HDV: A clear and present danger.

[Steve Freebairn]

That is why Panasonic’s HVX200 is going to be a really sweet camera. Everyone should put in a feature request with Premiere to support MXF so that we can edit P2 footage in Premiere Pro. Here’s the link for the feature request. https://www.adobe.com/support/feature.html

[Aaron Strader]

I assume you’re referring to what something like the cineform codec is going to do with your footage. This won’t always be the case. We’re real early in the development of HDV. Within a few months we’ll have decent hardware rendering solutions that will process HDV footage in realtime just like you get with DV.

Matrox has already announced that the Axio will feature this on it’s next driver set, which should be along before the end of the year.

https://www.matrox.com/video/press/releases/hdv_dvcpro_hd_editing.cfm

I’d bet good money that it won’t stop there. I would imagine realtime HDV decoder cards will get very big soon.

-Aaron

https://www.stopfcc.com/
Knock it off! I like my radio and television the way it is…

[Tim Kolb]

[Martin Munthe] “Until there’s a solution that actually just copys the HDV stream or blocks stream that are not 1×1 compared to the camera original I will loose a lot of sleep. As of now the solution rests solely on CPU interpretation. That means that if you have a slow system you’ll get crappy quality and if you have a fast system you’ll get good quality. And if you have a super fast system and you run into a sudden unexpected bottle neck – like in all super fast systems – something will probably happen to your footage at the point of the bottleneck. Which in turn means that all HDV data has to be monitored by the human eye and we have to hope that the stream is OK. Scary thought. I’d just like to transfer whats on my tapes as I would using DV. But that won’t happen in long GOP land.”

…I don’t follow this. What is “1×1 compared to the camera original”? Also, I’m not sure what you mean by a slow system producing crappy quality…a slow system will either take significant time to render, or if it’s too slow, just simply won’t do HDV editing at all depending on what solution you’re using…

“…if you have a super fast system and you run into a sudden unexpected bottle neck – like in all super fast systems – something will probably happen to your footage at the point of the bottleneck.” What does that mean? Have you worked with HDV? On what system? What “bottleneck” are you referring to? I assume from the word “probably” that this is mostly conjecture?

Sorry…I just don’t see a question…or knowledge based on experience to share in this post. Am I missing something?

TimK,

Kolb Syverson Communications,
Creative Cow Host,
2004-2005 NAB Post Production Conference
Premiere Pro Technical Chair,
Author, “The Easy Guide to Premiere Pro” http://www.focalpress.com
“Premiere Pro Fast Track DVD Series” http://www.classondemand.net

[Ron Shook]

Aaron,

[Aaron Strader] “This won’t always be the case. We’re real early in the development of HDV. Within a few months we’ll have decent hardware rendering solutions that will process HDV footage in realtime just like you get with DV.

Matrox has already announced that the Axio will feature this on it’s next driver set, which should be along before the end of the year.”

This could be confusing to some folks in that they could get the implication that Axio will be able to output HDV back in real-time to deck or camera. That’ll still be a render, though a render that I suspect will be hardware accellerated. It’ll be interesting to see if it’s a smart render. What Axio will do with the next set of drivers, as I understand it, is decode the HDV using the hardware, so that HDV can be kept in it’s small native format on the hard drive, yet the editing and monitoring experience will be just as real-time as before using a not-GOP intermediate format in the 8 or 10 bit color space. If you want to output to another format this will happen in RT, but back to HDV will still involve a render.

[Aaron Strader] “I’d bet good money that it won’t stop there. I would imagine realtime HDV decoder cards will get very big soon.”

The holy grail is realtime HDV encoder hardware.

Ron Shook

[Aaron Strader]

I don’t quite understand the bottleneck theory either.

I have to be able to promise certain levels of ability in the systems I build and the Axio is showing strong numbers on throughput on benchmarks, and crashes are pretty slim on occuring for me.

Same thing with Video Toasters. Those need a lot of hard drive capability, and they run pretty much off the processors. Again, I don’t see “bottlenecks” as an issue when your system has been put together in the correct manner.

As for the Axio not being able to output, until I try it in person, I don’t know for sure. If it has the hardware to be able to bring the MPEG2 in, in realtime, I don’t know why it couldn’t output it as well.

We’re talking about a system that can capture and output MPEG-2 IFrame in HD resolution at realtime as well.

At the very least, I would expect it to accelerate the output. Again this is going to be running on the hardware supported codec, and not a cineform situation like what we have currently.

[Larry Sherwood]

In version 1.5, Axio will need to render HDV out to Uncompressed AVI before you can print to tape, further developments as they occur . . .

LS

Larry Sherwood
Sherwood Post Production
Austin, Texas
512 219-8721
larry@sherwoodpost.com

[Martin Munthe]

Tim. My experience is that when I capture HDV on a fast machine I get good quality video. 1×1 “clone” of what my camera produces. And when I capture HDV on a slower machine I get strange behavior and quality loss. Sometimes very obvious and sometimes not as obvious. That all reminds me of working with analog sources. It may be a good capture and it may not. Let’s hope it’s good. And I don’t want “hope” to be in the picture. I want Premiere Pro to tell me something’s gone wrong when it has. If something happens to my twelve frames of long GOP limbo that’s a software interpretation and my eyes won’t see it in editing – I’m going to have a rude awakening in After Effects when I start to tweak all that file of missing information.

Martin Munthe
DP | Director
https://www.operafilm.com/edit.html

[Tim Kolb]

[Martin Munthe] “My experience is that when I capture HDV on a fast machine I get good quality video. 1×1 “clone” of what my camera produces. And when I capture HDV on a slower machine I get strange behavior and quality loss. Sometimes very obvious and sometimes not as obvious.”

Hi Martin

Are we talking about capture through Premiere Pro (then converting to CineForm HD either via the 1.5.1 software itself or with the Aspect plugin…)?

What sorts of quality loss are you seeing? Are there typically lost frames reported on the slower machine…and what sort of machine are we talking about?

I would think there might be some issues with manipulating the stuff on a slower machine…but the artifacts you would see in playback might be from the machine just being overwhelmed, not necessarily the footage itself…

The CineForm codec hasn’t given me any surprises in AE (knock on wood) but I could see where an HDV MPEGTS file might…

TimK,

Kolb Syverson Communications,
Creative Cow Host,
2004-2005 NAB Post Production Conference
Premiere Pro Technical Chair,
Author, “The Easy Guide to Premiere Pro” http://www.focalpress.com
“Premiere Pro Fast Track DVD Series” http://www.classondemand.net