[Glenn Chan]

In some other contexts XDCAM has a nice workflow. For offline (and depending on your NLE), you don’t have to spend as much time doing log & capture.

For online editing, ingesting off XDCAM is very fast. Shuttling is instantaneous. Conforms go a lot faster.

[Glenn Chan]

The depth of field might explain it… XDCAM tends to be shot on 1/2″ chips, which digital betacam 2/3″. If you care about DOF, you can get a 35mm adapter for the same DOF as film (though you get light loss, some noise, and some other issues). Some stuff shot on HDV cameras with a 35mm adapter looks pretty darn cool. Probably a lot of it is how much care you put into shooting the material.

[Glenn Chan]

1- The color temp of the monitor should be D65 (except in Japan and Asian countries). Sometimes this is labeled 6500K (which is not the same color as D65, but is pretty close).

In practice you want all the light sources in your room to be in the ballpark of D65, but more importantly they should all match. Your eye kind of auto white balances to what it’s looking at… you don’t want that to drift.

2- Display a black and white image on your monitor (actually de-saturate the image to ensure that it’s perfectly black and white). Real world images converted to black and white are good. You can adjust the bias controls to try to get the color right.

3- When a CRT ages, its colors will shift… it may be bad enough that you can’t get grayscale tracking to an acceptable level. In that case you need a new monitor.

[Glenn Chan]

Adam Wilt has an article over at dv.com with some numbers…

https://www.dv.com/columns/columns_item.php?articleId=55301757

DVCPRO:
Bitrate: 100 Mbps (for picture only? audio would add to overall bitrate)
Luma: 1280×1080
Chroma: 640×1080

HDCAM:
Birate: 135 Mbps
Luma: 1440×1080
Chroma: 640×1080

If the post house has a HDCAM SR deck, it may be able to play back HDCAM tapes. So you may be saving money on deck rentals.

[Glenn Chan]

Hey David,
Thanks for the reply- I think the monitor may be able to apply the appropriate conversion. Didnt think of that. Hopefully I can make it to the next FCPUGTO meeting and bump into you there.

Glenn

[Glenn Chan]

If you have the money, a Teranex conversion box will do a very good job. Resolution-wise, it noticeably gives a little extra resolution and no motion artifacts. The Teranex website has information on their motion-compensating de-interlacing:
https://teranexlive.dimentians.com/resources/whitePapers.cfm

I believe Compressor does something similar, since it supposedly inherit’s Shake optical flow processing (which is what the Teranex does). However, I’m not sure how good the actual implementation is- I’ve never compared Compressor to a Teranex. Supposedly, Compressor does get artifacts sometimes.

[Glenn Chan]

Yep!

[Glenn Chan]

1- Saturation can be an ambiguous word. If you follow an intuitive sense of saturation (like the HSL color picker), then both 75% and 100% bars are 100% “saturated”.
If you mean chroma (and this is unintuitive), the 75% bars are 75% “saturated” and the 100% bars are 100% “saturated”.

Perhaps this is why you are confused? Saturation can refer to either of these two concepts (and it probably shouldn’t).

2- In the bars generated by Final Cut, the chroma is 75% of the maximum (as opposed to 100%). This is the kind of color bars you usually see. The 100% bars (chroma is 100% of maximum) is illegal to broadcast (since broadcast is more limited in bandwidth than studio/production use) and not as commonly found.

3- Bars going from HDCAM to dbeta usually give you the correct SD bars. In rare occasions, you can get the wrong levels in the conversion- bars will let you spot this.
a- In consumer equipment (or poorly implemented equipment), they do not downconvert correctly.
b- (Nothing to do with FCP.) In some cameras, you can change the colorimetry setting so that the camera uses a different set of luma coefficients. The bars generated by the camera will reflect this.
c- The Teranex converters can tweak the colors of an image to account for differences between EBU, SMPTE C, and Rec. 709 phosphors/primaries. I believe this affects the color bars too. You can insert correct bars on the SD master.

[Glenn Chan]

Hmm not even Final Touch does that (curves/smoothstep interface is limited like in FCP; the other curves do something else).

Color Finesse and After Effects both have curves like what you describe. After Effects is very photoshop-like in that many photoshop filters and features can be found in AE.

[Glenn Chan]

1. Why is HDCam’s 3:1:1 better than, for instance, DVCProHD’s 4:2:2? I thought the higher the numbers, the better the quality?
The x:x:x notation (or J:a:b) mostly refers to the ratios between the luma samples to the chroma samples.

HDV1 1280x720p 4:2:0 Luma res: 1280×720 Chroma res: 640×360
HDV2 1440x1080i 4:2:0 Luma res: 1440×1080 Chroma res: 720×540
DVCProHD 1280x720p 4:2:2 Luma res: 960×720 Chroma res: 480×720
DVCProHD
30fps 1920×1080 4:2:2 Luma res: 1280×1080 Chroma res: 640×1080
25fps 1920×1080 4:2:2 Luma res: 1440×1080 Chroma res: 720×1080
HDcam 1920×1080 4:2:2 Luma res: 1440×1080 Chroma res: 480×1080

HDCAM has a higher bitrate than Panasonic’s DVCPRO HD format, so this means that HDCAM is recording more information to begin with.

2. What is Uncompressed HD? Meaning: since HD is not analog, its digital, therefore encoded, therefore there has to be a codec, therefore there has to be some kind of compression?
Uncompressed usually refers to digital video that doesn’t have DCT-based, JPEG, MPEG, lossless compression, or other forms of compression (excluding chroma subsampling). 4:2:2 uncompressed video will go over SDI, while other forms of video will not.

4:2:2 chroma subsampling itself behaves very much like compression. Marco Solario’s site shows the differences between different 4:2:2 “uncompressed” codecs. codecs.onerivermedia.com
4:2:2 chroma subsampling, in practical situations, is usually not noticeable at all.

7. Whats the difference between, on one hand,choosing the sequence settings (selecting the sequence and apple-0) to be anamorphic 16:9, and, on the other hand, choosing in the same menu (apple 0, sequence settings) the quicktime video settings in compressor DV-Pal advanced button, the aspect ratio at 16/9?
When you add a clip to the timeline, FCP will look at both the clip’s settings and the timeline’s setting. If necessary, it will apply the correct “track motion” (distort) to the clip to make it match. Changing the anamorphic setting of a clip already on the timeline doesn’t seem to change its look- you should go into track motion and change things, or paste attributes onto that clip.

An anamorphic sequence will change the look of the canvas window to show the image in 16:9 ratio (instead of 4:3).

9. When you say 8-bit or 10-bit uncompressed, what are those 8-bits or 10-bits?
These bits refer to the bit depth of the video. It’s a similar idea to audio being 16-bit bit depth or 24-bit bit depth.
10-bit reduces the amount of rounding error. Rounding error can occur in places such as the conversion from R’G’B’ color space to Y’CbCr (many people incorrectly refer to Y’CbCr as “YUV”).