HVX200 and the colour red

[Shane Ross]

Red…all video has issues with red. But this camera isn’t any worse at red, in my experience.

BLUE…that is another story. DVCPRO HD doesn’t do blue very well. That is the highest compressed color you will find.

Shane

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[Rmherd]

how are you measuring what is “the most compressed”? That doesn’t make sense, but I admit to not knowing it all. Moreover, you can manipulate every single variable in the extensive menus.

RH

[Shane Ross]

Well, I have had several people show me (Motion Graphics guys, online editors) who have showed me each channel individually. Looking at them that way you can REALLY see it. I believe they used After Effects to point that out. Not sure with what tool.

Shane

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[Rmherd]

What did they show you? A black and white image? A histogram? A waveform? RGB parade? Vectorscope? And what did they compare that to?

I’m also curious if they kept the codec native to DVCPROHD or if they changed to animation codec–a bad idea–to match their files. Another problem is it doesn’t actually matter what the motion graphics guys think since the final output should be conformed in a DI suite (the best case scenario) or at least with plugins like 3 Way Color Corrector in FCP.

Another serious dilemma is color temperature. There’s very little blue in studio lighting, but there’s lots of blue in sunlight. This can get really tricky when shooting special effects.

RH

[Shane Ross]

[rmherd] “What did they show you? A black and white image? A histogram? A waveform? RGB parade? Vectorscope? And what did they compare that to? “

You know, I am not sure. But let me e-mail the guy and see what he did so I can pass the info along. Maybe even do it myself and post pics.

[rmherd] “I’m also curious if they kept the codec native to DVCPROHD or if they changed to animation codec–a bad idea–to match their files”

We looked at the native DVCPRO HD codec…no converting. He was complaining that it was tough to pull a key from this footage and showed me why.

[rmherd] “Another problem is it doesn’t actually matter what the motion graphics guys think since the final output should be conformed in a DI suite”

It most CERTAINLY does when they need to composite footage. And they use After Effects. And since when does the final output need to be conformed in a DI suite? I output directly to HDCAM or D5 from the DVCPRO HD timeline, and before that, I upconverted to 10-bit uncompressed, either with FCP or After Effects and then output. All on my G5. The DI suite is only if you are going to film or doing VERY high end color correction. We don’t.

Shane

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[Rmherd]

Thanks for asking your pal those details. That’s why the COW rules. I’ll be gone for several days since it’s New Years, but I hope to read-back on Tuesday. My wife is tapping her foot–ready to go out.

There’s no quick reply to your last paragraph. Regarding the workflow, certainly you need the deliverable rendered out of AE, and then cut into an NLE for layback and audio mastering. If not, I’m curious how you tape-out of AE. Therefore, let me try to approximate your workflow with a little more precision.

1. Image capture on AG HVX200 in DVCPROHD 1080i (4:2:2 YCrCb)
2. Ingest footage into FCP (4:2:2 RGB). Edit. Picture lock.
3. Uprez in Compressor? to Uncompressed HD 4:4:4 RGB
4. Import from (3) into AE for compositing. Render out to Uncompressed HD 4:4:4
5. Import (4) into NLE for audio layback to HDCAM (3:1:1 YCrCb) or D5.

Hopefully this is a close approximation, but please provide further details. For instance, are you sticking with QuickTime the whole way through?

RH

[Don Greening]

Thanks for the response, Shane. Your answer has put my concerns about the HVX200 and the DVCPro codecs to rest. FWIW a friend of mine is the 1st A.D. with the Masters of Horror series and they apparently cut HVX200 footage into their other Panny HD footage all the time. Not sure if the other footage is varicam or HDX900. His comment was that after final output the HVX footage is virtually “indistinguishable” from the other footage. High praise I would think.

– Don

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[Daniel E]

Traditionally there has been a technique used to bias how much of the light is sent to each channel from the Beam Splitter prism to a cameras RGB sensors. Green receives the most light since it is the predominant Luminance value as well. Red gets the most of the remainder while blue receives the least. If you look at a camera with component outs you will see the green is the cleanest, the red is second, and the blue a distant third. All of this happens before the compression into a Codec begins. Not all colors are recreated equally.

Daniel Epstein
Gold Teleproductions, Inc
New York, NY
http://www.goldtele.com

[Erik Hansen]

From what I remember, due to the splitting of the color information to the CCDs, blue is always been the most heavily compressed. You can test this with just about any digital camera and Photoshop. Take a photo and view only the blue channel and you will see the compression. Anything that uses a CCD (scanners, video cameras, etc) will have the same results, AFAIK.

There is a similar effect in film. Each color has it’s own emulsion layer (I think that’s the term), and so the remaining part of the spectrum has to pass-through the next layer, and so on.

– Erik

[Shane Ross]

OK…I went to my friend again today and he showed it to me, both in After Effects and Shake.

In After Effects he used the CHANNEL COMBINER and switched RGB to HLS, then looked at each channel individually, throwing a LEVELS filter and adjusting the Gamma to show the footage more clearly. The blue channel was the most pixelated…although the red looked pretty messy too. Green was the best, but you could still see the compression. But Blue had the most compression by far.

The human eye is most sensative to the BLUE spectrum…it doesn’t take much for us to see it, so that is the most compressed channel. So I hear (so he told me).

Hope this helps.

Shane

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