATER, BLAIR WITCH, ANNIVERSARY PARTY, CHUCK AND BUCK…BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE…and the list goes on.
DVCPRO HD is a fine codec to work in. Don’t get mired in the quality issue too much.
Shane
Littlefrog Post
http://www.lfhd.net
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