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HDCam / DVCPro HD in Post
Hi There,
I’ve just completed two short films, using HD for the first time, one on HDCam the other on DVCPro HD.
Now that i’ve gone through the process, looking back there are a couple of niggling issues, any advice or info would be great.
First off using DVCPro HD, Shot on a Varicam with 35mm lens adapter, we captured the footage into FCP via Firewire, everything was fine once we got our heads around the deck, capturing at 60p and dropping into a 25p timeline [the original shooting framerate]although we found that on a couple of the tapes, FCP decided to remove the wrong frames when in 25p, which gave a stuttered look ???, adjusting the capture in and out points, and re capturing solved the problem, but is this normal ?
Also the Data rates were around 13/14 but my understanding is that DVCPro HD should be at a rate of about 100, so were we missing something, or is this a limit on capturing via Firewire ?
HDCam and PsF,[shot on a HDW750] ok so i looked at the footage for the first time and was disappointed, it looks kinda interlaced to me, when graded it was better, but nothing like the DVCPro Progressive, what can be done about this ? any tricks or plugins, is it just a case of running it through something like magic bullet ??
Our next task was downconverting to SD for Digibeta laybacks and DVD’s, now the DVCPro footage looked equally amazing downconverted, now this obviously had the added help from shooting on 35mm primes, but i’m just wondering if there is an optimal process for shooting HD for downconversion, it seems that with the HDCam shot with a CineZoom, it ended up looking like Digibeta, and when i’ve shoot on a HVX200 it looks kinda like DV downconverted, now this is all about lenses, but with the added boken of using 35mm primes or shooing long lense on a zoom really helps retain detail in the foreground, is this something to do with the way the codec is working ?? and is it actually benifical to shoot HD for downconversion ??
Any thought much appreciated
Eddie
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2 Replies
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[Steve Chrome] “Also the Data rates were around 13/14 but my understanding is that DVCPro HD should be at a rate of about 100, so were we missing something, or is this a limit on capturing via Firewire ?”
This is the only thing I can comment on as I don’t deal with PAL formats (25P) and haven’t dealt with HDCAM original footage.
The data rate for DVCPRO HD is 100mbps (megaBITS) which works out to about 12-13 MB/s (megaBYTES)…for 720p 59.94 material. When you work with it at 720p 23.98, you get down to 6MB/s…less fps. DV is also called DV25 for it is 25mbps, but about 4MB/s. There is a factor of x6 in there somewhere. I am not a math guy nor engineer…but it seems to work out.
Shane
Littlefrog Post
http://www.lfhd.net -
Cheers Shane,
It hadn’t crossed my mind that they were two different scales, i should pay more attention in class..
i just wasn’t sure if we had fully utilized all the information the camera had recorded capturing through firewire, as people at the time kept saying that we need to capture via HD SDI, but i presume doing it that way would effectively be a hardware uprez and not actually gaining any more information from the original tapes.
Eddie
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