-
HDV footage taking forever to preview
-
Yeah thanks for catching that. I was working on about 4 hours of sleep when I posted!
-
Personally (and others will disagree I’m sure) you are up against a cluster#$&^ of two major headaches – HDV and Premiere, both of which pretend to be “professional” solutions but neither of which really deliver. And while Dynamic Link sounds like such a great idea, I have seen literally hundreds of posts on the various boards with problems arising from DL. A typical workflow, which involves editing until you have final cut, and THEN moving to AE for post, should help clear up some issues you may be facing.
You don’t need HDCAM to get good HD. the Panasonic HVX200 is around $6k, shoots nice, clean HD, offers 4:2:2 sampling and is very easy to work with.
You also might consider bumping up to a Mac Pro with Final Cut Studio, which will immediately make your HD workflow easier and enable you to work with better formats like DVCPRO HD.
-
I’ll wait for your check in the mail! ;D
I’ve used Dynamic Link for single shots. It doesn’t seem to work for entire timelines, which is too bad. But I’ve gotten some graphic work done with Dynamic Link back and forth from PP2 and AE on single shots that was very helpful.
I’ve been told to use Automatic Duck to take an entire timeline into AE smoothly as well, but since there is no plugin for Premiere to After Effects, I have to assume it’s “just supposed to work” because they’re the same company. Smooth workflow, and all that.I don’t think I’ve ever had any problems working with HDV in Premiere, it’s just been a challenge to export on certain occasions. Like I said, I’ve got the youtube quality and the mpeg2 for dvd exports down pretty much, but anything else is just frustrating. But I chalk that up to never being taught ANYTHING about compression or exporting in school and everything I know has been figuring it out myself or working with other people who don’t know jack about it and figuring it out together. Since there are so many variables, if you don’t know what anything means or does to the video, then changing them all around on a guess really isn’t moving forward. It’s like trying to guess a safe combination. Too many options to choose from.
… but back to the subject, I’m waiting for a different export to finish for a different project that I thought I’d try. In the meantime, I tried a Windows Bitmap export, as I didn’t immediately find an option for photo jpeg, thinking it would be a similar result. I just ended up with 10204 seperate bmp files…. So I’m going to see if it’s an option in the media encoder under quicktime.
-
It’s…. BRILLIANT!
The photo jpeg is amazing! I got a 2GB file that looks great, and I can pop back and forth on frames in AE and it renders immediately. And it takes like 3 seconds to ram preview at full resolution.
Amazing!
I’d buy you all a drink if I could mail a pint first class.
-
thank steve roberts, he’s the one who turned me on to photojpeg… i’ve only worked with hdv once, but photjpeg was a great help, and i’ve heard many others use this workflow…
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
PhotoJPEG is pretty good, but it IS a distribution codec, not a production codec.
Since you are pulling this footage into AE and presumably plan to manipulate it, you are introducing major quality loss by using this codec, and you may only notice it once you go to render your final work out of AE.
-
beenie is correct, photojpeg is introducing more loss, it would be preferable to go lossless or uncompressed if you can…
however, photojpeg at quality settings above 90 isn’t quite what i would call major quality loss. i would recommend the lossless animation codec, or a photojpeg setting above 95 for footage that will be chroma keyed.
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
The lossless animation codec for exporting out of Premiere? Or from After Effects. I exported it at 100% quality.
Do you know what the lossless animation codec is called?
-
lossless is an option in quicktime… you can export from premiere to go to ae or render from ae to go to premiere (or any other piece of software that can use quicktime, like dvd applications, compression utilities, etc).
apple’s lossless animation codec is as old as the hills (well, as old as quicktime anyway), and is probably the most popular intermediate codec around (by intermediate, i mean go-between codec). it supports millions of colors and alpha channels, and you won’t lose any quality rendering to it over and over again.
so what’s the negative of this wonderful codec? file size and data rate… the files may be smaller than uncompressed (or sometimes the same size), but they will most often be very large and require fast hard disks to play out in realtime.
since ae is not a realtime application, large files (or high datarate files) aren’t a big issue, but when you take them into your nle, you will want to convert them to the codec of other footage that you are using in your nle (no big deal, the nle will convert them at import).
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
OK…after reading this entire thread of very interesting experiences, i thought I’d just add a couple of things for the next time out since the issue seems solved for kimbobob for the moment.
1. After Effects is very well known as not handling inter-frame compression very well as several here have noted. HDV being as large a frame size as it is simply compounds the issue. Each frame in a long GOP MPEG file other than an I-frame has to access information from a preceding frame and B frames need to access a preceding frame and a succeeding frame to be fully realized, hence the mind-numbing speed of response.
2. HDV1 (JVC) is indeed 1280×720 square pixel while HDV2 (Sony Canon) is 1440×1080, 1.333 PAR. If the footage from the Canon or Sony is brought in via HDSDI, it typically has been “up-rez’d” (and most likely transcoded anyway) to 1920×1080 as SDI only handles square pixel material. If it was ingested via FW, it will be the native framesize (and compression).
3. There are several options to handle HDV material in other compression schemes that will play far nicer with video editing and post applications. On a Mac, depending on what the circumstances are of your project or your system, you can edit HDV as uncompressed, or ingest and edit as DVC ProHD (a smaller quality advantage relative to “runnability” advantage) or the shiny, new Pro Res. On the PC side you have the quality leader, CineForm (currently ported to QT and on its way for FCP), or uncompressed. I happen to be on a PC using, what beenyweenies informs us is a hopelessly amateurish editing application, Premiere Pro (I’ll let NATAS, the Chicago Film Festival, and several other organizations know this so they can reclaim the statues they’ve bestowed on me over the years…).
4. Photo JPG is defintely a very runnable format, but as some have pointed out, it does have an image accuracy cost. Animation is very high quality, but creates a large file (though if I was headed for final color correction, a large file, and preferrably 10 bit color precision would be a good thing to my mind.) The other Intermediate codecs i mentioned might be worth a look.
Lots of issues to examine, but basically a balance between compression and filesize is the goal. Too much compression, even at very high quality, leads to processor overwork while the drives coast with very small data throughput requirements, too much filesize removes the strain on the processors but now you need seriously fast storage to accomodate the data rate.
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,Creative Cow Host,
Author/Trainer
http://www.focalpress.com
http://www.classondemand.net
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up