uncompressed dv25…

[Shane Ross]

When you capture DV via firewire you are capturing uncompressed. DV is compressed 5:1 and the compression happens AFTER it goes onto tape. When you capture via firewire you add no further compression.

Even if you got a capture card and captured 10-bit uncompressed, it would look the same as if you captured at DV/NTSC.

Shane

Alokut Productions
http://www.lfhd.net

[Ryan Brown]

Thanks Shane for the reply. Ok I think I’m on the same page with you bro. So when you shoot dv it’s already compressed onto the tape…but in order to work on the timeline isn’t it compressed for performance and then uncompressed when you say go out to tape…sorry bro if this is a dumn question. I remember watching the movie November bonus material and they mentioned a workflow I believe with FCP or possibly avid and they said something about retaining as much information as possible since they were going to a blow up…

At an earlier time I talked to Black Magic I think and they said I could use one of there capture cards to bring it in uncompressed like you said but the real benefit of the capture card was mainly higher formats since dv is brought over firewire and now computers are so fast that it was not much of an advantage to have a capture card…though when i first started i had a targa 2000 then i needed dv so i got a dv500. the hardware was supposed to take strain off the cpu…i have pretty fast computers now but i’m really just trying to retain as much info as possible. i am not as experienced in digital video as i am with photography but we just switched to shooting in RAW instead of jped so we can retain as much detail, edit wb after the fact and tweak then we just batch to jpeg and get amazing results. i thought a similar workflow for dv might be possible. forgive me for being new…

again thanks for your time.

ryanb.

[Ed Dooley]

No, it comes in exactly as it’s recorded on the tape. The only reason you would want to bring it
in with a card is to use 10bit Uncompressed. And you would use 10bit if you planned on adding
a lot of graphics, which look better in 10bit. As for your newbie status, you might consider
starting over at creative calf, which may offer you more resources as a beginner.
https://creativecalf.creativecow.net/
Ed

[DowntownBrown] “but in order to work on the timeline isn’t it compressed for performance and then uncompressed when you say go out to tape”

[Todd Beabout]

You can throw your DV clips into a 10-bit Uncompressed timeline if you need to add graphics or do color correction, etc. The graphics look much better in an uncompressed timeline than a DV timeline, and if you are going out to DVD you should get much better results! Note you will have to render the DV clip of course because it is not uncompressed, but this will render your DV clip + your graphics all in 10-bit.

There is some discussion over whether it is better to “up-rez” at the point of capture to bring the footage itself in as uncompressed, but I personally don’t see any advantage to this in most cases.

-Todd Beabout
Vazda Studios

[Winston Cely]

How much will this affect render times? Seems like it would take twice as long to render since you’re rendering both graphics and the clips.

[Todd Beabout]

Give ‘er a try and see. Not bad at all on my dual 2Gig G5, but I suppose for long-form stuff it would be a pain. The graphics compression is very noticeable though and simply unacceptable for the work that I do.

-Todd Beabout
Vazda Studios

[Winston Cely]

I think I’ll give ‘er a try. We’re working on a dual 2.5 G5 with 4.5 gigs of RAM and an x800XT, so hopefully it won’t be too render time nappy….

[John Pale]

The drawback is not only the render time (not bad on a fast machine) but also the disk space…the render file will be the size of your sequence in uncompressed…that is in additon to the original DV file size. For long projects, thats a significant amount of drive space. Depending on your workflow, digitizing and editing in uncompressed could use less space overall, and not require any rendering. That’s the advantage of going that route. It depends on the project and your workflow.

[Winston Cely]

Good point. Thanks!

BTW, on my system, render time isn’t taking much longer at all. 🙂

[Ryan Brown]

Thanks Ed and everyone for the breakdown. I started with video production(92-96grad) on decks and A-B Roll(insert/assemble edits) in hs. So as far as DV and all the digital goes I’m not trained and just taking my previous knowledge and applying it to this new revolution(so teaching myself dv). So much to learn. I appreciate everyones advice and I’ll look into the creativecalf…

Thing is it’s real easy to just sit click on the presets and just cut but to really understand it is a whole different ballgame…but i’m accepting the challenge…looks like a lot of helpful and experienced users here-thanks for sharing!

~Ryanb.