Shooting 24p DV…does Uncompressed Capture Codec make a difference?

[Jeff Carpenter]

You’re correct, the footage won’t look any better.

But if you do any effects, any color correction, any titles…all of those things WILL look better working in an uncompressed tmieline instead of sending THEM through the DV compression too.

The question for you, then, is what is going to happen to the movie in the end? If you put it back on DV tape then it all gets compressed anyway and there’s probably not much point to doing it that way. If you put it on Digibeta or are up-converting to HD or something…well then it probably IS worth the trouble.

[Ed Dooley]

Yes I can, do a search of the archived posts. There are tons of posts about it. UC helps only if you’re planning on adding lots of graphics, which benefit
from UC. But do a search of posts (did I say there are tons of posts about it?).
Ed

[Catama Productions] “I am about to begin post on a film I am shooting with the panasonic dvx100. I am shooting 24p (NOT 24pAdvanced), 16×9, onto MiniDV tape, and I am posting with FCP. My question is this…

If I capture in an uncompressed Codec via an Aurora RGB Component, will I get any better quality on the final output than if I captured DV Codec via Firewire. My thinking is that since the footage is (I believe) already compressed into a DV codec on tape, capturing with higher end hardware and a much less compressed codec will do nothing to improve the quality of my footage.

At my workplace, we often will capture this same sort of footage (24p from the panasonic) using and Uncompressed Codec if we are planning on broadcast quality output (TV spots, etc.) But it occured to me recently that the footage might be the same using a standard DV compression, since that what it is on the source tape. The amount of disk space this would save is huge, and I am very curious about it from a technical standpoint anyway.

Can anyone help m”

[_adam_]

Just out of morbid curiosity, why are you shooting in 24p normal mode? For a film, my natural instinct would be to shoot it advanced.

[Catama Productions]

Yeah…

I only thought about that after having three scenes in the can. Out of continued morbid curiosity, what sort of storm would I be piloting this boat into if I decided to switch it up now?

Again, I will probably be posting with FCP. so I would have to take the scenes I have already shot, and somehow get them into the 24base timeline that I would use for the rest of the stuff. How hard is that to do, or is it even possible?

I have never used the advanced mode, but I would agree that it makes sense, especially if I decided to do a film-out.

Can I match it with the stuff I already have?

[_adam_]

Fortunately enough, I’ve navigated those stormy waters. I was shooting with the DVX & shot most of my footage in advanced mode, and then at some point started (accidently) shooting in standard mode. I didn’t even realize it until I was cutting and kept seeing ghost frames. All I had to do was fix the cadence in Cinema Tools, which wasn’t hard, but time consuming and annoying. Of course, I only had about half an hour of standard footage to fix, so it wasn’t that big a deal.

Note that I wasn’t going out to film, and I don’t know how much footage you have, but I’d suggest routing all your footage through Cinema Tools to fix the pulldown and then pull the fixed media into a 24 base timeline to cut with. I don’t think you’ll have any problems.