Graeme Nattress
Forum Replies Created
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Yes, that will help tremendously. FCP won’t get fantastic real time performance until you can pull video back off the GPU as fast as you can put it up there.
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects for FCP
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I can only get the quicktime API to give me frames of video, no matter what the codec, not fields. Perhaps if you want to access the raw DV stream with your own code you might be able to do that, but that’s not a very easy way of working. If you can only access frames, you have to be able to combine a field from one frame with a field from the next to recreate the frame.
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects for FCP
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I think in the decompression you can choose to only decompress one field, or even just do a rough / fast decompress, but I don’t know if there’s a way to extract the raw data from one field and combine that with the raw data from the other field and create a new frame from them. It would certainly be nice if you can, but again, I go back to my point earlier that 24pA a) avoids this issue entirely, and b) is easier as the frames are flagged.
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects for FCP
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I think it would be hard to notice, but I really think that the 24pA advantage is the ease of use – no guessing where the A frame is and it being fully automatic.
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects for FCP
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I guess that if you plug in a DVCpro50 deck into the camera you could record live out to DVCpro50?? Other than that, you have to record to P2 as the deck in the camera is DV only. It would have bumped the price of the camera way up if they’d put in DVCpro50 recording, never mind DVCproHD recording to tape!
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects for FCP
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Cinema Tools does indeed do a good job of pulldown removal, and deals with the field ordering on the C frame correctly but…. It is not smart, and if you don’t know where the A frame is, you have to tell it. I wrote a little helper plugin for FCP that helps you find the frame the pulldown starts on and I used it to restore some animations back to 24p from Quad video tape and make 24p DVDs from them. It’s in the free section of my website if anyone is interested. However if you have a cadence break in the video, you have to split it at that point and send it seperately to CT or it will pull out the wrong frames.
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects for FCP
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Yes, the codec is aware of fields, but you can’t ask the codec to give you a field – you’ve got to ask for a frame, and it gives you two fields – at least I know of no way to extract a field’s data without decompressing and recompressing.
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects for FCP
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Due to the DV codec, the 24pA will look ever so very slightly better on one frame out of 5. I doubt you’ll see it, but it’s nice to know that it’s there 🙂
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects for FCP
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3:2 pulldown is standard and looks good, but is designed for viewing, not removal. If you want to edit in a 23.98fps (24p) timeline, then you’ve got to remove the pulldown, for which, if it’s DV, you have to remove the pulldown frames, which means, in 3:2 doing a bit of reconstruction work, which implies a decompression and a recompression of those frames.
Advanced pulldown is such that you can extract the 24p frames without mucking around with fields, and hence they can be extracted as whole frames without decompression and recompression, hence better quality.
But….
The DV codec, like most codecs, works better with progressive video than interlaced video, so the 24p frames under advanced pulldown may be very slightly higher quality to begin with than frames from 3:2 pulldown where some get interlaced and spread around a bit.
As for the CF24 mode on the Sony Z1 – don’t get me started on a rant about how bad that looks. It’s awful. Sony should be very sorry about that and apologise.
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects for FCP
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The other issue with normal 2:3 pulldown is that it won’t be flagged for automatic removal, so you’ll have to either have a more intelligent pulldown remover or just guess until you get it right. With 24pA the frames are flagged so it’s automatic.
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects for FCP