How important is a capture card?

[Jonathan Shohet]

[Brendan Coots] “I’m not trying to argue with you, but this is a debate worth having.”

Same feelings here 🙂
(And although we “hijacked” this thread a bit, I also feel this is debate is relevant to the OP’s question about the importance of a capture card…)

From my posts it’s probably easy to gather that I am a low-budget all-in-one director/photographer/editor/compositor. I guess you are right that if you only work in AE and do not edit as well, uncompressed has less of an overall impact on your system needs.

STILL… for uncompressed you need LOTS of disk space. Even the link you gave mentions that. If you are working on a few minutes in AE, maybe it does make sense to go uncompressed. But what if you are working on a complex project that uses lots of HDV footage?

AND… what AE loads into RAM, it needs to read from disk first. Uncompressed requires more bandwith, therefore disk speed will still have an impact on AE performance. If you do not have the correct hardware, you may just end up moving the bottle neck from the processor to the hard drive.

Yes, I did compare performance in AE between HDV and lossless/uncompressed, with every free codec I could possibly find. As far as I can tell from my own tests, PhotoJpeg at 75% was the best compromise between file size and near lossless quality, and it did not improve AE performance in a noticable way over using HDV.
QT Animation, HuffYUV and Lagarith actually took more time to process than HDV. I am pretty sure that if I had a fast raid-array, and/or a fast codec like Cineform, performance could have been much better.

I’m not saying my tests were scientific or conclusive. All I am saying is, as long as you realize that working with HDV shot footage is a compromise in any case, After Effects CAN “play nicely” with it. Please don’t tell people it CAN’T.

In any case, using reduced-resolution proxies whenever you can, is the best solution for decent performance while working, regardless if your final render will be from HDV or Uncompressed.

with respect,
Jon.

[Ron Lindeboom]

[Jonathan Shohet] “I’m not saying my tests were scientific or conclusive. All I am saying is, as long as you realize that working with HDV shot footage is a compromise in any case, After Effects CAN “play nicely” with it. Please don’t tell people it CAN’T.”

I have stayed out of this to see where it goes but at this point I have to jump in here and say that I do not know a single working professional that works this way.

Disk space is cheap nowadays and I can’t imagine for the life of me a pro putting up with the hassles of working within HDV to do things like compositing in After Effects — which MAY work okay with HDV, but I can think of a myriad places where the GOP intraframe compression is going to bite you.

Just because you “can” do something does not mean that you “should.” I can garden my yard using a teaspoon but I’d rather use something designed for the task.

[Jonathan Shohet] “STILL… for uncompressed you need LOTS of disk space. Even the link you gave mentions that. If you are working on a few minutes in AE, maybe it does make sense to go uncompressed. But what if you are working on a complex project that uses lots of HDV footage?”

This site is for professionals and hobbyists are welcome to visit and learn here but the focus is for pros. To any pro I know of, disks are the cheapest they’ve ever been and are falling steadily all the time.

Many of us remember when we paid the better part of $2500 for 4gigs and $3500 for 9gigs. $100 or less for 500 to 750 gigs on sale, that is nothing if you are working for a living.

If you are not, then I guess it’s an issue.

Ron Lindeboom
co-founder, creativecow.net

[Jonathan Shohet]

Ron,
I know you are one of the masterminds behind this amazing site, and for that I am extremely grateful and respectful.
But I have to say, I am genuinely offended by your post.

Whether or not this site is “for professionals”, the OP has clearly stated he is asking a newb question, and there’s a world of difference between informing him about the pro’s and con’s of a format and just stating flat out that After Effects wil NOT play nice with HDV, and that he HAS to convert to uncompressed.

All I was pointing out was that it can be done, and it’s an acceptable compromise, depending on yours needs and budget. I can’t for the life of me imagine why this simple point is causing so much antagonism. It’s as if the very notion of working with HDV in a AE is a taboo, and just suggesting it is unacceptable.

Yes, hard drives are quite cheap, but capture cards, hardware raids cards and enclosures are not; uncompressed HD file sizes are HUGE, and the costs CAN add up.
An uncompressed workflow does not automatically suit everyone’s needs, regardless whether it’s “how the pro’s do it” or not. What’s wrong with pointing that out, in response to a “newb” question?
I never argued against working uncompressed, and I was very clear and careful in stating that what I am saying is from my own personal, low-budget-work perspective, which I still think IS relevant to this thread.

I do not do broadcast/commercial work. I am an artist, and my paid freelance work is mostly (by choice) with/for other artists, and therefore usually at a limited budget. Maybe the considerations I make due to the low budgets I am used to working with means I am not a professional by your standards, no problem with that. But I still take great pride in my work, I often have very tight deadlines to meet and tough clients to please, and I certainly do not appreciate the “hobbyist” remarks. Sorry, but I find them condescending, even if they are coming from the co-founder of creative-cow. I am sure you had no intention to offend, but still…

Sincerely,
Jon.

[Ron Lindeboom]

If you wish to be offended, Jonathan, that is your prerogative and you are entitled to your opinion.

But, that said, if we had not held a policy that the COW is for professionals and everyone else is welcome to peek over their shoulders and see what they are doing and how they do it — this site would have long ago turned into the kind of politically correct pile of standardless anything-goes that you find everywhere on the net.

We did not want that.

We have always stated that if you wish to learn from the pros, listen to them and respect them, they are giving you their time for free. If you wish to argue with them and tell them how they are wrong, well let’s just say that you better be ready to prove your point with blow-by-blow definitions of why you are correct. Generalities won’t cut it with people that do this day-in and day-out for a living.

I am sorry if you take offense at this, but we do not want this site to become what we see in so many other forums communities on the Net.

In closing, the prices that you cite (to working pros which are the backbone of this site) seem absolutely economical, compared to the prices that we paid not all that long ago. Many of us have had $100,000 and more tied up in our systems, so something that costs a few hundred seems like dirt cheap to us. It is not an insult, just a matter of relativity.

Best regards,

Ron Lindeboom
creativecow.net

[Brendan Coots]

OS X features software-based RAID 0 (included with the OS), and virtually all PC motherboards now include multiple SATA ports and BIOS-based software RAID as well. No fancy, expensive cards needed at all to set up a three drive RAID system which will handle uncompressed SD.

Uncompressed 8-bit SD uses roughly 1GB per minute, and depending on subject matter Animation codec can require even less. Assuming you dropped three 500GB drives in for your software RAID, this would cost you just over $200 and you would have sufficiently fast storage that holds 25 hours of uncompressed footage and renders. This far exceeds the storage needs for the vast majority of productions.

Adding to that, you can get a Blackmagic Intensity HDMI capture/monitor card for $199, although this is absolutely NOT necessary for working in uncompressed. You can still capture as normal, then set up batch renders to convert the HDV footage to uncompressed, letting it run overnight or whatever.

All told, you can spend $200-$400 to have a perfectly suitable system for uncompressed. If this is too expensive for one’s budget, I would question how said artist can even afford the software, After Effects being a solid $1,000 on its own.
For the record, my studio does a lot of uncompressed HD work and we don’t have any of these fancy trappings on many of our workstations, and they handle it just fine. The reason is that workflow habits can reduce system needs by up to 50%. Even our editing systems handle uncompressed just fine, since most editing apps these days have on-the-fly quality adjustment which ensures real-time playback no matter the source.

Cheers, and happy holidays!

Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com

[Jonathan Shohet]

[Brendan Coots] “All told, you can spend $200-$400 to have a perfectly suitable system for uncompressed. If this is too expensive for one’s budget, I would question how said artist can even afford the software, After Effects being a solid $1,000 on its own.”

Charming.

Just for the record, I’m currently editing and compositing a project with about 8 hours of hdv footage. At roughly 4-6 gb (depending on content) for 1 minute of uncompressed QT Animation, that’s well over 2 tb, just for source footage, without taking into acount backups, renders, intermediate renders, archiving previous projects and so on. That’s definately more than 200-400$, even without “fancy” hardware raid card/enclosures.
Just for example, a 4 bay, 4 tb “burley” port-multiplied enclosure costs a little over 1000$, and that’s by no means a high-end, fancy solution.

In any case, I never said, at any point, that I find 400$ (or 4000$, for that matter) unaffordable. All I said is that I’ve found working with hdv in AE an acceptable compromise, and that I have a limited budget and more urgent expenses.

I do low-budget work, true, but I still work with paying clients. Just because I have to think longer and harder about my expenses, and make compromises that someone with a bigger budget doesn’t, does not mean I will put up with anything (like gardening my yard with a teaspoon…).

As I clearly stated before, I compared rendering times between hdv mpegs and uncompressed/lossless formats. I also worked a few test projects to check for stability issues.
I do not have the results with me any longer to post, but have no objection to re-do the tests when I have some free time if you are interested.

I have been working for over a year with hdv footage in AE, and as I said, it is far from perfect, but it has not cost me any deadlines or clients. This is why I still insist that working with hdv can be an acceptable solution, depending on your budget and needs. Even if that’s not the industry standard.

I realise that what one would find “acceptable” is relative, and that people with different budgets have different priorities and needs. I am not insulted by that in any way.
If you think that my priorities are off, and insist that it is wrong to use hdv even for low-budget work, fine. I am not insulted by that either.

But to go as far as to suggest that anything I have said in this thread is a pile of politically correct standardless anything goes, that compromises the professional integrity of this site?
To label me a “hobbyist” because I have less money and experience than you, just to prove a point?

I’m sorry you see it this way.

I hope at least the OP has found the expert advice he was looking for in this thread.

Happy new year to all.