HDV timelines

[Brett Howe]

Great question Danny!

I too am interested in nutting out the best HDV workflow. Maybe it’s time BM put an HDV FAQ info page up for premiere, vegas and Final cut users.

I’d like to have a couple of Premiere suites cutting native (or cineform)HDV from Z1’s via firewire, and one machine with a BM HD card outputting via SDI, in HD or SD. The appeal for me is being able to offline on say a laptop, native HDV, then simply play this timeline out of the BM card on the desktop machine.

I’m sure somebody on this forum has the answers.

Thanks in advance

Brett

[Kristian Lam]

Hi

Begin a new 1920 x 1080 HD project and select the HDV device from the settings tab in the capture window.
HDV material will then scale and playback in realtime on an uncompressed timeline.

Any further questions email – pcsupport@blackmagic-design.com

[Brett Howe]

Thanks for the quick feedback!

This seems to be a different workflow.

If I was to setup a premiere project on a “non blackmagic” machine, I would use either Native HDV, or cineform.

Can this timeline be opened on a michine with BM and output?

Or do I do as stated in your post, then import the sequence into the new project?

cheers

Brett

[Mihail Angelov]

There is a HDV BMD Easy Preset for FCP user,even if you use SD deklink card you can see the video downconverted to SD ot your TV monitor in realtime.

[Brett Howe]

Sounds great!

Anybody know if this feature is available for PC (premiere pro)?

Also…possibly a bit off topic, but do u know of a Component HD to HDV converter?

Cheers

Brett

[Tvchimp]

Many thanks for replies guys
Okay so ive got original 1440 footage now on a fully uncompressed bm timeline at 1920 etc.
Now i want to put at back onto the sony z1 as a 1440 x 1080 compostion. How do I achieve this
Danny

[Stewart Mayer]

I just saw this post, and a little late, but thought I’d answer. I just finished a project like this. Shot with Z1, and then just started a 1080i Black Magic project in Premier Pro 2.0 and was able to batch capture the native hdv files just like i was in a HDV project.

Actually, my first time I had captured footage in a HDV project, and then imported that project into a new Blackmagic project, that worked too.

It is great because you get real monitoring of the HDV footage. But there are a couple bugs, although the HDV footage plays back in real time on the timeline, there is still a red “render me” line above all the footage, so if you want to render a disolve or an effect you have to make sure only that area is selected for rendering or you’d be needlessly rendering everything. Also, 24p footage on a 24p timeline plays back funny (I had shot it with my XL-H1), the fields are reversed on output when the “introduce 3:2 pulldown on playback” option is selected in the control panel for support of HDTVs that only support 1080i. Also, my audio looses sync with realtime playback after a while, I think my machine is borderline able to support the realtime playback, I’ve got a dual 3ghz zeon nocona system. It takes a lot of horsepower to stretch the 1440 to 1080 in realtime.

I think it would be great if blackmagic could take advantage of Nvidia’s pure-video processing technology, offload the MPEG-2 decoding to the video card, that would be great. I mentioned this to tech support once, and they responded that HDV was actually Mpeg4, but I did more research and that was incorrect, it is mpeg2, and indeed the Nvidia purevideo is made to decode HD.

Anyway, hope this gives you some info you needed.

My HD project was an hour and a half long and the biggest problem was outputting and down converting. I ended up outputting the whole thing to a master file at 1440×1080 using Huf lossless compression which is free to download off the internet. Then I used virtualdub (also free to download) to downconvert to SD size and did a little vertical blurring to get rid of interlace flicer. Then used that outputted file to convert to DVD. I’m adding this info because it took me about two weeks of frustration to find the best method. After effects 7.0 would crash after about 16 hours of downconverting, and I wasn’t pleased with the quality of Premiere Pro’s downconvert. Virtualdub is awesome.

stewart

[Brett Howe]

thanks for your input stewart. Very interesting.

I’m surprised you machine won’t keep up. PPRo is multi-threaded and your 2 xeons should well be up to the task I would have thought!

A question. If you were to save this project (a final edit)…would the whole thing render? I have done a few HDV tests in pro2 and Generation loss is an ussue. I would be reluctant to render the whole project.

Any ideas?

[Stewart Mayer]

The audio out of sync issue only occurs after a few minutes from within a blackmagic hd project, audio sync works fine from within a HDV project. The issue is that in a Blackmagic project the image needs to be resized to 1920 from 1440 by the CPUs so that the output card can provide realtime monitoring. It isn’t really an issue though since I render out a master file when finished.

Generation loss is a problem in HDV projects, but not in Blackmagic projects, as far as I can tell. Although the source footage is HDV, anytime something is rendered in a Blackmagic project the rendering is done uncompressed. I think this is better than cineform since your source footage is exactly what the camera captured, and your rendering is all uncompressed. Kind of the best of both worlds.

Hopefully Blackmagic will release an update to the drivers soon to fix the little problems they’ve got, and maybe increase performance.

[Brett Howe]

Hi Stewart.

I’m just about to take the plunge and buy the blackmagic HD extreme. Just looked up this last thread we had, as I check the current issues, so I can head them off at the pass. I’ve got a couple of questions for you if you have the time.

1./
So we established that HDV can play off the full res BM timeline. The BM website states “Premiere Pro 1.5.1 and 2.0 can capture HDV via Firewire and then transcode the video to an uncompressed Blackmagic 8 or 10 bit timeline. Once the transcoding process has completed, you can edit the video and audio and then play it out as uncompressed video through your DeckLink HD series card. I’m not entirely clear on the “Transcoding” …any clues?

2./
It seams to me the feasability of offlining in native HDV for the early, and rough cuts is practical, as I can import this premiere project into a BM project…is this correct?

3./
Sounds like you are monitoring in HD. You mentioned you had down-conversion issues. Can we live monitor in SD (SDI or Component)?

4./
Have you had any joy sorting your sync issues. If my above question is yes, are there sync issues in SD?

Basically I’ve got to build a box for the card to live in, and although I don’t want to fly too close to the wire, I don’t have an unlimited budget….it seems like only last week I built my last edit suite.