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DVCPro HD ingest via Firewire better than HD SDI?
It was suggested to me by my Blackmagic Dealer that in our situation, ie onlining in DVCPro HD, that our quality would be better to ingest via firewire and get bit for bit transfer rather than capturing through a card such as Decklink or Kona where the material must be transcoded from DVCPro HD to uncompressed and re-encoded to DVCPro HD.
I must confess that I didn’t realize that capturing to DVCPro HD codec from HDSDI was a decode-encode process but i guess that makes sense.
If that is the case then it does not make sense to capture to DVCPro HD anyhow but to something less compressed? no? ProRes?
Or just capture to DVCPro HD via the firewire? But then must it decode to do the color correction? I guess so. Can anyone suggest a workflow?
Another question.. Can one capture the HD footage from the HD AJ1400 deck via firewire to an SD DV codec? (for offline).
Thanks.
Jason
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5 Replies
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If you go firewire you are not going to hurt your file rez from your deck at all. You simply are tranfering the video in its native codec to your drive. That being said you can capture from HD-SDI straight to DVCProHD Codec. For me it would depend on where the deck is in relation to my Mac,long firewire cables are hard to find and coax is easy to run.
isnt there a built in down converter on HD decklink cards?
del
you cant hear my inner voice scream… can you..?
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[del chapple] “isnt there a built in down converter on HD decklink cards? “
I was told that the quality is not that good.
That’s the thing. I was told that transfering via sdi to a DVCProHD codec makes no sense as the picture has to be decoded stretched, and reincoded thus reducing the quality.
jason
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DVCProHD is really compressed anyways. its a 4×3 420 100mb/s image that they play with the pixel aspect ratio to create a 16×9 image. I’ve seen good results in manufacture’s nailing their SDI outputs and i’ve seen bad firewire too. I’d suggest doing a test bothways, put them in the same time line and apply a difference filter to the top layer. that will show you the difference where as black is perfect.
del
you cant hear my inner voice scream… can you..?
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I think it depends more on what you have your timeline set for. If you plan on just cutting in DVCPRO HD, then the Firewire route is more direct. If you are bringing in DVCPRO HD into an uncompressed or ProRes timeline, then the SDI route would (could) directly transcode your footage to the native format. It also depends on what your deliverables are meant to be and if you are doing graphics. If you had to transcode your HD graphics to DVCPRO HD there would be a fair amount of loss from going to that compressed format
At my station, we shoot in the field with a Panasonic P2 HD camera. Our output timeline is normally ProRes HD. All of that P2 ingest has to be rendered.
If you have the option to do SDI ingest, it can save you time on the renders.
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If I do a P2 ingest from DVCPRO HD 720p24PN, I just use a straight DVCPRO HD timeline. No render, no problem. Why are you sticking it in a ProRes timeline? Are you using lots of effects and multigenerational copies? DVCPRO HD should hold up fine.
Videographer/Editor
Creative Director
Union Digital, Inc.
https://www.uniondigitalmedia.com
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