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

[Floh Peters]

[Michael C.] “What do you mean, “draft/full frame mode in Media 100 i”?”

Okay, I finally found the time to check it. When digitizing clips in Media 100 i (using the “HDR Online” quality and Media 100 HD at the same data rates they look identical on our systems (PAL). In Media 100 i you are able to use the “HDR Draft” settings for low data rates, which drops the second field but obviously has then more resolution for compression on the first field. These look better for still images, but we never used this setting since we could not get used to the full frame look of video in motion. That

[Michael J c]

Floh,[Floh] “And since storage is extremely cheap these days you could probably digitize much much more material at 40-60k for the same money you had to spend for 5k resolution some years ago. I really would suggest either getting some additional FireWire drives for storage or to digitize in Media 100 i and edit in HD.”

Floh, you usually have great advice, but the above statement is just ridiculous.

Why should the technology be going backwards? Why should the Media100HD drop working features that have already been perfected in their past products? This is a programming oversite, and one that I should not be expected to just “deal with”.

For me to get the equal quality low res footage on my M100HD system, I have to WASTE approximately 5X more hard drive space than I did on M100i.

I’ve already mentioned that I deal with high volumes of offline low res media (and I’m only getting more everyday). Are you really suggesting that instead of storing my data on just 1TB drive I should have to go get 5 1TB drives? That’s about $4K more of storage costs. (And what about backups?!?!)

What is the point of even having the low kb draft resolutions on M100HD? They are utterly worthless (as you can see in my examples). At least in the past, even 5kb could be useable at times (talking heads, footage with little motion, etc). But 5kb will never be used by anyone on MEDIA 100HD.

I would have rather they didn’t advertise that M100HD was capable of digitizing at ALL the media 100i resolutions… I would have known not to buy a system… Since I’m not using High Definition video yet, and I’m now forced to have to have 2 systems (unless I want to just do everything on the old M100i), the only benefit I’ve gotten from the M100HD is the faster computer. But that benefit is neutralized by not being able to have 2 independent stations… For me this makes the Media100HD dependent on my old Media100i. And that is not acceptable.

But this is a programming oversight by Media 100 that you are telling me to just accept the fact that it will cost me 5X more $$ for storage…. Or “pretend” that I’m living 5 years in the past when storage space was more expensive.

No way.

[Floh Peters]

[Michael C.] “Why should the technology be going backwards? Why should the Media100HD drop working features that have already been perfected in their past products? This is a programming oversite, and one that I should not be expected to just “deal with”.”

The problem is, that although you maybe “should not be expected to just deal with” you obviously have to deal with it. There is some functionality that did not migrate from Media 100 i to HD, and obviously the “Draft” compression for Media 100 i codec is one of them. Unfortunately this functionality seems to be important to you, but not to many other users. And since decisions have to be made which features get implemented into a new system and which not, it seems that not enough people thought that this “Draft” compression would be important these days. There are other examples, like the audio out functionality where you could use the Media 100 i outputs under OS9 for system sounds that never made it to OSX, or the fact that with the Media 100 i hardware you could watch files from QuickTime player on your SDI screen. Or the S-Video connectivity. Or…

So while it may be “not acceptable” for you that this Draft compression is not included I tried to help you find ways to work with your system. Maybe I did tell you to “just accept the fact that it will cost me 5X more $$ for storage…”, but just because it is your only choice right now. If you have other ideas how to handle it, no problem, do it as you like.
As you may know I

[Michael J c]

But they did provide a draft mode. It just doesn’t work. The other things you mentioned were not advertised to be in the later products. This one was. I bought the product and had no reason to expect that the Media100i codec was not going to work like Media100i codec.

And I appreciate your trying to help and find solutions, you are a one man tech support department for Media100 and don’t even get paid by them to do it. And like I said, your advise is typically great.

But in this instance, there were a couple of people who already posted in this topic that they used the lower resolutions and also ran into the same bad quality issues. They too need to use their old system to supplement the M100HD if they want to be able to digitize at low res. I guess I was hopeing someone might know a way to get this flaw fixed…

I’ve talked with tech support and they said they’d call me back… Haven’t heard anything still… I guess I’ll call again.

But does anyone want to take a shot at answering the question: Why is there a 5kb draft quality option in Media100HD? Could there even be a use for it? Maybe capturing 2 hours of a still fruit basket? <--- I don't know how that would even look. 🙁