DVCPro HD Codec Quandry

[Steve Covello]

I would have a really bad feeling about trying to capture live material to a drive of ANY format without having simo tape backup. Even in today’s tapeless audio recording/mix studios, they still record AVO to DAT as a backup. Otherwise, one hiccup and you’re completely screwed.

Seems to me like you should tap out all of your cameras to a stack of DVCProHD decks that are slaved to a jam sync TC setup (as previous poster suggested) which will save you an immense amount of headaches now and in the future. And surely there will be someone who will want to have a vhs screener of the meterial. Are you going to take down your editing systems just to make dubs? What if your RAID goes down? Flood? Tornado? Just kidding, but still. It doesn’t take much for the whole thing to come crashing down, IMHO.

steve covello
double wide post

[Marco Solorio]

Yes, I read the QT Pro tip yesterday in the newletter. Very good tip indeed!

Marco Solorio  |   OneRiver Media

[Francois Stark]

Hi

I’m just playing around in QT 7 pro and here’s its capture options for a G4 1.25DP with a AJA Kona LS card installed:

Video source:
choose between automatic (I assume that’s firewire DV Pal or NTSC only) and AJA Kona PAL or NTSC 8 bit or 10 bit. That’s only to get the video in.

Microphone:
choose between Automatic (I assume that’s firewire) and Built-in Line in or AJA Kona

Quality:
choose between MPEG 4, H264 or Native. The Mpeg 4 and H264 are highly compressed versions for email use only. You can not change quality or compression or size (240 x0 180). Native would be uncompressed (8 or 10) or firewire according to your video source selection.

Save files to:
Well, that’s obvious…

Now this system only has a SD card. Maybe of you get QT 7 pro on a HD card you can capture natively, but that would be HD uncompressed. Unless you get a live DVPRO HD firewire signal into the firewire port?

Regards
Francois

[Francois Stark]

One more thing that impressed me about QT 7 pro: multithreading! Yesterday I played around with the four HD movie previews (in H.264) from Apple’s trailers website. The first one I downloaded (fantasic 4) looks like it’s been uprezzed from SD, the other three’s visual quality is amazing! Runs natively at 1280 x 540.

So I started to convert the first one into DVCPRO HD 60p. Fine – while that was running, I opened the next H.264 HD trailer, and started exporting the second one as well. It tags the second progress bar to the bottom of the first one… And then I opened up another DV PAL quicktime file and played it.

All happening at the same time!

Yep – now we can import and convert multiple files at the same time without waiting for the first export to finish – a crude way of batch processing, but it is effective and will definitely help us here.

Regards
Francois