[Adam White]

Hi David,

Thanks for your response.

Here is a simulated example of the kind of video tearing I’m experiencing;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tearing_%28simulated%29.jpg

It occurs most frequently when viewing video with fast motion and/or camera pans or movement. My first thought was that it’s a problem with the refresh rate, but this happens on both the iMac monitor and additional monitor, so I’m not really sure of how to resolve this.

[Adam White]

I was always a little bit unsure as to whether 1080 could be ‘truly’ progressive. Thanks for the insight! You learn something every day! 🙂

[Adam White]

I’m on a similar set-up with my iMac (2.66GHZ processor, 4GB ram) and Final Cut Studio runs very well.

One thing to be aware of – if you plan to use Motion it requires a pretty decent graphics processor. It works OK for me – fine for most titles/lower thirds e.t.c. – but tends to lag a bit if I use any of the 3D tools.

But you’ll be fine with your MacBook for all other video editing tasks. FCS is a great piece of kit so you’re in for a treat! 🙂

[Adam White]

I had to do this myself once.

I found the best solution was to go from HDV1080i60 to HDV1080i50 in Compressor.

Drag the HDV1080i60 video into the batch window, then select HDV1080i50 from the presets. In the ‘Frame Controls’ window, you can set the resize and deinterlace filters to “Fast” as the conversion won’t change either size or interlacing method (make sure that these are both kept the same as your source material).

But you’ll want to set rate conversion to “Best (High Quality Motion Compensated)”. This should give you a very good conversion, but make sure you do a couple tests first – try converting some footage with pans/camera moves or scenes with plenty of movement so you can gauge how effective the rate conversion has been.

Be warned – the process will take a long time! If there is a way that you can just convert your final sequence instead of hours of rushes I would advise you to do that, but if you’re client won’t allow it then you’ll just have to bite the bullet and wait it out.

[Adam White]

Hi Caleb,

Capturing your HDV material with ProRes won’t automatically give you superior [i]image[/i] quality; the key is that ProRes RETAINS greater image quality after several renders and the application of video filters e.t.c. as opposed to other codecs. But, the main reason ProRes is so great to use when working with HDV content is that it is far better suited to the editing process then the native HDV codec – using ProRes will reduce your render times when adding filters e.t.c. and I’ve also noticed that it really cuts compression times when you’re compressing your final cut for SD DVD. ProRes is generally better to work with if you’re doing any kind of extensive colour grading, too – in my experience.

The big drawback is that the ProRes format produces very large files (about 60GB per hour of HDV). I don’t know what capacity your scratch disk has – but keep that in mind. As for working with ProRes over a USB connection – personally I would be quite dubious about that. There is a good discussion about this here; https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/8/1000834. The other “solution” would be to capture the files to your macintosh HD during the capture and then transfer them to a FireWire drive afterwards before you start editing. Again – this is not ideal and I know many people would shoot me for even suggesting it! But if your options are limited…

It really boils down to; is this project going to require many video filters/visual effects? If so, ProRes will save you a great deal of time that will otherwise be wasted rendering HDV files and it [i]does[/i] seem to just work more harmoniously with Final Cut (I used to edit with HDV but would never do so now).

Best,
Adam

[Adam White]

Hi John,

Thanks for your input.

I’ve never used (and probably never will again) the HD DVD presets. This particular client asked for a HD DVD (specifically NOT BluRay) to be authored. Personally I would never use this format, but in this line of work the client is king! I still don’t get enough requests for High Definition DVD content to warrant purchasing a BluRay burner – but I’m sure the time will come.

Equally, I’ll try and avoid the DVC Pro codec in the future, too. Maybe it’s just because I’d never used it before, but I didn’t get on great with it. I’m just so used to Apple ProRes now – solid as a rock and just WORKS with FCP and Compressor. I don’t like to use anything different I guess!

Best,
Adam

[Adam White]

Rafael,

From an AJA Whitepaper about the DVC Pro HD format;

“DVCProHD works in non-standard raster sizes, with non-square pixels, to create the same 16:9 picture aspect as full raster HD, without storing as much data. This once again helps to keep the data rates and encoding difficulty down, however the sacrifice is in real resolution. In some cases this will be an acceptable trade off, and in some it will not. Specifically this can cause issues for effects and keying work. In place of standard 1920×1080, DVCProHD encodes 1280×1080 or 1440×1080 depending on the frame rate. In place of 1280×720, DVCProHD encoding down samples to 960×720.”
https://www.aja.com/media_folder_web/AJA_whitepaper_DVCProHD_editing.pdf

The film was shot at 29.97fps – so in 60i – thus, the 1280×1080 dimensions. Had it been shot in 50i then the dimensions would have been 1440×1080.

Also, here you can see a list of Panasonic cameras that use the DVC Pro HD format and the resolutions they record in, the highest resolution being 1280 x 1080 (apart from on the HPX3000 and HPX3700) – https://www.negativespaces.com/blog/tables/digital-production-cameras.htm

So 1280 x 1080 does apply – but only to DVC Pro HD 60i content. I guess you could make an argument that because of the slightly lower resolution it’s not TECHNICALLY a true HD format as we know it – but that’s another issue altogether I suppose!

Best,
Adam

[Adam White]

Hey Guys,

Thanks for your input on this.

I carried on plugging away on this today – and discovered that in fact the encoded files DO have the correct aspect ratio. BUT, it was QuickTime Player displaying them incorrectly! If I open the files in any other programme (i.e. VLC, MpegStreamclip) they look fine.

So the files were being encoded correctly, but QuickTime Player was stretching them on playback. I’m calling Apple later on today to get this mess sorted out!

Oh, by the way, as for the 1280 x 1080 resolution, it’s the correct dimensions for the DVC Pro HD codec. DVC Pro isn’t technically TRUE HD as we know it, so it downsamples higher resolutions to give you 1280 x 1080. Just to add it another complexity, these weird dimensions only apply to 60i DVC Pro video, where as anything in 50i has the much more sensible (and familiar!) dimensions of 1440 x 1080.

Thanks again for trying to help out!

Best,
Adam

[Adam White]

Hi Rafael, sorry I misunderstood your question.

The info from a test H.264 clip that I compressed is as follows;
Format: H.264, 1920 x 1080, Millions
FPS: 29.97

Yes, I used a preset from Compressor – namely HD DVD: H.264 90 Minutes. Then I just adjusted the bitrate accordingly to suit my requirements and set Video Format from ‘Automatic’ to ‘1920 x 1080’. I tried adjusting some of the geometry settings after I got exports with the wrong ratio, but none of these changes worked.

I’m sure I must be making a basic error somewhere along the way, maybe you can help?

Adam

[Adam White]

The info from QuickTime Player;
Format: DVCProHD1080i60, 1280 x 1080 (1888 x 1062), Millions.
FPS: 29.97
Data Size: 64.39GB
Data Rate: 116.64mbit/s

When importing the clip into Compressor, Video info appears as;
Econded Bounds: 1280×1080
Display bounds: 1920×1080
Pixel Aspect Ratio: DVCProHD 1080i (16:9)
Frame rate: 29.97

I have just done some tests converting the file for an NTSC SD DVD (my client needs standard definition copies too) and it works fine – the aspect ratio is correct. So it must be an H.264 setting that I haven’t got right. Any thoughts?