• Blackmagic Design

  Here’s one for the cross-platformers

  Posted by Baz Leffler on September 6, 2007 at 12:13 am

  I have been commissioned to master a series shot on HDV and off line edited using FCP as native HDV. The final product has to be mastered out to HDCAM 1080 50i.

  I have both FCP on a PowerPC G5 (non intel) and Prem CS3 on Win XP but only my Prem CS3 is HDCAM compatible using a Multibridge Extreme. At this stage I don’t have the budget to build a new HDCAM FCP system.

  So I load up the HDV FCP project and do all the finalising including titling and colorgrading (audio splits out as OMF to the sound boys) and everything looks good.

  Now I need to move it over to PPro CS3 on the PC as a finished program for HDCAM mastering but I don’t want FCP to go back out to HDV tape as that would be another stage of compression.

  I loaded up the BMD codecs onto the FCP and exported as BMD uncompressed 10 bit 4:2:2 quicktime. I then moved the final mov onto the raid drive of the PC where I do lots of HDCAM capture and playback so I know its more than fast enough.

  When I import the mov into PPro CS3 using a BMD 1920×1080 50i project setting it comes in just fine. When I put it on the timeline it show as NOT needing rendering (no red bar). When I place the cti on any part of it it shows the output correctly on the HD monitor etc. But when I try to play it runs for a few seconds and then stalls as if it can’t handle the data rate. If I force a render it plays just fine. Now remember that this ‘render’ is also ‘uncompressed 10 bit 4:2:2’ so it definitely is NOT a hard drive problem; it seems more to be ‘something’ cannot extract the data out of the quicktime file as fast as it is needed.

  So as an alternative I tried exporting out of FCP via compressor to an MGEG 2 elementry stream with native frame rate/size. When I put this file into CS3 it plays fine and in realtime it is able to go out direct to HDCAM but of course it has been compressed and shows a slight loss of horizontal detail when I use a multiburst test signal (not to mention the added motion artifacting).

  Can anyone here shed any light on this ‘shows as realtime’ in CS3 but ‘just can’t hack it’ when playing?

  For the moment I am living with the force render workaround so at least I am avoiding extra compression but it seems unnecessary as I am rendering a 1920×1080 uncompressed file to a 1920×1080 uncompressed file; just changing the wrapper.

  The sad part about all this is that the FCP route does not allow 1920×1080 uncompressed avi creation thru any of its options including Compressor (please correct me here if I am wrong). In fact the only reference FCP makes about avi creation is “avi is now a defunct microsoft format”. Defunct? Where are these Apple people working from? A basement somewhere in the USA where there are no ‘windows’ to look out of? And what makes matters worse, the only avi you can make is a ‘DV avi’ which from what I understand is SD only.

  Do Apple people really hate PC people that much?

  Baz

  What would I do without the ‘UNDO’ button!!!!

  Baz Leffler replied 18 years, 8 months ago 1 Member · 0 Replies
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