Can BMD take on Avid’s DNxHDCodec?

[Matt Dowling]

Hey Jason,

Nice to hear from you – been a while man…

The main reason for the incompatibility between the two products is the fact Cineform

[Lance Bachelder]

It’s true – it’s open and very clean. I can render out of AE to any flavor of DNxHD and then cut and trim it in near realtime in Vegas 6 off a single SATA drive. With a fast RAID I could cut an Avid HD show in realtime in Vegas – no Mojo or Arenaline box needed. I do believe the Cineform codec is even better than the Avid codec and have done a lot of testing with it. I agree, Cineform should perform equally well on BMD boards as they do the Xena (Kona) boards from AJA – people always want choices.

I would guess that Apple will do something soon with a compressed HD format – they are the only NLE out there that doesn’t! (other than DVCPRO HD – which they used to off-line the movie Dreamer) Avid, Edius, Sony Vegas, Premiere Pro all support excellent compressed HD codecs.

Lance Bachelder
Southern California
Cow Forum Host- Magic Bullet

Apple Dual 2Ghz G5 ATIx800, 2.5GB RAM, OSX Tiger FCP Studio
Intel P4, 2GB RAM, PNY 6600GT XP Pro – Vegas 6 Studio

[Scott Brown]

Hi Jason

You’re absolutely correct, my mistake, the Infinity camera uses JPEG2000 not DNxHD. I sat through the demo at IBC recently and the camera looks really interesting.

Lance, thanks for the feedback on both the AVID and Cineform codecs – I plan to fully test them both out shortly.

Best wishes

Scott

[Sean Lander]

Hi Sean.

I have searched for your instructions but can’t seem to find them. This is of great interest to me as we use photo-jpeg
a lot. Please enlighten me.

[Sean Lander]

Sorry didn’t realise this would get put down the bottom of the list. I was replying to Sean O’Neil saying that it is possible to enable RT for Photo-Jpeg

[Sean Oneil]

[Sean Lander] “Hi Sean.

I have searched for your instructions but can’t seem to find them. This is of great interest to me as we use photo-jpeg
a lot. Please enlighten me.”

Oh boy. Ok, first of all, I take no responsibility. This is obviously not supported by Apple.

Go to your Final Cut Pro 5 app file (it has to be version 5 I think). Ctrl-click, show package contents. The navigate to “Resources -> English -> FXScripts -> Enablers.

In this folder, the only file should be “RT Software Enabler.txt”. Before you do anything, copy this file to another folder for backup purposes. That way if you screw anything up, you can always revert to the original by restoring this file.

So now open the file with TextEdit. Scroll down about 2/3rds toward the bottom of the document.

Find a section that starts with this:

// *****************************************************************************
// jpeg settings. Settings specific to jpeg go below here.
// *****************************************************************************
// *****************************************************************************

You’ll see that there is max sequence height and width which RT effects are allowed. They are set to half-SD-res for Offline-RT. Change them to 1920 and 1080 respectively. maxCompressQuality is set to 364 (36% quality). Change it to 800 or so anything below 80% P-JPEG quality will be RT (75% is the best quality for 4:2:2 and it’s what the BMD Easy Setups use).

Scroll down further into the section and you’ll find more places where you need to repeat the same changes. Once you get past the JPEG section (2YUV is next), then you’re done.

You have the original file backed up somewhere safe. Now, also make a backup of the modified file and keep it somewhere else. This is because sometimes updating FCP will revert it back to the original (the update to 5.03 did this – maybe they read my trick).

So go ahead and test it out. You’ll notice when you start FCP, you’ll get a warning saying that green render bars will now be blue. Click OK. It’s a bit annoying, but worth it. And the blue bars are purly cosmetic. Everything is still functionally the same.

You will now get RT Extreme orange bars for Photo-JPEG effects where as before they were red bars.

I use it all the time now for certain types of jobs. Before I was digitizing at DV and re-capturing at Uncompressed. So now w/ JPEG it’s been a huge timesaver having RT dissolves.

I haven’t tried it with HD yet, so I don’t know what kind of performence you get. But I can say that SD on a dual G5 works great.

Also, this trick does not work with other codecs. The reason it works for JPEG is because JPEG is already enabled to work with RT Extreme (for the Offline-RT capability). The Enabler file just restricts it to low-res. This “hack” of mine lets you get rid of that restriction.

[Sean Oneil]

Quick correction. When I said it has to be version 5, I meant not 4 or 4.5. I did not mean it must be version 5.0 w/o any updates. 5.02 or 5.03 is fine.

[Francisco Cueto]

FYI: Discreet Smoke systems don’t have a Compressed HD CODEC. matter of fact, they dont use codecs. Nor can u compress anything.

🙁

Frank Cueto