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How does apple distinguish DV25?
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Don’t go assuming, Brett. Re-read my previous description; the flow, once it reaches the FCP workstation at the home base, is analog NTSC SD coming out of the Io, thru ten feet of BNC over to the uplink rack, where it goes up analog Ku, and there is NO editing, further transcoding, or graphics work being done to it.
Stations pull this down from the bird and only THEN do they perform whatever unholy rites they want to upon it. And this is the norm for news operations, frankly, it’s a step UP in resolution from multiple generations of analog they are used to, they’re getting it at least one analog generation cleaner than the old betacam chain. From initial shoot to the satellite uplink, there has been only one digital to analog conversion, in real time, playing out of the io. The footage has been DV25, then compressed to h.264/mpeg4. for transport.
The editing system is not being used for editing in this setup at all, just as a media player station and reception point for the FTP feed. FTP is not like streaming. Streaming is immediate but lossy, FTP is slower but a bit for bit copy of the uploaded file.
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Now it all makes sense. Better late than never to get a proper description of the workflow.
So what easy set up in FCP lets you play H264 without render?
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None that I know of, I stumbled onto that by accident one day when I wasn’t paying attention what source files I was importing. I grabbed a picon in the bin of identical-looking footage that had been compressed to h.264 to burn to a disk for a client approval session, threw it on the timeline of an 8-bit or 10-bit thing I was editing, and it played. Only when I tried to edit with it did it start to choke a bit, but if I just left it alone and only played it, it played all right. And the monitors on the analog spigot end of the Ajas Io were happy with it.
But I really don’t know enough about this. Yet. That’s the point of the exercise, to pilot this a bit and see if it can work simply and reliably enough to cancel a week’s worth of expensive Ku uplink truck rentals, just to get the raw pics into the air. Maybe it won’t work, maybe there’s hidden pitfalls here and there. That’s good to learn as well. Dreaming up new ways to do stuff better, faster, yet cheaper, is part of what I do to keep from going nuts on the job. I’ve got about six weeks to come up with a proof of concept, on a zero budget, with whatever we have off the shelf here. If it works, I’ve saved twelve grand or more.
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No, I understood your workflow perfectly both times. Comment stands. You’re handing out lossy h.264 files for others to edit, reencode, etc. AND you’re taking them analog in the process. Guess I missed that part. What part of this is better than a couple passes of uncompressed component analog?
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Hi Mark,
If you have already tried playing h264 from the FC time-line, I think there is not problem at all to do what you want.
Just one thing: Don’t use I’Movie. You can do it better with QT Player (QT Pro).
With I’Movie:
– You are not capturing QT DV (.mov), but DV Stream (.DV).
– You loose the TC on capturing.
– You end up with a clip per shoot done.
I think you can do it better with QT.
You can capture your DV footage the same that you would do t with FC (QT Video Recorder).
To make a simple editing (cleaning footage or selecting shoots) you don’t need nothing else.
You end up with a DV.mov that you can save as a Reference movie or export to h264 or any other codec.
If its works well the h264 just go.
Another advantage of the QT way is that you end up with all the footage in your HD ready for further editing in FC.
hope this helps.
rafael -
[Mark Suszko] “if it takes 30 minutes or so to upload fifteen minute’s worth of feed cleanly, “
From a hotel internet connection??? Not gonna happen!
You don’t need to travel to a third world country to test this out. Spend a hundred bucks and check into
your local Holiday Inn and test your workflow. I think you’ll be shocked at how slow it goes.Frankly, your plan is DOOMED! Theoretically, maybe. Practically? No way.
Mark
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Rafael, you’re a mensch; this is good info. I had not considered working in Quicktime Pro because I couldn’t imagine a way to get the footage into it. You’ve opened up some new possibilities with this tip, and I appreciate the distinction you pointed out.
I just found out that in a week or two, I’m going on a shoot in the area our guy would be filing these uploads from. I’ll try to take a laptop pre-loaded with an h.264 file out there with me and see just how tough or easy this might be to pull off. I’ll also look into the elgato encoder device that was mentioned, it looks interesting but there may be no budget for getting one unless I buy it out of pocket.
As far as the gnashing of teeth and wailing about corrupting my footage with this process, I can only say that I think h.264 looks gorgeous on playback. looks as good to my eye as mpeg 2 at about half the file size. I’m not making anybody on the final user end play it or edit with mpeg4, I want to make that clear. The final user is getting an analog broadcast in NTSC standard def, which they then may ingest and edit as they please.
If you don’t ever work in or for news, I can see why you might raise an eyebrow at this workflow. It is not anything like what we would do for most production. But you have to understand, the rules are a little different in spot news; the timeliness and relevance of footage comes first, the quality second. Sometimes a distant second.
Cable news outfits will play stuttery camera-phone footage of an event, if that’s all they have of the event. They will uprez and play a youtube stream, if they can’t get the original footage. They still request 2nd generation betaSP dubs over lossless cloned DVCpro25 originals, this I have seen with my own eyes. They jam SD footage thru an upconverter to make it HD all the time. Is any of this optimal, of course not. Is it done everyday to footage you have no problem consuming without thinking on the TV at home? Absolutely.
But this is the point of the whole exercise, to do a pathfinder test, try something theoretical in a real-world setting. I may come home chastened with my tail between my legs. I may come home riding an elephant. Either way it will be fun to try. I’ll report back after a test, either way, so we can get the I-told-you-so’s all happy. Meanwhile if anybody else has some additional technical advice to add, I’ll keep an ear open. Thanks for your time.
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Hi Mark,
Few years ago we edited news with two Betacam and a Tektronick in the middle.
Almost everything that was not Betacam was labeled: “Archive”, “Domestic video”, etc.
Today there are not standards of quality in News.
I think that your workflow can works. There is nothing wrong with h264 unless you try to edit it in FC.
FC is not ready yet.
You just need to find the optimal data rate for your compression. For SD NTSC I would try around 1Mbps.
Testing times.
Please reports your experience with this workflow.
I’m not in the world of the news any more, but we never know where the life will bring us.
Best,
rafael -
Update. Took my ibook in to work today, running iMovieHD. We hooked up firewire to a shoebox Panny HD deck and imovie HD said it saw the deck (though it called the deck a camera), I could even command it to play, rewind and fast-forward, but no picture. We were playing SD DVCpro tape in the Panny, which is able to play that normally. But imovieHD told me the video coming in was half-size and it couldn’t deal with it. We spent an hour futzing with settings and menus, trying to get an output setting that the laptop would see, to no avail. This doesn’t mean the end of the experiment though, just that I need more research on setting up that deck, and perhaps w’ll wind up renting a brawnier macbook pro with FCP for the week. This is still all about relative costs, so when I find out how much for the laptop rental, that may be the end of things right there, or it may spur further research.
If you have ideas about what settings to put on the panny shoebox deck, let me hear from you.
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