MEDIA 100HD horrible compression quality? What’s going on?

[Floh Peters]

[Michael C.] “In the past (on the M100i system) we would capture at 5 or 10kb HDR and the quality of the image was just fine. Obviously a bit pixelated, but nothing that a client would be distracted by understanding that it was an “offline”.”

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[Michael J c]

Thanks for the quick response…

Floh… Maybe you are thinking of the “Natural” settings at the low rates? Because the HDR settings are usually much better and often useable even at 5kb. Most of the time we do use 10kb and sometimes have been forced to go up as high as 30kb on the M100i… but that is only in rare instances when we are not working with film or there happens to be a lot of crowd shots or something.

What I’m seeing on the M100HD is similar to when we digitized at 5kb and accidentally left the natural setting on. There is no HDR option on the M100HD codec controls.

Anyway… I’ll link some examples that I just quickly captured for you to see what I’m talking about. You can see that even up to 30kb, the M100HD stuff is utterly worthless. Meanwhile the M100HD even gives you something of better quality even at 5kb!

https://gandernook.com/m100test

Something with mostly close ups, we’d use 5 or 10kb and be fine with it. It is offline and it is usually just to show clients very early ideas… they get that it isn’t perfect. But if I tried to get away with the M100HD stuff, they’d think I’m crazy.

I was hoping to retire my xr system… This is our first project on the HD… It is starting to look like they have lost some capturing functionality that was very important to us. We’d have to have file sizes 5X or more what we are used to… And with the volume of material, that would be a bad thing for us in the long run.

Thanks for any thoughts you might have on this.

-Mike

[Arthur Dent]

Why not use your old XR as a capture station… Media from iXR should be compatible with iHD. At those data rates you’d have NO problem capturing to an external FW drive and moving that across to your iHD to edit.

[Dave Jennings]

If the Media 100 HD system is just using the software codec, and the software codec behaves like the old hardware codec (meaning, “the hardware codec used via QuickTime”) then it probably is using “Natural” for the low data rates like 5KB/10KB and not the old “HDR” setting. That’s the way the old, hardware QuickTime codec always worked. Below some threshold (something like 30 or 40 KB) it used Natural, above it was HDR. If I’m remembering my history right, this change happened way back around Media 100 4.0, when they rolled the HDR and non-HDR “QX” codecs into a single codec.

Do the clips recorded on your old system at the lower rate play back with the quality you expect on the HD system? If so, you could always use your old system as a capture station for your rough footage.

[Michael J c]

Yeah… the clips captured on the old system play back as expected…

But that doesn’t help me retire that system (as was the purpose of my purchacing the M100HD). I agree that it is probably defaulting to the Natural setting… I just don’t know why they would choose to do that since, as you can see, that would be useable for pretty much nothing.

I’m going to have to capture on the old station, but that is not ideal. I’d like for my new Media100 HD to be able to capture at the same quality as my old one. After all, I was told I would still be getting the Media100i capture codec capability. (They just didn’t mention that it wouldn’t be fully functional).

[Bobby Mosaedi]

i have never tried using the offline capture settings using the m100i codec in HD system, but that sounds dissapointing. i have always enjoyed the fact i could digitize hours and hours of very descent looking footage at 20kb, especially talking heads. i think part of the problem could be that the m100hd has no hardware compression support for m100i codec like it used to. doing it all in software can probably be pretty taxing on resources, especially if there is more involved in HDR processing. im no engineer and i could be totally wrong, but it seems like either it was overlooked or maybe just not possible to acheive the same consistency and reliability using software than our vincent or p6000 cards.

[Ron Humer]

Just bought the HD system too…..the very first thing that I noticed was the huge difference in quality at 15 kb (my low rez of choice)….gotten years of compliments on how good your rough cuts look! Well, I’m going to take advantage of that and use the old machine to digitize while I’m editing on the HD machine…..it does have it’s advantages….

but I hear what your saying…..upgrade with a downgrade.

Good luck with your new Boris editing machine….

Ron

[Michael J c]

[editology] “but I hear what your saying…..upgrade with a downgrade.”
Yes, I’m not really happy with the work-around (using the old M100i to do the digitizing). I need this to be a stand alone editing and “acquiring” station.

I’m hoping they can tweak the code and either default to HDR or give us back the option to select HDR. I don’t buy that the hardware/software can’t handle matching the compression quality of the P6000 board. We are talking about extremely low data rates here. Eventually we all get jobs where we’ve got to capture a TON of footage. I’ve gotta think more will run into this issue if they keep using M100 HD.

[Floh Peters]

Michael,

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[Michael J c]

[Floh] “from your examples it seems like you did digitize in draft/full frame mode in Media 100 i and that this is not supported in Media 100 HD.”

Not sure I understand what you mean by this? What do you mean, “draft/full frame mode in Media 100 i”? Let me know what you get when you test it out… I’m at a loss here… (and back on the XR) 🙁