Compressed High Quality capture – why Mac only?

[Adam Levine]

This is a feature that uses built-in Quicktime functions. Anything can be captured on a Mac using the P-JPEG codec.

[Igor Babic]

You can capture to Photo JPEG on a PC with Decklink in quicktime thru Decklink capture utility. But there is no batch capture. If you have to capture multiple clips you must do your own list of time codes and put it manualy. You can’t capture to QT in PPro. In Premiere Pro 2 in uncompressed timeline you can use those clips and they are RT like every other file on your timeline uncompressed or DV and you can also mix them together. There are some small things to consider like audio asio driver that premiere pro have to use and field order of DV, but now is time to use it if you must. On a recomended 75% compresion ratio Photo Jpeg is 30% smaler in file size then DV, and 10 times smaler then uncompressed. This quality is somwhere between DV and uncompressed. Diffrence is most obvius in still frames, where uncompressed is far superior. Diffrence to DV is most obvius in a clips with angled thin lines. DV looks jagged, Pjpeg don’t. Both of them are little blury against uncompressed and uncompressed is razor sharp without flicker. I am using PJpeg for archiveing, but belive me when you see uncompressed you will definetly buy more HDDs.

[Mark Palmos]

[Igor] ”
You can capture to Photo JPEG on a PC with Decklink in quicktime thru Decklink capture utility.”

Thanks for the explanation igor… I would like to know from BlackMagic why they created the codec for MOV only, why not a MJPEG codec for PC too?

Till later
Mark.

[Adam Levine]

It is not a codec created by BM, perhaps I was unclear. This is part of QT and has been for years. Any QT-based app can use it.

Some background: back around version 2 of FCP (2000?), someone discovered that a G4 Mac or better would be able to capture from any source and encode it as Quicktime P-JPEG on the fly (just using the CPU and built-in QT functions). Apple incorporated this into a later release of FCP as a half-rez offline setting they call “Offline RT”, which is just half-rez P-JPEG Quicktime at 35% spatial quality. On the release of the first DL card (I bought one about 2 months after they hit the market), BM incorporated this capability (albiet with a larger frame and higher quality) into their own FCP settings files.

So to sum up, this is about what FCP/QT do with the video signal on capture, and really has little to do with BM software or hardware. Really, “Online JPEG” is a group of settings for FCP and QT which are installed along with the rest of the BM software and settings files.

Any app you use that incorporates QT encoding will be able to do the same thing, with the proper settings. As an example, I have created numerous different offline JPEG settings (for different projects) for use in FCP, all of which with work with either an SDI or Firewire souce signal. Unfortunately, FCP does not support RT for anything but the Apple Uncompressed and DV codecs, so there are no RT FX

[Mark Palmos]

[Adam Levine] “It is not a codec created by BM, perhaps I was unclear. This is part of QT and has been for years. Any QT-based app can use it.”

gotcha,
ok…
in that case it would be very nice if BM WROTE a MJPEG codec to capture RT in WinXP… very nice indeed.
thanks
mark.

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Mark,

You’ve asked some good questions and Adam’s answers are spot on. Further to Adam’s comments, please see the support note Which compressed codecs can I use with DeckLink cards? and scroll down to the Windows section which works through the different compressed options and why we’ve implented the codecs that we have.

One thing we’ve always tried to avoid is the use of proprietary codecs and/or ones that must be purchased at a (typically) high cost. There are always codecs that we could write but usually they are ones that we would have to license and pass on a per-user royalty fee to the licensor of the codec and that’s not very attractive for anyone other than the licensor. Alternatively we could write a proprietary codec but then that breaks the philosophy of using open standards to make it easy and inexpensive to share files with other users regardless of whether they use Blackmagic products or not.

DirectShow for Windows cannot take advantage of the PhotoJPEG QuickTime codec and so we’ve really moved away from suggesting that the PhotoJPEG codec should be used for captures on Windows. We are very interested in both SD and HD compressed codecs for Windows that are available to everyone and preferably and little or no additional cost.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Igor Babic]

Marc, it’s a Real Time capture on XP if you are using SDI or YUV or composite input from BMD cards ( depends of what type of card you having)! The only draw back is you have to capture outside of Premiere Pro, and without batch lists. (Decklink capture utility has RS 422 machine control). Another draw back is that you can’t capture from firewire to Pjpeg. There is no mather what extension your captured file has, as long as everybody that use those files have QT instaled.

[Mark Palmos]

[Igor] “The only draw back is you have to capture outside of Premiere Pro, and without batch lists.”

Hi Igor, thanks for the reply

Yep, that’s rather a huge drawback for me. My clients often want something from last year, and without an ability to recapture, it is of no use to me… so it would be great to have this implemented in PP2. I dont know if that is for BM to write or for Adobe to enable, but from what you say, if it can capture this codec with an AVI extention, it may be up to Adobe?

Mark.

[Mark Palmos]

Hello Luke,

thanks for the respose…

I would definitely be interested in doing whatever it takes to get a compressed HD and SD codec for Decklink on APP. Even pay extra for a codec.

I have been eyeing your cards for a while, but within a few months I will be buying a Premier Pro based system, and would LOVE to get a Decklink card, but it is not going to happen if there is no low>>>high bitrate compression codec to capture to with timecode… I am sure there are many PP and other PC NLE users who would also find a compressed codec massively useful, so please do more than just being “very interested” in it! 😉

Thanks,

Mark Palmos

[Igor Babic]

Yes, definetly Adobe has put out support for QT projects. But on the other hand, I was affraid of uncompressed just like you. I was working in MJPEG on various boards since a Premiere 4 so thats the only way for me also. Buy a cheapest BMD board that works for your workflow and put it in some Xeon machine and give it a try in uncompressed. For a start there is no need for raid. Experiment a little and if this is the right thing buy everthing else. If you can recapture than is not so scarry even if you have couple of hours of footage. Quality of uncompressed justify every investment in it. My work is under hour infomercials, and short 10-30 sec comercials and all with lots of compositionings. I have notice that my final product is sharper than ever and has no problem with flickering when you put scaled digital fotographs on timeline (thats most of staff that I do. With Xeon machine and Premiere Pro 2 I am about 30%-50% more effective then with Premiere 5&6, and everthing I make looks better.