Barry Green
Forum Replies Created
-
Well, yes, but not downloaded; there’s no way to load scene files electronically on the DVX series. You can look on The DVX DVD for a dozen different scene files and their effects, and you can frequently find postings where people have listed their various scene files. But you can’t download ’em, you have to manually set ’em.
—————–
Get the most from your DVX camera. The DVX Book and DVX DVD are now available on ebay and at Amazon (https://www.fiftv.com/db) -
You can’t do it in-camera with the FS-100 (yet); perhaps a future firmware update will allow that.
So yes, you’d set 720/24p mode and FILM CAM and set your frame rate to your chosen rate (in this case 48fps). Then, as I understand it, you’d run the Apple Frame Rate Converter utility to strip out the duplicate frames and leave you with a 24fps file with (approximately) 2:1 slow motion.
With that said, you’ll have to ask one of the Apple experts here for more info on the process of using the FRC; I’m just pointing out that yes, that’s the workflow that you’re going to have to follow to get this to work.
—————–
Get the most from your DVX camera. The DVX Book and DVX DVD are now available on ebay and at Amazon (https://www.fiftv.com/db) -
He’s probably capturing the playback from the FireStore. FCP 4.5 supports firewire capture of DVCPRO-HD.
—————–
Get the most from your DVX camera. The DVX Book and DVX DVD are now available on ebay and at Amazon (https://www.fiftv.com/db) -
[Mitch Ives] “Where can someone find info on the AVCHD format… codec, compression, data rates, etc?”
AVC-HD is a different format, it’s being positioned as an alternative to, and replacement for, HDV. AVC-Intra is an alternative to HDCAM-SR and HD-D5, but AVC-HD is an alternative to HDV (and even XDCAM-HD).
I don’t know of any authoritative reference sources, other than the official site, avchd-info.org.
The differences of AVC-HD to HDV are fairly easy to illustrate. Both are long-GOP 4:2:0 systems that record 8-bit color depth. After that, it’s all in AVC-HD’s favor:
HDV is tape-based (and exclusive by manufacturer); AVC-HD is tapeless (approved media include hard disk, mini-DVD, SD card and Memory Stick, so far).
HDV uses compressed audio, 2 channels of MPEG-1 Layer II at 384 k-bit. AVC-HD has two audio schemes, one is AC-3 with 5.1 channel surround sound, the other is uncompressed PCM audio with 7.1 channels of surround sound.
HDV uses 1440×1080 to record 1080i; AVC-HD offers that and it also offers full-raster 1920×1080.
HDV has no real support for 24p; 24p has been kind of wedged-in using frame-repeat pulldown in a 60p data stream (in 720p) or Canon’s 24F mode. AVC-HD has true native 24P support for 1920×1080 @ 24p, 1440×1080 @ 24p, and 1280×720 @ 24p.
HDV is fixed bit-rate, AVC-HD is scalable. You can select your quality level, which means you can vary how much recording time you get on your media. AVC-HD goes from about 6 megabits on up to 24 megabits.
And finally, AVC (aka H.264) is a much superior codec to MPEG-2. Sony and Panasonic issued a joint press release where they said that AVC was about 2.5 times as efficient as MPEG-2 (meaning that to match AVC-HD’s quality, you’d need to use 2.5 times as much bandwidth with MPEG-2). To match 10 megabits of AVC-HD, you’d need 25 megabits of HDV. My speculation is that AVC-HD at its maximum (24 megabits) should match or exceed XDCAM-HD quality (all other things being equal, of course).
The two big problems with AVC-HD right now are: editing, and camera head selection. AVC (h.264) is notoriously processor-hungry, and it’s slow to edit (right now). The solution is the onboard H.264 decoding chips on nVidia and ATI graphics cards; when editing apps tie into those GPUs we’ll have realtime editing, but until then it can be very slow. And there are few editors that work with the format now; FCP 6 is one of them, but it does a transcode away from AVC and over to its ProRes codec. EDIUS can do the same thing, transcoding AVC files to CanopusHQ codec. Pinnacle Studio 11 does native AVC editing, and I believe it uses graphics card acceleration; I saw it running on a laptop and delivering something like 20 fps so… the future is bright, but the “now” is not as bright.
Of course, HDV has its share of editing hassles too, it’s a lousy editing codec, but it’s certainly easier to edit than AVC is today!
Second thing is camera heads: there are no “worthy” camera heads out there yet. Whereas HDV has things like the XLH1 and HD250, the best AVC-HD has (right now) is little tiny palmcorders. Imagine if Canon made an AVC-HD XLH1 (and put a lens with decent manual controls on it!) That would be a killer camera. The day someone produces a worthy camera head (like a high-def DVX or something comparable) I think people’s interest in AVC-HD will skyrocket. It’s unquestionably the format of the future and will totally replace HDV; that’s what the manufacturers intended when they designed it. And other manufacturers have joined; right now every camcorder manufacturer (except JVC) is a member of the AVC-HD group.
But we need a worthy camera head, and we need adequate bandwidth. The maximum bandwidth they’ve implemented on any AVC-HD camcorder is about 16 megabits, IIRC; the format is spec’d to go up to 24. I think AVC-HD at 24 megabits would be XDCAM-HD caliber or better.
So it’s not a perfect format, it’s still long-GOP and 4:2:0, but hey, people have been living with that for years on HDV and many seem satisfied. If someone’s happy with HDV, they should be thrilled with AVC-HD.
—————–
Get the most from your DVX camera. The DVX Book and DVX DVD are now available on ebay and at Amazon (https://www.fiftv.com/db) -
[tarkken] “Please bribe Panny to change the name back to AVC-PRO or AVC-ULTRA, whatever they were thinking in the early days. I think this question is going to come up more than not – and soon enough people are going to think you’re bidding jobs with a consumer camera, rather than a $100k rig.”
I so agree. I think the name “AVCPRO” would have been perfect; it’s one letter different from their established DVCPRO, it gets across the AVC name, and it differentiates it very well from the lower-end AVC-HD. There’s definitely going to be confusion. Maybe we should start a grass-roots campaign to call it AVCPRO anyway, to see if it’ll “stick”? 😉
—————–
Get the most from your DVX camera. The DVX Book and DVX DVD are now available on ebay and at Amazon (https://www.fiftv.com/db) -
[Raymond Motion Pictures] “That begs the question – Is it an EDITING codec? Preferable to ProRes because of apparently smaller file sizes?”
It’ll be much smaller file sizes, and it’s intraframe only, and it’s 10-bit, and it holds up extraordinarily well to multiple generations of recompression.
But is it an editing codec? I guess it depends on hardware acceleration. It’s AVC-based, which does make it processor-intensive, but it doesn’t do the long-GOP structure that makes HDV and AVC-HD so painfully slow to work with.
Apple and Canopus both said that they’d have native AVC-Intra editing offered, so we’ll see. I think that if there’s fast-enough response, it’ll definitely make a great editing codec. But if it’s not fast enough to do multiple streams in realtime, you might still want to consider transcoding to an editing codec. It remains to be seen. But it’s possible that the AVC hardware acceleration on nVidia and ATI graphics cards might render this moot; if AVC-Intra can be coded to use hardware acceleration then it could be an awesome editing codec. (“could” being the operative word, because hey, there’s theory and there’s real-world, and the only thing that counts is real-world experience!)
—————–
Get the most from your DVX camera. The DVX Book and DVX DVD are now available on ebay and at Amazon (https://www.fiftv.com/db) -
Exactly. The lenses are the same (well, the glass is the same). The difference with the CAC lens is that it is a digital lens with the ability to relay focal length, iris, and focus position digitally to the camera, so the camera’s CAC function can work.
If you put a CAC lens on a non-CAC body, you’ll see purple/green fringing. If you put a CAC lens on a CAC body, you won’t. If you put a non-CAC lens on a CAC body, then the level of fringing you’ll see depends on how well and how thoroughly the lens coatings compensate for fringing.
The CAC lenses don’t try to correct out the fringing with coatings; they assume the camera body’s digital processor will do it. If the body doesn’t have a CAC processor, that’s why you’ll see fringing — the body won’t know what to do with the CAC lens position info the lens is feeding it.
—————–
Get the most from your DVX camera. The DVX Book and DVX DVD are now available on ebay and at Amazon (https://www.fiftv.com/db) -
AVC-HD is not AVC-Intra. One’s a slightly-improved HDV, offering more compression efficiency, long-GOP 4:2:0 and uncompressed audio. The other’s a near D5HD caliber codec with intraframe-only 10-bit 4:2:2 encoding and full raster 1920×1080.
Both are based on AVC, hence the confusion. The AVC-Intra codec card (by itself) costs more than any AVC-HD complete camcorder on the market.
—————–
Get the most from your DVX camera. The DVX Book and DVX DVD are now available on ebay and at Amazon (https://www.fiftv.com/db) -
It is a *huge* feature if you’re buying an inexpensive lens. I’ve played quite a bit with seeing what the CAC function does by unplugging the lens and comparing, and it works very very well. It really minimizes, and in some cases eliminates, the purple/green fringing that is endemic in low-cost lenses.
If you can spend $50,000+ on a lens, don’t worry about CAC. But if you’re buying a $10,000 lens, by all means spend the extra $1,000 and get the CAC version, it really works.
—————–
Get the most from your DVX camera. The DVX Book and DVX DVD are now available on ebay and at Amazon (https://www.fiftv.com/db) -
No cheap PCMCIA->firewire or PCMCIA->USB adapter will work, nor will one ever work.
You can get a PCI slot->PCMCIA slot adapter for a desktop for around $75 to $150 and those all work, but I don’t know if Mac drivers exist for those.
—————–
Get the most from your DVX camera. The DVX Book and DVX DVD are now available on ebay and at Amazon (https://www.fiftv.com/db)