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HDV into ProRes 422?
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At NAB I showed the AJA Io HD, and it was qualified by AJA to work with any intel Mac. We showed it on a dual 2 core MPB 17″… Pro Res is larger than DVCPROHD but smaller than uncompressed 8 bit. It’s a 10 bit codec I believe.
I’m sure with an AJA box a MBP will work…. the MXO will work with Pro Res too I hear from Matrox. with that and an Io HD, you could capture uncompressed hd from the set and view it externally on a 23″ Cinema display.
SD Pro res is about the same data rate as DVCPROHD. 10 bit though, and comes in two flavors SD and HQ SD…
Jerry
Apple Certified Trainer
Author: “Jerry Hofmann on Final Cut Pro 4” Click here
Dual 2 gig G5, AJA Kona SD, AJA Kona 2, Huge Systems Array UL3D
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[gary adcock] “Firewire is a data transfer Only – and no it will not work, not in real time.
You would be able to transcode after the fact, but that would defeat the purpose of having a TRUE 10bit codec since all of the FW captured footage would be 8bit compressed.”You don’t get TRUE 10-bit from HDV period. Whether you use FW and transcode or use a FW to SDI converter (or an HDMI to SDI converter) – the end result is the same (barring any quality differences between the encoders).
Sean
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[Graeme Nattress] “Just stick it on a FW drive, take it roud to Walter’s studio and say, “Can you master this out for me?”, which you do for a reasonable $ fee and everyone’s happy.”
Graeme, how would one go about mastering it out? Does this mean transcoding again? Sorry if this is a dumb question.
James
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[Jerry Hofmann] “But you’ll be needing a way to capture without FW involved for the best workflow… you need an HD capture card”
Jerry, I’m confused. Are you saying there’s a boost in quality if HDV is captured via a capture card, as opposed to FW? I thought HDV via FW is the best HDV gets. Is that incorrect?
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FW is as good as it gets.
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP
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It would mean just playing out of the timeline, over HD-SDI via, say, a kona card, to a mastering deck. The deck too uses compression, but milder and it does it all itself in hardware.
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP
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No HDV isn’t going to be better in Pro Res. however anything else you add to the sequence will be better… i.e. graphics, titles, stills from digital cameras etc… HDV also takes a huge amount of overhead to edit natively with too. i.e. render times are pretty awful. Pro Res would be faster there too.
You would need a capture card though to translate either SDI or analog outs from an HDV deck/camera to the pro res codec if you want to capture it on the fly. An Io HD would also do the job for you…Otherwise, you’d have to transcode to it after you capture it via firewire natively…
Jerry
Apple Certified Trainer
Author: “Jerry Hofmann on Final Cut Pro 4” Click here
Dual 2 gig G5, AJA Kona SD, AJA Kona 2, Huge Systems Array UL3D
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If you capture and edit HDV natively, all cuts-only edits are exactly 100% 1:1 purely identical to the way it existed originally on the tape.
If you are mastering back to HDV (which you shouldn’t do nor have any reason to do), then the quality does not get ANY better than a native workflow. Period. It is as much of a lossless workflow possible. Any conversion means that you will be re-compressing back to HDV format when you master to HDV tape. This is REALLY BAD. One generation of HDV is bad enough. Avoid a 2nd one at all costs.
If you are mastering to another format (which is a normal method of delivery) like HDCam, then there is no reason to keep it HDV. There are several workflow related reasons why it is better to capture and edit Uncompressed (or ProRes) – or at least render your final sequence to an Uncompressed or ProRes timeline. It’s faster to work with, better effects performance, it’s easier to key stuff, color correction works better, etc. But it does NOT improve the quality. It simply does an excellent job at preserving the quality. Since you are not mastering back to HDV, this workflow is not going to hurt the picture quality. However, if you were to capture ProRes and master back to HDV, that would be a big mistake unless you are applying effects to the entire project (like color correcting). If that’s the case, it doesn’t make a difference. But none of this should matter since you should never want to nor have any reason to master a project to HDV. You might as well just burn a DVD and deliver that.
Sean
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I think the optimum solution though, would be to edit native HDV on a ProPres timeline. Then you’ll be rendering to ProRes rather than HDV and you avoid a lossy transcode step.
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP
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I think the optimum solution is an Io HD capturing the HDV to Pro Res… no rendering at all that way, and I’ll bet that the picture quality will be just as good or better I’d think.
Jerry
Apple Certified Trainer
Author: “Jerry Hofmann on Final Cut Pro 4” Click here
Dual 2 gig G5, AJA Kona SD, AJA Kona 2, Huge Systems Array UL3D
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