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DVCPROHD Pipeline and Online Question
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[rick McNealy] “Thoughts? Will going out HD-SDI with serial control fix this? Should I buy a card?”
Serial control only works with the 1700, not the 1200A. RS-422 only works during playback, but you can’t record to it with RS-422.
I’m able to get completely accurate start times of 01:00:00:02 by finessing with the start time in the timeline. Took a lot of trial and error, but we finally got it to where it hits every time.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com“The Rough Cut,” an original short film premiering December 7th in full High Definition in Atlanta.
rsvp@biscardicreative.com to reserve seats.
https://www.theroughcutmovie.comNow editing “Good Eats” in HD for the Food Network
“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters
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I’m able to get completely accurate start times of 01:00:00:02 by finessing with the start time in the timeline. Took a lot of trial and error, but we finally got it to where it hits every time.
That’s encouraging…how do you do it? How many frames do you offset? Is your offset always the same?
Depending on what day I think that our offset differs…my mind might be playing tricks…I’ve onlined a bunch of shows lately.
Thanks
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I have a 1200A. Never had a problem laying off. I set the timeline to 58:00:00, start the show at 1:00:00. Then I just run “Print to Video” and hit record on the deck. When it’s all done, the TC on the tape matches the TC in the sequence exactly.
On a seperate note, I have to take issue with mastering to DVCProHD from a quality standpoint. From what I’ve seen so far, I really consider it an aquisition format only (albiet a very good one). But it’s not suitable for post IMO. The codec is too damn lossy and you’ll really start to notice it after as little as 3 generations.
If you can keep a firewire-only native workflow going, then it’s great. But if you have to do color correction or anything else that require recompression, I think you should master it to D5 or HDCam.
Sean
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[Sean ONeil] “On a seperate note, I have to take issue with mastering to DVCProHD from a quality standpoint. From what I’ve seen so far, I really consider it an aquisition format only (albiet a very good one). But it’s not suitable for post IMO. The codec is too damn lossy and you’ll really start to notice it after as little as 3 generations.”
Actually I have to compeletly disagree with that statement.
For our short film we shot with the Varicam, I captured at 720p 8bit uncompressed, did all editing, sfx, and color correction in the timeline and laid back out to the 1200A, thus recompressing as it went to tape. We then displayed the film on a 57′ film screen using a Panasonic PD-7000 HD Projector for our world premiere. The image was absolutely outstanding.
I’ve found the DVCPro HD codec to be just incredible for post for broadcast. Capture, edit, CC, titles, SFX, Chroma Key, etc…. DVCPro HD is the workflow we use all day long and it’s incredibly clean.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.comDirector, “The Rough Cut”
https://www.theroughcutmovie.comNow editing “Good Eats” in HD for the Food Network
“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters
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Walter, you’r right that DVCProHD can look great, even after a generation like what you did, and indeed it holds up to that generation loss much better than HDV which really diminished fast, but….
DVCProHD is a very lossy codec. It’s much more compressed than DV on a compression per pixel basis, and indeed, looks more compressed than DV when you look at it closely. That’s the sacrifce they made to fit HD on a tape (or P2). Now if DVCproHD was only as compressed as much as DVCpro50, we’d have a killer codec on our hands, but it isn’t, so DVCproHD is hardly killer. It’s nice, but it’s by no means optimum.
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP
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[walter biscardi] “thus recompressing as it went to tape. We then displayed the film on a 57′ film screen using a Panasonic PD-7000 HD Projector for our world premiere. The image was absolutely outstanding.”
That is one generational loss. I said three. I agree it’s great for one or maybe two, which works great for your world premiere. But Gramme is correct. It’s best to avoid it for most workflows. Perhaps TV spots must be made from that master. Or a DVD will have to be encoded. Or perhaps it gets translated into another language or it’s re-edited for television. If everyone involved used the same workflow, it could look very degraded by the time the intended audience sees it.
I had a situation where I ended up having to worth with concert that was originally shot on DVCPro 720 (Varicam), recompressed to DVCPro 1080 after color-correction, transfered to HDCam, and then transfered back to DVCPro 1080.
I’d love to explain how and why all of this happened, and if I did you’d see why this is something that can and does happen often. But I’ll save everyone from a boring story and skip it :).
Anyway, by the time I got it after all these transfers, there was definately noticable degradation without even looking closely. The image was much softer. But it was still decent. However….
I was cutting promos for it and they had to be in HD. It was for Best Buy and other retailers and they wanted to show off their HDTV sets I guess. Per client’s request, it needed to be delivered on DVHS if you can believe that (DVHS uses the same codec as HDV). The degradation really stood out on the DVHS. Had I encoded it from the original Varicam footage, I’m certain it would have looked a lot better. Furthermore, I made a DVD which looked softer and more pixellated than a DVD that was made from the 2nd gen master.
So it depends on your workflow. Just remember that after you deliver a project, there’s many, many situations where other editors and post people might get their grubby hands on it. And if they all use DVCPro HD tapes and it contantly gets recompressed because they use HD-SDI instead of FW (FW is a dirty word in a lot of places), then you may be in trouble.
Sean
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A lot of people just don’t “get” FW. Strange really.
Yes, DVCProHD is really too compressed for mastering, but then again so is HDCAM….. And I’m leaning towards thinking, that practically ANY compression is too much for a master…. But we’re not quite there yet in terms of storage needed.
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP
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I have done the same re: print to video but my tape is off a few frames from my sequence. I’m not sure what we’re doing wrong…I’ve talked to others who have also had the same problem. This is going out over fw only. We don’t have any capture cards yet…will capture cards be more accurate with the 1200?
re: quality…I agree DVCPRO HD is lossy especially when doing multiple generations…that’s why we only use FCP for cuts only…all color is done on DaVinci tape to tape system. That might change if we get a kickass FCP card (Aja etc)…holding out to see what shakes out with Adreneline HD on Mac…We are primarily a Avid Shop with many Mac Mojos and one Adreneline. I know…I know save the Avid bashing I get the differences…I am just tring to protect ALL our investments.
Anyway…felt like typing…thanks
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What tape format for tape to tape?
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP
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we take the DVCPRO HD and dub to HDCAM for use with the DaVinci and then back out to D5
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