FCP HDV master black level problem

[David Roth weiss]

Randy,

Its not a good idea to master back to HDV. Last week at the LAFCPUG meeting this was mentioned as being frought with problems, specifically with video levels, just as you’ve experienced. I realize this is not exactly what an owner of a new SONY M10 deck wants to hear, but a least it will keep you from struggling with something that won’t ultimately do the job for you.

Apparently the ticket is either to rent an HDCAM deck for mastering, or find a facility that will do it for you from your finished show off a portable hard drive.

DRW

[Randy]

Boy that is disconcerting to hear but thanks for letting me know. If I wanted to output to a hard drive to take somewhere else for output what format/compression/etc. would be best to output to? Thanks.
Randy

[David Roth weiss]

Either D5 (Panasonic) or HDCAM (Sony). These are the major competing flavors of true high definition. Where are you located? If you’re in a big city you should be able to find a facility that can output for you from your finished project off a hard drive.

[Arthur Vibert]

I had to do this recently. Here’s what I did –

You want the FCP10bit uncompressed codec, which comes with FCP. So you can take your entire FCP sequence and choose File->Export->QTConversion. Then choose FCP10bit for the codec, and 48khz 16bit audio. Your file sizes will be dramatically larger. My 58 miinute piece was about 350 gigabytes.

You may find that when it comes out the other end it’s 1440×1080, not 1920×1080. I resolved this by dropping it into After Effects, stretching it out to the proper aspect ratio and re-rendering. There’s probably a more elegant solution but deadlines lead to desperate solutions : )

We dumped it off to HDCam and it played back beautifully, projected in a theater for an audience of 600.

What I’ve since resolved to do with HDV (if I ever use it again) is import it uncompressed (using a Blackmagic card or something similar) and never get it near HDV again. I had nothing but misery working with HDV and I’m willing to pay the price in increased file sizes for the peace of mind.

Arthur Vibert

[Steve Connor]

Randy,

I note you have a Kona 2 card. Simply create an 8 or 10 bit Uncompressed 1080i HD timeline, if your X-Serve can hadle the datarate, and drop in the finished HDV sequence. If both are set to anamorphic, the aspect ratio works fine, you can then render the timeline and output via HD-SDI to an HDCam or D5 Deck. Quality is great and has the added bonus of making any titles or graphics look a little better.

I know some people have noted an issue with levels on HDV, but so far when we have mastered back to HDV, it hasn’t happened. Probably more luck than judgement.

Steve Connor
Cardinal HD

[Randy]

Steve, In the same way can I create a DV timeline, copy the HDV timeline into it, resize to fit the 720×486 format then output to DV? I’ve got to get a DVD master out Monday for replication and unfortunatel don’t have time to locate a deck to rent. Thanks for your help.

[Graeme Nattress]

Sure, use easy setup, make a NTSC DV timeline, and put the HDV timeline in it. Make sure it’s got high quality scaling on, and render, and wait…. Should work fine.

However, for DVD mastering, you’re only loosing quality going to tape! Why not make your DVD MPEG 2 direct from the HDV timeline’s quicktime movie and get better quality??

BTW, digital video has no, never has, never will have any form of “setup”. See https://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/video_levels_nattress.html for more info.

Graeme

– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP

[Steve Connor]

Just create an anamorphic DV timeline, you don’t have to resize it as FCP is very clever, however field order is wrong as HDV is upper and DV is lower. There’s probably a better way of doing it, but I apply the “shift fields” filter to the imported sequence, then render away!

I still can’t think why your .m2v would look bad from your HDV timeline!

Steve Connor
Cardinal HD

[Randy]

The ONLY reason I would go to DV is to get a tape that our SONIC DVD system can hardware compress a MPEG2 movie from as I’ve not been able to get a clean MPEG2 out of the timeline. If someone could give me specific procedures/settings for getting an MPEG2 out of the timeline I would be in heaven! It just has to be a SD DVD movie at 16×9 that would show as letterbox on 4×3 systems. If you can tell me how to do that I’ll send you a gift certificate for a steak dinner! 🙂

[Gary Adcock]

[David Roth Weiss] “Either D5 (Panasonic) or HDCAM (Sony). These are the major competing flavors of true high definition. Where are you located? If you’re in a big city you should be able to find a facility that can output for you from your finished project off a hard drive.”

Funny, the workflow the largest number of people are using for HDV content is to convert it to 1080|60 DVCPROHD, so that they can get true I-frame available edits and at a data rate not much larger (between 10-20%) than the Native FW based HDV content.
No renders back to tape no issues with levels clamping.

and for the record the D5 is not an HD format, it is a post tape format, the 2 most common true HD acquisition formats are Sony’s HDCam and Panasonic’s Varicam ( which uses the DVCProHD compression to tape). The Viper , Genesis and other formats are used less for HD acquisition and more for Film “replacement”

Gary Adcock
Studio37
HD and Film Consultation
Chicago, IL USA