How many HDV streams should I get?

[Tom Wolsky]

“Your computer has almost nothing to do with streams of video. It has everything to do with the speed of your storage and whether or not you have a card such as the Kona 3. ”

“Also, HDV is a very processor intensive format so you do not get nearly as many streams of video as you would in something like DVCPro HD.”

Because HDV so processor intensive the functionality of the processor is key to multi-stream playback. The data is only 3.6MB/sec, so the speed of the drives is seldom an issue.

All the best,

Tom

Author: “Final Cut Pro 5 Editing Essentials” and “Final Cut Express 2 Editing Workshop” Class on Demand “Complete Training for FCP5” and “Final Cut Express Made Easy” DVDs

[Stacy Rothwell]

So I did an intersting test last night.

I ran Premiere Pro CS3 for the MAC and, oh my God, was it faster in every single way than FCP 6.01

Premiere used all 8-cores to nearly 100% when rendering and I was able to playback 5 HDV streams with no trouble whatsoever. When I did render a test (5 HDV streams, 4 compressed boxes with a background) it took around 48 seconds.

I did the same exact test in FCP 6.01 and FCP would play (although I got an orange render bar) but would degrade the background video while playing without rendering. When I did go to render, it took almost 4 minutes where PPro took 48 seconds.

FCP never seems to use the 8-cores past about 30 of their capacity. Is this just a limitation of the apple software? I guess all will better in the new release.

As for the Kona card…. this is just a hobby. There’s no way I’m going to spend another $4000 for a capture card.

And, this isn’t you, but if I hear one more person tell me if I use a Kona card I can convert my HDV into Uncompressed full-res HD I’m going to scream! There’s some guy all over the apple forum that keeps spewing that garbage. Yes, maybe you can get Uncompressed if you’re shooting E-E through the camera but if you’re playing back off the tape and converting to something else it’s still compressed.

Thanks for the info….. I’m disappointed after spending $1200 on FCP that it’s so slow.

Stacy

[Walter Biscardi]

[Stacy Rothwell] “FCP never seems to use the 8-cores past about 30 of their capacity. Is this just a limitation of the apple software? I guess all will better in the new release.”

Supposedly with Leopard a lot more realtime and features will be unlocked with FCP. We should have had it already, but the OS X team was pulled over to the iPhone. We’ll get Leopard in October, hopefully.

[Stacy Rothwell] ”
And, this isn’t you, but if I hear one more person tell me if I use a Kona card I can convert my HDV into Uncompressed full-res HD I’m going to scream!”

I would never do that quite honestly. DVCPro HD or ProRes would be plenty, no need to go uncompressed with that format. But like you said, it’s a hobby so no need to spend that kind of money, just edit native HDV.

Oh and it’s a good thing you don’t have a Kona because Premiere will crash right now with a Kona board in a Mac. AJA hasn’t released the drivers yet so there’s a conflict between FCP and Premiere if a Kona is installed.

And if Premiere is currently faster editing HDV, then why not just use that application? They’re both good apps and maybe FCP will get faster with the release of Leopard. But quite honestly, if Premiere is cutting faster right now and you want to edit in HDV, I would probably just use Premiere.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Broadcast and independent productions.

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