HDV edit to DigiBeta master?

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Chris,

I’m guessing you are working in PAL frame rates. So just capture your HDV material in to Final Cut Pro and drop it in to a Blackmagic HDTV 1080i50 HDV timeline by using the associated easy setup. Your DeckLink Extreme will automatically down convert the material to PAL and you can preview this on your SD broadcast monitor to see how it will look. The DeckLink PrefPane provides the choice of Letterbox or Anamorphic down conversion and the results should be excellent. Please be aware that when you finally go to record your down converted HDV material to tape, there will be a lengthy conforming process before the SD video is recorded to tape. This is a current working of the HDV format in FCP and is nothing to do with the down conversion.

If you run in to any problems at all, you could always switch the output of the HDV camera to DV. Then use FCP to capture to DV and output that with the DeckLink Extreme. However we’ve tested the workflow that you want to use and it works just fine.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Chris Davies]

Hi Luke,

Thanks for the quick reply.

Why use the Blackmagic HDTV 1080i50 sequence instead of a native HDV one? Presumably the conform is from HDV to HDTV 1080i50? It seems like a long way round to go to SD.

Regards,

Chris

[Steve Connor]

Same thing – the Blackmagic bit gives you the monitoring out!

Steve Connor
Cardinal HD

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[Luke Maslen]

Hi Chris,

[Chris Davies] “Why use the Blackmagic HDTV 1080i50 sequence instead of a native HDV one?”

The Blackmagic HDTV 1080i50 HDV easy setup is using the native HDV sequence. It just configures the video to output via HD-SDI and also to use Blackmagic RS-422 device control for the deck.

It is invoking Apple’s HDV format and just routing it out via your DeckLink card.

Actually there is a lot going on with the compressed HDV 1440 x 1080 video (which you captured via FireWire) being decompressed and scaled to 1920 x 1080 for uncompressed output and also down converted from HDTV 1080i50 to PAL at the same time! It’s pretty powerful technology.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Chris Davies]

Thanks Luke, I’ll give it a go.

It’s all “Black Magic” to me!

Chris

[Jaketenniel]

Hi all

I have the same situation arising as Chris – Mostly HDV footage+some Beta SP. I need to Create A Digi Beta Master.
All my HDV footage has been captured by Firewire. I’ve since been told by a blackmagic reseller that I’ll lose significant quility by trying to Master to DigiBeta via the decklink. So much quality that I shouldn’t even bother trying. How true is this?

What’s the best workflow to keep maximum quality?

Should I Drop my final Picture locked sequence into an uncompressed Blackmagic Timeline, do grading, effects & titles here to keep quality, then layoff to tape? Or am I losing too much quality by doing this?

Do I keep any quality by laying off my Final HDV Sequence via firewire to HDV, then recapturing via component from the Camera (SONY Z1 Downconverted to SD) to an uncompressed blackmagic timeline timeline? Or should I auto-conform my HDV timeline straight into a blackmagic uncompressed timeline via SD componant.

Or am I best to import the whole HDV program into After Effects and render out the entire program to a blackmagic uncompressed codec?

As you can see, I

[Chris Davies]

Hi Jake,

My edit ended up as 90% HDV and 10% DigiBeta. Looked great when output to DigiBeta. This is what I did.

Set up the project using the Easy setup for HDV 1080i. HDV footage was digitised via Firewire. As the vast majority of footage was HDV, this was the “master” sequence setting used.

The DigiBeta footage was digitised into a seperate project via SDI (I’m using a Decklink Extreme card). The capture preset was Blackmagic 10bit uncompressed. This was all trimmed up (with appropriate handles) and put in a 720 x 576 CCIR 601, Anamorphic 16:9 Uncompressed 10bit sequence.

Then export the whole sequence as a Quicktime Movie with Settings set to HDV 1080i.

Import this QT movie into the HDV project and it will drop right into your HDV sequence.

When you’ve finished editing, you just set the Decklink preferences to output HD to anamorphic SD via SDI (if you haven’t already got it set this way for monitoring). As Luke said earlier: “The Blackmagic HDTV 1080i50 HDV easy setup is using the native HDV sequence. It just configures the video to output via HD-SDI and also to use Blackmagic RS-422 device control for the deck” so that would set everything for you at one go.

Anyway it all worked like a charm and looked great. The Digibeta material didn’t show any ill effects from its trip to HDV and back.

I think your reseller is confusing himself with the different resolutions of HDV & SD. He probably wants you to produce an HDV or other flavour of HD master, which would be higher “quality” (i.e resolution) than DigiBeta, but that isn’t what you need to end up with.

Hope this helps!

Chris

============

Chris Davies
THETA PRODUCTIONS, UK
http://www.ThetaProductions.com
http://www.ChrisWDavies.com

“I am not young enough to know everything” – J. M. Barrie

[Jaketenniel]

Hi Chris

I’m glad it worked out good for you. It’s good to hear as I was afriad that I’d be losing quality through generation loss of HDV to Digi Beta by putting it in a new uncompressed timeline which would mean a shift of feilds and a Render before anything else. But if it works keeping it all HDV, then great.

Did your graphcis and name straps all keep thier quality too?

I’m not Mastering for a couple of weeks, so thanks for boosting my confidence

Jake

[Arwa Merchant]

Hello Luke I’ve been following your thread with Chris Davies from the UK and has been really quite helpful. Thank You.
Well, I’m trying to output my native HDV sequence to digibeta, which is at present in a Black Magic HDTV 1080i50 – HDV easy setup sequence.
I have a Decklink Plus card and unfortunately, I cant get a video output. I’m getting audio through my SDI cable, but no video. I made sure that video playback is set to BlackMagic HDTV 25Hz – 10bit (1920×1080).
I’m set to all frames in FCP. In the Decklink prefpane “all outputs are active”. And i can’t think of why this would not output. My Digibeta deck is also set corrctly to accept SDI.
Oh yes, here’s something interesting, when I hit play on the timeline and record on my deck, it’ll record the audio, but when I print to video, I dont get audio nor video recorded.

Please do let me know, if you or anyone else can think of why I can’t get an output. Thank You.

[Mark Cookman]

I had an HDV – SDI problem recently and the solution was system preferences > BMDDecklink> HDTV up/down converter