Graeme Nattress
Forum Replies Created
-
Yes, they do work in FCP6.
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP
-
Output to the card is direct from rendered YCbCr data, and should not have gone through the FCP RGB pathway whichis 8bit only. When you render in 10bit mode, it goes through a 32float YCbCr pathway, and that’s the data that goes to the render file on disc, and also, as 10bit YCbCr out to the card.
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP
-
It’s actually Film Effects that has the chroma upsampling. Try G Chroma Sharpen which can do wonders on SD scaled up to HD.
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP
-
Ah, a bug in the scaling with 10bit. Great find! I’ll have to see if I can dupe the bug here.
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP
-
Thanks Matt. I’ve not seen this 10bit bug myself, but I’ve seen a few other 10bit bugs in the past. I hope you’ve reported this to Apple with enough information so that they can reproduce the bug.
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP
-
And when you get FCS2 with ProRes, you can elevate that quality still further!
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP
-
Might not make things, for you, visually worse, but you’ve got to know that behind the scenes you’re adding another layer of unneccessary compression. It’s probably only the fact that HDV cameras are not that great to begin with that’s not letting you easily see the 18% lower resolution. And then, that’s one more layer of compression that’s been put on the video before broadcast and it all adds up.
Of course, it would be wonderful if we all had hard drives big enough to go fully uncompressed, and it would be wonderful if HD decks were also totally uncompressed, but that’s not reality. We must accept some compression, but in doing so, we should tailor the compression for the job and keep it sensible. DVCproHD is a camera acquisition codec that’s great for native editing of such footage, but it was never designed as and due to it’s smaller than needed raster size, not really suitable as an intermediate codec, and certainly lacks robustness over multiple compressions. I guess that’s why Apple invented ProRes, which was designed for intermediate work, has 10bits, is full raster, and will stand up to multiple generations.
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP
-
Sending back to tape puts another compression on the image though. Just putting 720p in a 1080p timeline and letting FCP just scale up with high quality mode on works very well. Issue here is it doesn’t handle issues of frame rates, so won’t help for 720p60 to 1080i60, and it won’t add 3:2 pulldown to 720p24 to 1080i60.
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP
-
Does it occur rendering in a native HDV timeline? Have you tried an 8bit SD timeline to see if it’s a 10bit issue? What quality of scaling do you have turned on in your timeline?
Was it the camera or your capture card that did the downconversion to SD? The cameras, I’m told, have very poor sub-standard downconversion built in.
I don’t know precisely what the answer is as I’ve never seen it before, but see if any of the above spark an idea and perhaps help get to the bottom of it.
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP
-
Capturing as DVCproHD is transcoding though. And to say you’ll have a better quality, is false. How can going from 1440×1080 to 1280×1080 help the image? How can taking something that’s already over-compressed and compressing it again help? It can’t. It can only make things worse. Sure, it can help for some workflows, but quality is not one of the things it helps.
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP