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Tested out 6.0.2 and V1U pulldown remove… my thoughts
Hey Everyone,
So I got home an updated my home system to 6.0.2 on Leopard, ready to test out the new pulldown removal on capture.The short answer is it works.
The long answer is it works but with some annoying things apple seems to have left out of it’s release info.
Here it goes:
I hooked up the V1U via firewire and loaded a tape that was shot at 24pA. I first tried the Easy Setup HDV-1080P24, then HDV-1080P24 firewire basic. Both worked, and the pulldown was removed correctly. BUT when I jogged through my clips frame by frame there was a duplicate frame every 5 frames. I right clicked on my clips and they were still at 29.97! WTF!
Now, I checked the easy setup and my sequence setting was for HDV 23.98, so I took one of these clips and dropped it into a new sequence, FCP prompted me to change my sequence settings to match the clip, I said NO, and to my delight when I jogged through the clip in the timeline the extra frames were gone. It is realtime, needing no renders or green bar, so it’s native to the timeline. So although it captures at 29.97 it’s really 23.98 with duplicate frames added and by putting it into an HDV 23.98 sequence the extra frames are properly removed.
Weird way to do things, but it works.
Now, I’m not a fan of editing in HDV, so I was very excited to try out a conversion to ProResHQ while removing pulldown on capture. So I open up the Easy Setup HDV-Apple ProRes 1080P24. I opened up my log and capture window and… NO LOG AND CAPTURE WINDOW, WTF!!!! A window pops-up that says “name HDV clip” or something like that. So I go along with FCP and name a test clip, and hit OK. It goes right to the capture screen, and starts my camera rolling. It begins capturing footage off of my tape, with a little warning saying “preview is 10 seconds behind, view camera for playback”. I let it roll for a few seconds, it goes through a clip break, and I hit ESC.
Now 2 clips pop up in my Bin, both with the pulldown removed and at 23.98, and it successfully created a new clip at the clip break. So at least it works, now I don’t have to go to compressor to do ProRes/Pulldown conversions of my HDV footage. But seriously, why can’t I add logging info? I can’t even add a reel name, or have playback controls. I have to switch between easy setups or (gasp) use my on camera playback controls to cue up footage? That really really really sucks. It doesn’t make any sense. It’s like Apple brought some of the Windows code writers to add these new functions to FCP.
Anyway, I guess I’ll have to deal, it’s better than recompressing everything I capture.
But one more thing, there is no Easy Setup to do the transcode to ProResHQ, only to standard ProRes. Weird right? SO I made a custom easy setup where the compressor was ProResHQ…and it worked exactly the same as the regular ProRes Easy Setup. So Apple seems to have left it out, but it works. The lag concerns me though, I’ll need to try a longer capture (the test was about 30 seconds), I’m worried that maybe the lag happens because of the transcoding eating up processor power and memory, I could see a long capture (like a full tape) possibly causing the system to run out of memory or lag to the point where it couldn’t keep up anymore.
Although I did do this test on a Dual 1.8 GHz G5 with 1.25GB of RAM over to a firewire800 drive. So guys with shiny new 8-cores and RAIDs should be fine. I’ll have to take my V1 to work tomorrow and try it on my 8-Core there and see what happens :-).
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6 Replies
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I think people will be interested to see this:
https://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=2037000334&size=o
This is a frame grab comparing the footage I captured using on the fly conversion to ProResHQ to HDV footage I had on my system that was captured as HDV in 6.0.1
The top frame is HDV that was captured in FCP 6.0.1, and pulldown was removed and converted to ProResHQ in compressor (at the time the only good way to remove pulldown in final cut studio). Even before the conversion I would see the same artifacting (mostly aliasing) you can see in the top half of the image (the raw HDV footage in my FCP looked the same, I did a bunch of side by side comparisons, as I wasn’t happy with the amount of compression at all, but I figured that’s what happens when you put HD onto a miniDV tape).
Now when I capture straight to ProRes in 6.0.2 I get what you see in the bottom half of the image, an image that is almost completely free of aliasing (it’s very apparent on the black trim around the windows of the car).Now, maybe there was something wrong with my FCP system before, but if there wasn’t then it looks like the new capture feature does a nice cleaned up conversion.
Needless to say I’m a lot happier with my V1U (or should I say Final Cut’s ability to capture HDV).
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matt, thanks so much for this post. I have been battling with the Sony V1U as well, and am tired of batching in cinema tools to get true 24 frames per second. My question is, why don’t I have that update popping up for FCP? Do I need to install leopard?
cheers,
jesus
g5 quad 4 gigs FCP 6 -
You need to install the Pro Apps update first, then do another software update and updates for the whole Studio 2 will show up. You may need to update to OSX 10.4.11 first, not sure I did mine on Leopard.
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thanks! will try
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Matt,
Do you know if this pulldown with the V1U, shot at 24p, can be done in FCP 5.1? Thanks.
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Not in the same way. In 5.1 you would need to capture as DVCPRO HD or Uncompressed if you have a capture card, then remove the pulldown in cinema tools. Hopefully you shot in the “24PA” mode, which is where the camera always records a constant A-frame. Otherwise you’re looking at a big headache.
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