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Yesterday’s Emmys & FCP X.
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That device:
“The Video Recorder USB Capture Device (Mac OS-X only) from Blackmagic Design is a compact video capture device that is designed with ease of use in mind. The device features RCA connectors for component, composite, and S-Video video input, which it uses to capture video directly to the commonly-used H.264 format. ”
So that device captures and compresses to H.264. Something like the BMD Ultrastudio or AJA Io devices don’t…they bring in an uncompressed signal, and then the computer compresses it. To ProRes 422, or HQ…or Uncompressed. For a superior image than that device can provide.
Shane
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[Shane Ross] “These are capture devices, I simply say “capture card” out of habit. I know what I’m talking about.”
It is OK to call them video capture cards even if they are external.
[Shane Ross] “Yeah…go ahead and be snippish and jerkish towards me as if I don’t know what I’m talking about.”
That is how I read it.
[Shane Ross] “But you have yet to answer my question…how do you directly capture video into FCP-X? What capture DEVICE can you use, within the FCP-X interface, to capture video? Does that device you post do that? That is what I have been asking for 2-3 posts now. HOW was the video signal captured directly into FCX?”
I agree. Simply having a capture device connected to a Mac does not guarantee it works with FCPX or Premiere Pro. You may have to use Media Express exclusively with that product.
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[Bill Davis] “Now I understand the problem. You’re still thinking that “a capture card” in the old context of something that sits in a desktop computer.”
[Bill Davis] “The PCB board is simply in the body of the unit. Like everything about computers, the functions have miniaturized and it’s no longer REQUIRED that a card sit inside the computer.
Not for a long time now.”
I have to say this a tad bit offensive. You really don’t think Shane is aware of the DV converters and external Thunderbolt A/V capture cards? Not only does Shane know about them he has them. I would also like to add even though the device you posted is external it can still be classified as a video capture card.
[Bill Davis] “(I’d love to discuss this more, but I’ve got a boatload of deadline work heading my way this afternoon. I’ll try to pop in as things ease up.)”
Just because the video capture card works on a Mac does not mean it works with FCPX. It depends if FCPX has driver support for capturing with the device or not. In the video below I show how to capture video using Premiere Pro and Media Express. It would work with Premiere Pro on a Mac or PC but it may not work for capturing using FCPX. Does it kind of make sense?
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[Shane Ross] “how do you directly capture video into FCP-X? What capture DEVICE can you use, within the FCP-X interface, to capture video?”
Per the FCPX help document:
“Final Cut Pro supports tape-based import of the DV (including DVCAM, DVCPRO, and DVCPRO50), DVCPRO HD, and HDV formats”.So the only “direct” capture is from DV based tape formats. If you have a new MacPro, you would need a DV to Thunderbolt cable to connect the tape deck. An older Mac Pro with a Firewire port would be able to connect directly.
(Of course DV is a compressed format and doesn’t allow for the best upscaling of SD video. Obviously, DVDPRO50 and DVCPRO HD would be the least compressed, but still not uncompressed. And the reduced color sampling is always going to be an issue.)
Other “direct” capture is via Thunderbolt, Firewire or USB from modern file-based cameras
Isn’t this a bit of a tempest in a teapot? FCPX wasn’t really made with tape capture in mind. It’s built for file based import and export. We all know that. So use the AJA capture utility or the Black Magic device of your choice and move on.
This is silly. I don’t think anyone is trying to be insulting. I think it’s more of a terminology misunderstanding. No need for yet another video “tutorial.”
The Terranex vs. software upscaling discussion, on the other hand, is interesting. Terranex used to be the gold standard. I’m curious if the choices (softening vs sharpening, for instances) are different for stills vs. motion when upscaling. Does one method work better for interlaced vs. progressive, etc.
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Thank you Jeff, I figured the only tape capture options in FCX were DV and HDV (DV50…firewire based capture). Bill just mentioned that the producer and AE on this OJ doc tested direct capture into FCX and upscaling and compared that with a Terranex upconvert and found no noticeable difference. I wondered what was meant by “direct capture into FCX” of archival materials…tapes…entailed. Did they say what they used and how they did it?
I am fully willing to test capturing a tape as DV via routing through a deck, and then SD with a Capture DEVICE as ProRes 422 (even HQ if you want)…VHS as well as betaSP…and then upconvert via Terranex and AJA. And compare the scaling ability of FCX vs what AJA and Terranex can do. And even push it to 4K as that is part of the current deliverable for the LOST TAPES series. (there is only software scaling to 4K available, hardware upconvert to 4K doesn’t exist yet).
Shane
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Checking back in the midst of work and took a moment to ping Patrick Southern in case he has time to weigh in with his experience. I’m still swamped. Sorry.
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[Jeff Markgraf] “The very small percentage of users who need tape capture or output will use one of the several third party capture utilities available. The vast majority of users will wonder what the controversy is all about — in the unlikely event they think about at all.”
I agree…this feature really isn’t needed in FCX as easily 99% of the users won’t need tape capture. I only brought this up as it was mentioned that on an archival doc, tests were done comparing directly capturing archival footage into FCX and upscaling vs using a Terranex. And I simply asked if there was a recent update that allowed direct capture of non-DV/HDV footage into FCX. If there was, I was surprised, as it would be a very un-Apple thing to do. It was just a curious question, but one that got blown out of proportion.
Although it did bring up the debate about what is best, software or hardware scaling…and many do have curiosity about that, so I’ll have to do some tests, and provide video files to people of the results.
Shane
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We didn’t capture the footage directly into FCPX on OJ Speaks. We captured the tapes using Blackmagic’s Media Express. The tape was captured at its original resolution and then upscaled in FCPX. The footage we received back from the post house looked worse than the footage we’d been cutting with in FCPX. They had used a Terenex for the conversion. In this case, they were converting digital files to digital files. Had they been converting tapes to digital, they may have had a better result. As it was, there were all sorts of frame blending artifacts, and the image was soft.
As Shane may have mentioned, we used an AJA Kona 3 on Challenger Disaster: Lost Tapes and captured within FCP7. When working from tape, this seems the best solution. For upscaling footage downloaded from a resource like AP, Conus, Getty, or Critical Past, software solutions probably fare best.
FCPX has great software scaling. So does Resolve. I’d take Shane’s advice on upscaling & conforming frame rates any day. He’s been a delight to work with on all of the 1895 Films projects. In fact, we collaborated on the workflow we used on Challenger Disaster: Lost Tapes. And despite the fact that he consistently drops the “P” from FCPX, he still does a great job with the online edit of some of the best documentaries cut in it.
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[J.Patrick Southern] “For upscaling footage downloaded from a resource like AP, Conus, Getty, or Critical Past, software solutions probably fare best.”
I have been finding that trying to convert file based interlaced sources to Progressive via Terranex was iffy. AJA was spotty as well. For those I do use software solutions like AE or just let Resolve do the scaling…which would come right from the FCP-X cut where the scaling was done before. Interlacing is a delicate beast to deal with, for sure.
Shane
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Apologies in advance for this longer and somewhat rambling post. First of all, for the sake of accuracy, it’s Teranex, one ”r”. They’re a hometown company and I’ve been involved on and off with them since their start. Conversion and scaling of any sort is complex and there’s no single “best” tool. It often gets back to the task you are doing. But I’m really surprised that Patrick indicated such poor results. It really smacks of operator error at the post facility, but that’s hard to say from a distance and probably a bit unfair on my part.
The modern Teranex units from Blackmagic are combo i/o and standalone converters. Hardware conversion is best when using the units in a standalone fashion. When you use them for i/o, the NLE software overrides the settings, so you can’t work in SD and use the hardware to create an HD output. But when you use one of these as a standalone converter, then you have full hardware control. These units were designed for tape-to-tape processing. If you are doing file-based conversions (as if tape were in between), then you really have to play out of one computer with its own i/o, run the signal as SDI through the Teranex unit, and then capture the conversion on a second computer – again with its own i/o.
A lot more detail here in my review last year:
https://digitalfilms.wordpress.com/2016/07/30/blackmagic-design-teranex-processors/
Over the years I’ve done a lot of conversions and a lot of testing along the way. I created the HQV Benchmark Test DVD and Blu-ray for Silicon Optic when they were Teranex’s parent for a few years. SO made the chips and these were also going into consumer TVs and DVD players using Teranex algorithms. The point of the DVD was to create tests you could use to evaluate various processing functions. You can probably still buy these somewhere and the tests are still valid today.
https://www.qualcomm.com/documents/hqv-standard-definition-sd-benchmark-version-20
https://www.markertek.com/product/hqv-hddvd/silicon-optix-hqv-benchmark-hd-dvd-test-disc-ntsc
https://www.blu-ray.com/movies/HQV-Benchmark-Blu-ray/16605/
In general what I’ve found is that Teranex hardware did the best upscaling. The thing to look for is texture in the face and hair and generally how “open” the image looks. The tricky part is interlacing and cadence removal. Teranex does a great job of deinterlacing and creating good progressive frames. If you have 24fps media that was cut to a 60i NTSC master, you have 3:2 pulldown to deal with. If this is a consistent cadence, as would be the case if you transferred a complete film print without any video edits afterwards, Teranex does a good job, because it can predict the cadence pattern. However, old masters are often film transfer sources, which were then edited electronically, meaning that every video edit changes the cadence pattern. In my experience, the best application to get back to a 24p progressive timeline is Avid Media Composer. That’s because you can “blade” all the cuts and then adjust the cadence pattern with each any every clip if needed. Time-consuming but viable.
When it comes to pure scaling from progressive to progressive, you’d think that would be pretty well equal, but it’s not. I just did a test today with some drone footage. UHD 29.97p down to 1080 29.97p. I tested Edit Ready, Compressor and Adobe Media Encoder. Of the 3, AME did the best job. ER had a lot of visible aliasing on fine detail, which is something I hadn’t expected at all. I had also expected Compressor to be better than AME, since AME was using OpenCL and not a software conversion. But, in fact, AME looked better.
Then in these conversions, you have other factors that are often something one can’t really predict. This ties us into the discussion of DV and FCPX capture. So, first the DV part. With FCP “legacy” and a Mac tower you could do a direct DV capture over Firewire. This was a data transfer and, therefore, shouldn’t have induced any extra loss. However, back in those days you had professional DV decks and the AJA Io. If you took a DV tape, played out through a pro deck’s component analog or SDI connections into the AJA Io, you got a better-looking image. This was not because of compression, but because the DV deck had extra electronics to actually process the output video and add error correction. A lot better image from a Sony pro DV/DVCAM deck versus tapping the DV output from a cheap deck or a camcorder. Typically this would clean up tape drop-outs and other tape artifacts, which were usually passed through on the DV stream.
Now as far as FCPX is concerned, it can capture these signals, but only as a live stream. Essentially the software is “mounting” the tape deck like a camera card, so you have no deck control or mark in/out of segments with batch capture. So yes, you can capture into X, but it’s a “dumb” process (not intellect, but interactiveness).
– Oliver
Oliver Peters | oliverpeters.com
Oliver Peters – oliverpeters.com
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