Lossless codec for HD Capture on pc

[Eddie Lotter]

PPro captures using the source format. If you capture an HDV source then you get HDV on your hard drive. If you capture DV then you get DV on your hard drive.

You will find links to many free tutorials in the PremiereProPedia that will quickly show you how things are done in Premiere Pro.

Cheers
Eddie

[Jeff Brown]

For “lossless”, you will probably need an Input/Output (capture) board such as those made by AJA or BlackMagic. You will also need a large disc array. And, there would still be debate as to what “lossless” means. AppleProRes is not lossless. Typical “uncompressed” video formats are not truely lossless either, as they work in a Yuv color space, and throw away 1/2 the chroma information. Certain boards or devices will capture 10 bit 4:4:4 file streams (DPX is the most common), that would probably be the “most lossless”.

If you can describe your footage source and workflow, maybe there are other solutions we can suggest…

-jeff

[Conrado Krainer]

Hi Jeff, thanks for the answer.

We work with HDCAM tapes, we capture them from a HDCAM SR deck.The footage is in 1920×1080 resolution and 23.97p. The capture is generaly made on a mac platform in blackmagic with uncompressed YUV 10 bits preset. Some times we run out of space and we have to capture with proress422.

Now we need a lossless codec for capture on a pc. I searched on the wb and apoarantely there is not a lossless codec for high definition capture on pc, the ones that I tested, such as huffyuv, msu or cineform are only for SD capture.

Thanks again.

[Jeff Brown]

Why not just duplicate your hardware and use a Blackmagic card on the PC?

[Jim Leonard]

You should duplicate what you’re doing on the PC with more Blackmagic Design hardware/software. If you don’t want to do that, then CineForm is what you’re looking for.

[Conrado Krainer]

Because, I already did that.I captured with the black magic on the pc, but there is no option for lossless codec with black magic card.
I contact them and they said that the closest thing they have to a lossless codec is the MJPEG codec. I contacted AJA xena and they dont have a lossless codec etheir.

At the moment I am testing Cineform HD, lets see what happens….

[Jeff Brown]

I’m not sure where you got your information: Blackmagic and AJA both provide 4:2:2 10-bit Yuv codecs with their hardware. This is considered lossless in the world of broadcast. The upper-end AJA cards will even work with 4:4:4 10-bit DPX files if you have the RAID & motherboard to support it.

-jeff