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fastest work flow to create mp4 from HDV for screen purpose
hi, i am working on a hour doc edited on HDV.
I often have to send rought cut as quicktime via FTP and as everybody knows that HDV is just pain to work with. I would like to come up with the fastest work flow. The quality is not so important here. this is just for screening rough cut.my system environment is
powermac G5 2gh DP with 4.5GB RAM
Final Cut Studio 2
AJA KONA LH
HVR-1500To avoid long exporting and compression time due to the nature of HDV codec, what I have been doing is
1. output to DV tape as SD using KONA’s real time downcoversion through SDI
2. digitize back as DV or even low res photo jpeg
3. compress as H234. (which codec would be fastest to encode while keeping the file size relatively small?)
I could actually bring the 2nd mac so that I can combine the step 1 and 2 together meaning 2nd mac will be digitizing while outputting.
other option would be
A. directly compress from HDV timeline to H234
B. drop the HDV sequence to DV timeline and compress from there.any suggestion?
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6 Replies
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I forgot to mention.
I also have to add timecode window on the clip. So, what I have been doing is apply the timecode reader filter to the DV clip from step 2 then compress it.
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Hey,
I remember working with HDV being a painful and traumatic experience before we got a Mac Pro, so I may be way off here.
That said… when I saw “workflow” in the title of the post I thought, what workflow… just export it. Have you tried just exporting using Compressor? Nest your sequence and apply your TCR filter to the nested sequence. I’d go with plain ol’ MPEG 4 over H.264. This is anecdotal, but I feel like it exports MUCH faster.
I feel like exporting and reimporting is overly complicated if you’ve been able to play back HDV well enough to edit and hour-long doc, I feel like it should export quickly enough.
Zak
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A cheap piece of hardware to speed up the process
https://www.elgato.com/index.php?file=products_turbo264&PHPSESSID=1fc4bb624af0d694c98b693798f8f7a3
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If video quality isn’t a huge issue:
Idea #1:
1. Nest the sequence into another sequence and apply the timecode reader filter.
2. Export with Compressor or Quicktime Conversion, single-pass H.264 at a lower resolution (480?). If you are using Compressor, you can use both Macs in a cluster to reduce compression time.
Idea #2:
1. Nest the sequence into another sequence and apply the timecode reader filter.2. Output with the KONA card over firewire, capture with the second Mac.
3. Export.
You’d have to run a test to see if it is faster to resize and encode with software only, or to resize with KONA hardware and encode with software.
If you have a few extra dollars, you might want to pick up one of these to reduce your encoding time:
https://www.amazon.com/Elgato-Turbo-264-Encoder-Hardware-10020500/dp/B000PCVIEU/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2/104-7584744-8999954?ie=UTF8&s=software&qid=1191427089&sr=8-2 -
I agree with Zak. H.264, while a very high quality codec, is also very slow in compressing.
A regular one-pass MPEG-4 will be quickest.
Ed (I don’t understand why people are saying HDV is a pain, I’m having fun with it!) -
Thank you guys for advice.
I just ordered Elgato Turbo H264. with only $100 invest, I am saving lots of time if this works. Meanwhile, I will use regular Mpg4 compression instead of H264.
As far as compress directly from HDV to mpg 4 vs
realtime downcovert to SD and play back and at the same time
digitize using the 2nd machineI am not sure which is faster. In Mac Pro, HDV might not be
so problematic but in G5, HDV seems to take so much time. Even just exporting the 1 hour long time line could take 3 hours (at least it says 6 hours in the beginning and i know it will be shorter as process goes. ) and I am not sure if HDV needs extra time to compress than other format. I have done it this way before but i did it overnight so I don’t know how long it exactly took.anyone has tried and compare which is faster?
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