Bill Ravens
Forum Replies Created
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I have to be amused at the parochial attitude that many videographers take to technology. To add to Rafael’s post, the XDCAM EX uses a hardware compression codec that is limited to 35mbps bitrates. This is what the camera uses to record to the flash cards. As others have said, the EX1’s HD-SDI output bypasses the camera’s internal codec and feeds the signal out the HD-SDI port according to HD-SDI signal specifications, which are 4:2:2 YUV at bitrates up to 1.5 Gbps. The nanoflash recorder uses the Sony HD 422 codec, which has HD-SDI recording capability far exceeding that of the Sony EX codec. For the price of a consumer camera, a videographer can now record to professional specifications accepted by National Geographic.
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Indeed, long form GOP will need to be transcoded to DNxHD before you can use QTRef,but that’s just another render step. If you do anything but curring, i.e. FX or transitions, you’ll have to transcode anyway. And no, all the renderers I list will work in HD. I work exclusively in HD, myself.
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In my experience, the AVid renderers can be very slow, as you’ve experienced. My workflow alternative is to always export at a Quicktime Reference file, then import that QTref to a third party renderer. Depending on what the delivery format is, I use different 3rd party renderers including:
MPEG_Streamclip
Tmpgenc v4
After Effects
Sorenson Squeeze5
Procoder 3
Avid DVD by Sonic -
unless your clips are very short…like on the order of a few seconds…you’ll not have much joy sending any video files via email. Most email servers limit attachments to less than 1 Mb.
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I agree with you Tim. Your post made me think of another factor. Downrezzing HD(1920×1080) to SD(720×480) is inherently a problem, quite different from the twitter that results from bandwidth limiting and compression artifacts. In my experience, if one is aware of the need for downrezzing in their workflow and delivery, 1280×720 makes a much prettier source for downrezzing. Having said this, there are several techniques posted on the internet for mitigating line twitter when converting HD to SD.
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I think you’ll find the twitter problem is all but eliminated at bit rates of 100mbps or higher. As an aside, are you using much sharpening in your camera setup? Sharpening, in-camera, exacerbates the twitter problem.
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Another possibility is to transcode your file prior to importing them into Avid. There are several applications that will do this, most notably Quicktime Pro and Sorenson Squeeze.
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Can you not consolidate imported clips to DNx36 for the sake of editing, then replace that with the hi quality files when cutting is done?
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You have several choices…you can BATCH IMPORT the missing files, or, you can open the media tool and manually drag the missing mxf files back into the project bin.
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My personal preference is to output a QT reference file to MPEG_STREAMCLIP. I get the best quality H264 I’ve found with this methid.