Barry Green
Forum Replies Created
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[Noah Kadner] “In HD it’s also the only alternative to P2 recording.”
Noah, I know what you meant, but I’d like to take a moment to point out that there are *many* alternatives to P2 recording. Not all are necessarily viable, but people should be aware of what’s possible.First, anything that can capture the firewire stream can be used to record the straight DVCPRO-HD feed. That means you can plug in a DVCPRO-HD-aware FireStore hard disk recorder, or you could plug it into a computer and use HD Rack (my name for a forthcoming DVCPRO-HD-aware version of DV Rack). Or, a computer running Avid Express HD or Final Cut Pro HD. It’s possible that Canopus Edius will also support direct capture, but I don’t know for sure.
Or, as mentioned, you can also record straight to tape — you can plug the firewire output into an AJ-HD1200A firewire-enabled DVCPRO-HD deck and shoot straight to tape.
Any of those methods will let you capture the full, unmodified, native DVCPRO-HD signal at full resolution and full quality.
Also, there’s the potential of recording directly from the analog component outputs. You could plug into an HDCAM deck, for example. Or HD-D5. You could use an HD-SDI conversion and record uncompressed high-def on anything that has an HD-SDI input (a computer, a tape deck, a hard disk recorder, etc).
In other words, there are many ways that you’ll be able to record HD without ever going near a P2 card. I think they’re all much less practical and more limiting, but they are there.
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Well, what makes the JVC output so important is two things:
1) it avoids MPEG compression, which is a very good thing, and
2) it shows a signal that you can otherwise not get. No other camera in history, that I know of, had such a limitation — 60p display on the uncompressed, but only 30p on tape. That’s why it’s so interesting to people.It’s also totally impractical, as recording it will involve $10,000 worth of gear, cables, and only get six seconds per gigabyte.
But I think the reason it’s talked about so much is because the camera cannot do 60p/”live video” in any other way… and avoiding MPEG-2 is a very good thing.
The other thing, which I think you brought up, is whether or not the video has been through the chroma decimation process. “Uncompressed”, as the term is being applied to these cameras, means that it’s avoiding the final digital DCT compression phase (whether DVCPRO-HD or DV or HDV). But that’s not the only compression the signal undergoes, of course. The very first thing that happens to a DV signal is that it undergoes chroma decimation down to 4:1:1. That’s basically a form of “analog compression”. Then it undergoes the 5:1 DV compression. But they’re separate processes.
The question I have is, what is coming out of the HDV camera ports? Is it pre- or post-chroma decimation? If it’s an analog equivalent of 4:2:0, it’s obviously a lot less interesting than if it’s an equivalent of 4:4:4 from the CCDs.
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[Brian Wells] “But Barry.. The DVX100 also has “uncompressed output” as well.
It’s done over the S-Video connector.
Analog HD Component isn’t any different in that regard. “Not necessarily true. Has anyone verified that?
Back in the old Sony VX1000 days there was much argument over whether the s-video port would be better for chroma keying. Eventually an engineer traced the schematic and proved that the s-video was coming after the DV compression. S-video output, at least on the VX1000, was post-compression.
I don’t know what the status of today’s cameras are. They may be pre- or post-compression… we’ll have to figure out a way to test it to tell for sure. But I wouldn’t just assume that it was.
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Emery said he wanted to avoid the DVCPRO-HD codec. Using the analog component outputs would do that.
Whether that qualifies as full “uncompressed” or not, well… it’s not HD-SDI taken straight from the DSP, no. And we don’t know if it’ll have been through chroma decimation yet (a question I couldn’t get an answer to from the JVC guys either about their camera). But it would at least avoid the digital compression…
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[Emery] “more interested in avoiding the DVCPRO HD codec”
No need for a hack/modification then. The HVX will output uncompressed video on its component outputs. If you have an uncompressed HD capture system, with the attendant RAID of hard disks and capture card etc., you could capture directly to computer and avoid the codec.
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Be sure to look at this link, for an example of how superior 4:2:2 DVCPRO50 is, as compared to 4:1:1 or 4:2:0 DV:
https://www.eleventy.org/dv-en/
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Sounds like you have TC PRESET on instead of TC REGEN. Preset uses the setting in the current menu system to generate the timecode, whereas TC REGEN picks up the timecode off of the tape.
You can put 30p, 24p, and 60i footage all on the same tape if you want. You cannot switch frame rates while shooting, you have to pause before you can change the frame rate. Whether your editing program supports different timebase files in the same project is another question.
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You should get your wish.
A G5 running FCP-HD should be able to output the data to the firewire. You could have the camera plugged in through firewire, just like a DV camera, and the firewire data should be automatically converted by the camera to analog component, which could be displayed on an HD monitor. Unlike MPEG-2, which cannot be timeline-scrubbed to firewire, DVCPRO-HD can (at least, that is my understanding regarding FCP-HD and the AJ-HD1200A firewire DVCPRO-HD deck… that you can preview out to firewire, scrub the timeline to firewire, etc).
It remains to be announced whether the HVX will allow the same firewire-in, analog-component-out capability, but it seems reasonable to assume so.
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Yes Julie, your understanding is correct.
My source is Jan Crittenden, product manager for the HVX200. She’s pretty much *the* voice for what is officially included, and what is possible, and not possible, on this camera. I spent three hours with her (and Jarred Land of DVXUser, and Phil Livingston of Panasonic), getting the most accurate information possible. The result was written up in an article, which I also ran by Jan for fact-checking prior to publication, to make sure that it was accurate (with the understanding that all specifications are subject to change until without notice, just as with any pre-release product.)
A version of the article should appear in next month’s Studio Monthly magazine, and the full text is at https://www.dvxuser.com/articles/HVX200/.
The camera has the ability to copy to an external USB2 drive. It can dub the contents of a P2 card over to any off-the-shelf drive. As the feature set is currently constituted, it cannot record directly to such a drive, but as far as I understand, that isn’t absolutely definite yet — they may still be able to implement such a feature in the shipping version. I don’t expect it, but it was not definitively ruled out at the time the report was written.
What is confirmed is that if the drive has the electronics and intelligence to capture the firewire port’s streaming signal, then it definitely can capture live streaming. But that would take a specially-engineered drive, such as a FireStore, and that capability is the same as any firewire-equipped camera.
Additionally, Jan can’t comment on what may or may not be possible by third-party manufacturers. So if someone can figure out how to make a PCMCIA-to-1394 adapter that presents itself to the camera as if it were a P2 card, and interfaces with the camera as a P2 card, but instead of writing the information it receives to onboard memory it instead were to write it to a drive connected to its 1394 adapter, then yes, that should make it possible to capture and stream directly to an off-the-shelf drive. However, such capability is not a Panasonic product, nor is it anticipated to be forthcoming from Panasonic anytime soon, so that would be up to a third party to design, test, and manufacture.
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That would be perfect — 30 minutes is more than enough!
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Get the most from your DVX camera. The DVX Book and DVX DVD are now available at https://www.dvxuser.com/articles/dvxbook/ and at Amazon (https://tinyurl.com/54u4a)