Andy Forest
Forum Replies Created
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I would recommend that you call some tape transfer / duplication / media services houses and see what they can do for you.
Whenever we get a tape in a format we don’t have a deck for, I just send it to our local transfer house and they capture a quicktime file compressed with the Blackmagic codec from the tape. It is an uncompressed format with a free codec you can use in Premiere.
This transfer house has final cut for their video suite, but the codec and file itself are cross-platform, so we can use it right away in Premiere. 16 minutes of footage will be 25 GB, so you will have to send them a firewire drive to put it on. I had to buy Macdrive for $50 so that I could read a Mac formatted firewire drive on my PC edit station.
To get the best quality, they use SDI output from the Digibeta deck into a Blackmagic SDI capture card.
You mentioned that you might want to submit the final product to film festivals. If that means you want to output back on to Digibeta when you are done, you can just export a Blackmagic Quicktime file and send it back to the transfer house for them to output.
The Cineform HD codec is great, but you don’t really need it for this little footage. Also, Digibeta is an SD format, not HD. You can use the Cineform HD codec for SD work, we do it all the time, but there’s no need to purchase it for a small project like this. (Note: We use the Prospect HD codec, I’m not sure if the other Cineform codec flavours do SD).
Good luck!
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Yep, by using the analog outputs of the FX1, you can capture uncompressed 4:2:2 HD video. 4:2:2 because the analog outputs are YUV.
The footage will have been converted to analog and back to digital, so it won’t look as good as a really high end camera. The video quality will also depend on how good the digital to analog converters are in the FX1. That’s why that test by Kaku Ito is important to scrutinize. I would do your own tests, too, if you are going to rely on this setup.
The “portable” PC will have to be powerful dual processor machine, and have a serious RAID array, too. Uncompressed HD is a lot of data. Our Blackmagic decklink edit workstation has 8 SATA drives in a RAID 5 array controlled by a Broadcom Raidcore BC4852 card. Be sure to check Blackmagic’s page for system compatibility, too.
If you have a lot of footage to capture, I suggest looking at Cineform’s Prospect HD codec for HD. It is very high quality, much better than HDV. At 65 GB/hour, the captured files are much easier to work with than the 556 GB/hour of uncompressed 10 bit HD. This eliminates the need for an expensive RAID array. Since you will have no tape copy of your footage, you’ll need to archive the captured files when you are done editing, so this will also save you a lot on external firewire drives.
If you want to do some tests for your chroma keying setup, they have a 15 day trial version of Prospect HD. I’m not sure how to get it, you might have to email them to ask for it.
Cineform has some pretty specific requirements for ingest and editing of HD-SDI material, so make sure to follow their specs. We ordered the system they recommended from QSOL to make sure to have everything working.
We haven’t been working with Prospect HD for very long. We have encountered a few bugs, but their tech team has responded quickly to any problem.
Andy
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Have you thought about shooting in HDV? The chroma is subsampled due to it being recorded to tape at 4:2:0, but since 1080i HD video has about 6 times as many pixels as SD video, you will get a much better key. Here’s a great creative cow thread about keying with HDV. Your video editing workflow will be a bit slower, due to having to convert to SD after keying.
Another way to get an even cleaner key is to skip the chroma subsampling and mpeg2 compression that occurs when recording to tape. You can do this by using the live HD analog outputs of the Sony HDR-FX1/HVR-Z1 cameras.
You would connect the analog HD video outputs to an analog HD to HD-SDI converter. From there, you would go in to your computer with an HD-SDI capture card.
Kako Ito and others did some tests of this process.
Andy