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DVCPro HD Frame Size and After Effects Workflow
Hello there,
I am currently producing a movie shot entirely on the HVX200. I have searched extensively on the internet for the last two days, and can’t find satisfactory answers to my questions/concerns (to follow).
Status Quo: The original footage was recorded to a Firestore at 720p/60, DVCPro HD, and brought into FCP 5.1.2 Universal. The system used is in the model details below. Redundant frames were discarded during capture, and it was edited in a timeline with 720p/24 settings. FCP handled the footage without a single problem. Now… the movie has been sent for colour grading, and the artists have chosen to work in After Effects (AE) for more control over the image. The system used is a Power Mac G5 Dual Core. Although the “idea” of their work is brilliant, when the footage is put back into FCP, for export, it all looks like soft focus, “muddy”. I am hoping to wrap my head around all of the potential problems, and technical solutions.
1. When the footage was recorded at 720p/60. What was the original frame size of the .mxf file? In FCP it is 960X720. Was the original frame size recorded 1280X720, and reduced during FCP capture?
2. Reference files of each clip, not sequence, were exported from FCP (all attributes dumped), and then corrected in AE. AE does not work with .mxf, but this shouldn’t be a problem since the footage was given a QuickTime (QT) wrapper. Is this reasoning correct?
3. Once the work is done in AE, the footage was exported as a QT file with all renders, and imported back into FCP, dropped on the timeline, but looks soft. Am I running into a DVCPro HD problem with AE, which prefers HDV or DV?
4. Is the quality being compromised during the back and forth over external harddrives? Done over a USB 2.0 or Firewire 400 cable.
5. When we do the HDCAM Final, 1280X720, should the blow-up happen from FCP or AE? Does it matter?
6. The frame sizes of 1280X720 and 960X720 are only dif. in pixel aspect ratio, not number of pixels. Is this correct?Thanks for taking the time to read, and hopefully respond. If you have any other suggestions/concerns that I didn’t address, please throw them out there for me to check.
Cheers…
Hayden -
1 Reply
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1. The HVX200 uses a 960×720 chip to record the images. the 1280×720 size is acheived through the pixel aspect ratio. FCP did’t do any reducing.
2. yes, that should work, as long as there are nothing in what you exported (as the reference movie) needed or was rendered (including realtime effects). rendering causes recompression, which is a big no-no for you online.
3. speaking of onlines, you should do you online in after effects, not FCP. after effects can work in 16bit color, so you don’t throw away any image data. FCP is limited to 8bit for anything that it renders. use automatic duck to move your timeline to after effects, or just do 2 QTs of an A and a B roll-split your clips onto two layers, alternating layers for clips that need transitions. delete transitions, and build in overlapping handles so that you can recreate the transitions in after effects. make sure that nothing needs to be rendered or needs realtime effects to avoid recompression, then export each layer separately and assemble in after effects.
4. it’s probably a better idea to use firewire, since it can more easily handle the bandwidth issues of DVCPro HD, but there shouldn’t be any quality loss just by transferring from one drive to another.
5. definitely use after effects to do the blow up. after your online is finished, export it so a lossless codec, maybe a tiff image sequence or something, to use as a master, then do any scaling or exporting using that master.
6. yep.
hope that helps. i just finished doing all the post on a student film on DVCPro HD 1080p24, so i used this workflow and it worked great.
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