[Jeff Greenberg]

Unless you want to purchase a thunderbolt device, unfortunately no, there isn’t. That’s the limitation of iMacs (and MacBookPros.)

I’d do a sample with the miniDV device to see how you feel it affects the quality. If you’re not happy with it, you could look at some of the h.264 encoders – just make sure they have adjustable compression rates (and you’d want little additional compression.)

Best,

Jeff G

Certified Master Trainer | Adobe, Apple, Avid
————
You should follow me (filmgeek) on twitter. I promise to be nice.
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[Jeff Greenberg]

Josh,

Oh yeah, go Prores; I don’t know if the camera passes through uncompressed via HDSDI or HDMI, but I’d go into the Atmos @ ProRes or ProRes HQ. If you have really fast drives, you could go ProRes 4444. Stay in proves, you should get an excellent key – this is a great example for you to do a field test before you go and bring in your talent.

Best,

Jeff G

Certified Master Trainer | Adobe, Apple, Avid
————
You should follow me (filmgeek) on twitter. I promise to be nice.
New! FCPX DSLR workflows; What’s new in Media Comopser 6; Full Media Composer 6 basics from macProVideo.com
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My book (with Richard Harrington and Robbie Carman)- An Editor’s Guide to Adobe Premiere Pro
Lynda.com – Compressor Essentials 3.5 and 4
Contact me through my Website

[Jeff Greenberg]

[Kaoru Koike] “(I thought FCP X edit AVCHD natively…? wrong??)”
I don’t have am AVCHD camera around – I’m 98% sure that FCPX can edit AVCHD natively, for the card structures it recognizes.

This is a highly compressed codec – hard for your computer to playback; any effects (like text or color correction) would yield so-so results due to the compression. It’s about 30:1 compressed. So while you can edit with it directly (no transcode necessary) you’d never want to output directly in that format.

I suggest you edit, etc however you like. When you’re finished, you can use the share command in FCPX (or use compressor, which Share utilizes.) I just opened compressor….

Anything around 10mb/s or so (which is decent for 1080 video, 720 could be less, 960×540 could be less, SD could be less, etc) The Apple Device settings: HD for Apple Devices (10mb) should produce decent results at the sizing you want. Smaller (and decent) is the Large 540p Video Sharing setting under video sharing.

Feel free to ask followups, etc

Best,

Jeff G

Certified Master Trainer | Adobe, Apple, Avid
————
You should follow me (filmgeek) on twitter. I promise to be nice.
New! FCPX DSLR workflows; What’s new in Media Comopser 6; Full Media Composer 6 basics from macProVideo.com
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[Jeff Greenberg]

Best quality or optimized for keynote playback?

Where do the clips come from?

Best,

Jeff G

Certified Master Trainer | Adobe, Apple, Avid
————
You should follow me (filmgeek) on twitter. I promise to be nice.
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[Jeff Greenberg]

Frank or Val,

Sure, I’ll take a crack at this!

1) I think the answer has nothing to do with hardware or pipelines for the most part.
There are two types of compression: Lossless and Lossy.

Lossless compression your familiar with – you’ve zipped a spreadsheet, right? When you send it to someone else, it’s crucial that it arrives with all the data – otherwise we’re in real trouble with our financial data!

Lossy compression is like the JPEG we have on our still cameras. It’s possible to average some of the information and throw out some of the data that your ey just can’t see. For example, at a distance, somebody is holding up a square of 4 lights–3 of them bright green one of them a darker green. We could, average all that to be just one group of 4 dots all just a little darker than the bright green. Less information, but your eye and brain can’t really tell the difference. We’ve lost information, but we have a picture that your eye and brain pretty much interpret as what happened.

Where I think you’re getting confused is this–most professional compression schemes used by editorial software are lossy in nature. To display an actual picture though, the last step decompresses this lossy nature back to the full picture (uncompressed).

2) In a DV world (for example), Data on your HD (compressed), goes down the FireWire cable (Compressed), hits the cameras chip during playback for display and the chip uncompresses the lossy information back to full raster.

3) If hardware can’t keep up – say BM is requesting to playback uncompressed video @ 1080 and the drives aren’t delivering data fast enough, your system ‘drops’ frames.

4) I don’t understand this question.

Best,

Jeff G

Certified Master Trainer | Adobe, Apple, Avid
————
You should follow me (filmgeek) on twitter. I promise to be nice.
New! FCPX DSLR workflows; What’s new in Media Comopser 6; Full Media Composer 6 basics from macProVideo.com
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My book (with Richard Harrington and Robbie Carman)- An Editor’s Guide to Adobe Premiere Pro
Lynda.com – Compressor Essentials 3.5 and 4
Contact me through my Website

[Jeff Greenberg]

[Anhtu Vu] “Is it also possible to digitize multi stream in real time, like a Jpeg 2000, a low rez file for internet, a Prores file…..all in one pass ???”

Groups like Digital Rapids makes JPEG2k cards; I suggest you find a video reseller in your area to have them price out a full system (whatever you save by doing this yourself probably will cost you more money in time in the long run.)

Unfortunately, I don’t believe there are any cards on the market that will do multi encodes like this on acquisition. Especially formats like “low rez file for Internet” that will require multiple passes.

Best,

Jeff G

Certified Master Trainer | Adobe, Apple, Avid
————
You should follow me (filmgeek) on twitter. I promise to be nice.
New! FCPX DSLR workflows; What’s new in Media Comopser 6; Full Media Composer 6 basics from macProVideo.com
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My book (with Richard Harrington and Robbie Carman)- An Editor’s Guide to Adobe Premiere Pro
Lynda.com – Compressor Essentials 3.5 and 4
Contact me through my Website

[Jeff Greenberg]

Best format? Uncompressed video. You can buy a black magic decklink studio card , harder if you don’t have a MacPro.

Generally speaking, pick whatever the least compressed format is for your budget. DVCPro25 (mini dv) is pretty compressed; it’ll work and hits your budget and maybe the best case. Any h.264 format will have to be transcoded (making it TWO conversions) before it hits FCP – probably a bad choice, unless you get a great conversion.

Best,

Jeff G

Certified Master Trainer | Adobe, Apple, Avid
————
You should follow me (filmgeek) on twitter. I promise to be nice.
New! FCPX DSLR workflows; What’s new in Media Comopser 6; Full Media Composer 6 basics from macProVideo.com
Come see me speak at the Government Video Expo Nov 30 – Dec 1; Seminar link here
My book (with Richard Harrington and Robbie Carman)- An Editor’s Guide to Adobe Premiere Pro
Lynda.com – Compressor Essentials 3.5 and 4
Contact me through my Website

[Jeff Greenberg]

No -sorry – my language mistake

I meant an editorial tool that costs less than 3k.

Sony Xpri had direct access to the HDCam codec. It runs less than uncompressed. I think Smoke+IQ can access it as well. But MC/Premiere Pro/FCP/FCPX/Vegas? I don’t think any can directly grab the underlying data. They either capture uncompressed or compressed (into codecs like ProRes/DNxHD/Cineform.)

Panasonic licenses the DVCProHD Codec. Sony licenses the XDCam codec. But the HDCam? I don’t think they do (or do so at a very high license rate.) It was built into Xpri. I’m assuming that Smoke + IQ can do it, because they can ingest at 2x RT (which has to be a low level deck data flow.)

Hopefully that makes sense.

[Jeff Greenberg]

I don’t think there’s been a sub 3k editorial tool that handles direct HDCam; most are having you work uncompressed or with the NLE’s highest quality, least compressed codec. I do know some government branches use JPEG-2000 as an ‘archive’ compression type…

I think you’re going to have to have a conversation internally – uncompressed HD is huge. I’m not sure of the ‘big iron’ – Quantel or Smoke- they both have 4x speed acquisition, which makes me think they do…. The question becomes, do you purchase one of those just for this ingest need?

Best,

Jeff G

Certified Master Trainer | Adobe, Apple, Avid
————
You should follow me (filmgeek) on twitter. I promise to be nice.
New! FCPX DSLR workflows; What’s new in Media Comopser 6; Full Media Composer 6 basics from macProVideo.com
Come see me speak at the Government Video Expo Nov 30 – Dec 1; Seminar link here
My book (with Richard Harrington and Robbie Carman)- An Editor’s Guide to Adobe Premiere Pro
Lynda.com – Compressor Essentials 3.5 and 4
Contact me through my Website

[Jeff Greenberg]

[Philip Imbrenda] “quality 100”

Ah, here’s where we have the issue. You should really be using QuickTime as a compression engine; Quality 100 means – blow the file out as big as possible.

If you’re working at 720p60? Try using the Adobe Media Encoder preset for an h.264 file with the Vimeo, youtube or Apple TV presets.

The resulting file should be smaller and look decent – you’d merely (later) have to play with nailing down the frame rate and data rates – but those presets will provide you an excellent starting position and a much smaller file.

Best,

Jeff G

Certified Master Trainer | Adobe, Apple, Avid
————
You should follow me (filmgeek) on twitter. I promise to be nice.
New! FCPX DSLR workflows; What’s new in Media Comopser 6; Full Media Composer 6 basics from macProVideo.com
Come see me speak at the Government Video Expo Nov 30 – Dec 1; Seminar link here
My book (with Richard Harrington and Robbie Carman)- An Editor’s Guide to Adobe Premiere Pro
Lynda.com – Compressor Essentials 3.5 and 4
Contact me through my Website