[John]

[Sean ONeil] “BUT… there is a filter in FCP called 4:1:1 Chroma Smoother which is known to smooth out the artifacts just like an HD-SDI capture would do.”

Does this work with HDV footage which is 4:2:0?

Also.. I don’t think anyone meant to imply that a FW transfer is lossy. It is, as you say, a perfect transfer. The issue is with HDV and whether this highly compressed format is viable for editing HD material. Unlike DV, HDV footage gets decompressed and recompressed every time you make a cut. So.. if you capture and edit in HDV, how are you going to up-sample your final edited material to a 4:2:2 color space without FCP first re-compressing every frame of the HDV material first, thus losing a generation?

John Christensen
cdesign@airmail.net

[John]

[Tom Wolsky] “Are you talking about HDV material? That will break up at shot changes regardless of the setting in clip settings for breaking up clips. As far as I know for most cameras there is no way around this with HDV material or material transcoded to AIC.”

This has been my experience as well.. at least when capturing directly from a camera over FireWire. Does anyone know if this happens when capturing from a deck (i.e. HVR-M15U or HVR-M25U)?

Question Tom.. If one were to bypass HDV altogether by capturing through a Kona or Blackmagic card, would this issue go away?

John Christensen
cdesign@airmail.net

[John]

[cbreaker] “Note, I also tried capturing using the apple intermediate codec, and it does the same thing.”

It sounds like you may need to trash the FCP prefs. I had a very similar issue with a Sony v1u not capturing reliably. After trashing FCP prefs everything returned to normal — except for the breaking up of clips. With the v1u, no matter what pref setting I choose for how to handle TC breaks, or what format the source was recorded in (60i, 24p, 24pAdv), all clips come in as separate QT files. Even a Capture Now breaks up the material into separate files as if FCP is sensing a TC break at each camera start/stop point.

To trash FCP prefs, through away the following files and relaunch:

– Home/Library/Preferences/com.apple.FinalCutPro.plist
– Home/Library/Preferences/Final Cut Pro User Data/Final Cut Pro 5.0 Prefs
– Home/Library/Preferences/Final Cut Pro User Data/Final Cut Pro Obj Cache
– Home/Library/Preferences/Final Cut Pro User Data/Final Cut Pro Prof Cache

John Christensen
cdesign@airmail.net

[John]

I’ve just happen to have been working on this exact problem over the weekend. Bottom line is this:

1) FCP 5.1.3 is not yet fully compatible with the Sony v1u; hopefully an update or FCP6 is coming soon…NAB maybe.

2) Capture of HDV material — both 1080/60i and 1080/24pA — will not allow you to capture over a camera start/stop point without it detecting a timecode break. So.. if you capture a large chunk of video, each shot will come in as a separate QT movie. This is regarless of how the Pref setting for ‘Timecode break’ is set.

3) At the moment… The only way (unless someone knows better) to get true 24p material out of the V1U over Firewire is to capture as ‘HDV-Apple Intermediate Codec 1080i60’ (AIC) and then run your footage (each clip individually) through Cinema Tools and do a reverse telecine. Make sure you choose 23.98fps and ‘_CD_’ for the tempo. Then you have to edit in an AIC timeline. The files will be approximately 57GB per hour (vs 13.5GB/hour for HDV).

And to answer your question.. No, I don’t think that you will be able to capture AIC files to a MacBook Pro’s internal drive. My Quad Core MacPro immediately errored when I tried to capture to one of my internal SATA drives. I had to switch my capture disk over to an Xserve RAID (connected over fibre) to get it to work.

Hope that helps.

John Christensen
cdesign@airmail.net

[John]

[motionfx] “Can you explain why the two captures would provide different quality levels? Is it because going in firewire is in itself, a bandwidth limiter?”

It’s not a bandwidth issue. FW is plenty fast for transferring HDV material (FW400 is 400Mb/sec). Sony’s HDV is ony 25Mb/sec which is the same as regular old DV. That’s why you can get an hour’s worth of HDV material on the same cassette that records an hour’s worth of DV material. It’s the same amount of data whether it’s HDV or DV. So.. capturing HDV over FW takes no more disk space or i/o bandwidth than does DV. The price you pay, however, is that you need a much more powerful cpu to process (that is, edit) HDV data because it is uses a very processor-intensive codec (mpeg2) to compress the HD signal all the way down to where it can fit on that tiny, cheap cassette.

There’s another big problem with HDV asside from its hardware requirements: everytime you ‘touch’ your HDV material (i.e. color correct, add a dissolve, add graphics, etc), you lose information and basically take a generational loss. That again is due to the mpeg2 long-GOP encoding that is used for storing HDV. In fact, unlike DV, even when you do cuts-only editing with HDV, you lose quality because FCP has to re-encode every frame of the entire sequence in order to assign new ‘I’ frames to the video data stream. This is what happens when FCP says it is ‘conforming’ your footage as you do an export, for example.

So.. to answer your question: What most people are doing to avoid the above two problems with HDV is to re-encode the HD material and store it in a different codec. There are two ways (as far as I know) to do this with the Sony Z1U, three ways with the new Sony V1U:

1) Capture over FW into FCP using the Apple Intermediate Codec (AIC) To do this, use the ‘HDV-Apple Intermediate Codec 1080i60’ Easy Setup in FCP. When you capture, you will not be able to set in and out points. It is bascially a ‘Capture Now’ process. The footage will take up roughly 70GB per hour of video, and you will need a fast RAID array to keep up with the increased data rate. Your footage is no longer HDV. It is now AIC footage, and thus, you will need to edit in an AIC timeline. Although it is taking a bit more than five-times the disk space, FCP will actually have an easier time editing and working with this footage than it would with the much more compact HDV data. This is because FCP doesn’t have to do as much processing to load a frame.

2) Capture using a Kona or Blackmagic card This is probably what most pros are doing with HDV footage right now to make it useful. When you capture with one of these cards, you basically re-capture the HDV material from your camera or deck and re-encode that material in a different codec — most commonly DVCProHD. To do this with the Z1U, you go from the component video output of the camera (using the supplied cable) into the Kona/Blackmagic card and capture using something like the ‘DVCPro HD 1080i60’ preset. This seems counter intuitive because the component video out is ANALOG!! But it is still HD. So.. you are taking the HDV data stored on tape and letting the Sony decompressor (built-in to your camera) decode that data into an component analog HD signal. You then send that data over the analog component cable to the Kona/Blackmagic card, and then re-encoding the analog HD signal using a different codec — thus shedding your attachment to HDV. One of the advantages to capturing in this manner is that you can choose which codec you want to edit in. You could, for example, recapture your 1080iHD footage as 720p if you wished. Or.. Standard Def. Whatever codec you use for capture will, of course, have to be the codec you use to edit with (i.e. if you capture in DVCProHD 1080i60 then your timeline in FCP must also be set to DVCProHD 1080i60). The big downside in all of this is the same as with the AIC FireWire capture mentioned above: you will need really fast hard drives and lots of space. BTW.. one other nice advantage of using a Kona/Blackmagic card is that you can hook up a second flat-panel LCD to use for monitoring the HD material. If you use a monitor that displays 1920×1080 pixels, then you can see every pixel of your HD as you edit.

3) Capture over HDMI or HD-SDI If you get the Sony HVR-M25U deck or you have the new Sony HVR-V1U camera, you can use the HDMI signal to capture to a Kona/Blackmagic card — basically the same as option 2 above. The difference here is that you are inputting a digital signal into the capture card rather than a component analog HD signal. Whether you can tell a difference, I honestly don’t know. But if you are anal about keeping everything digital, that would do it. Another option would be to convert the component HD signal to industry-standard HD-SDI using a converter box (from AJA, Convergent Design, DataVideo?, etc). Also.. Sony has annouced a new, higher-end HDV deck (HVR-1500) that outputs HD-SDI directly. It’s going to be about $6K I believe.

There is a fourth option here that is probably worth mentioning, but one with which I have no experience. You could capture your HDV material over FireWire directly into FCP and then use some sort of software conversion tool (Compressor??) to re-encode that material to another codec such as DVCProHD. But because you are attempting to do in software what your Z1 and the AJA/Blackmagic cards would be doing in optimized hardware, I would guess that it would be very time consuming.

Well.. I hope that helps. Sorry for the long post, but I thought others who are confused (as I have been) about these HDV workflow issues might also benefit.

John

John Christensen
cdesign@airmail.net

[John]

2hrs of DVCProHD50 is a not of data. Your G5 is having to decompress the DVCPro then encode to mpeg2 which is very processor intensive due to the its temporal encoding scheme. Just moving around that data is going to take time, let alone processing it. So.. it doesn’t sound all that unrealistic given that everything is being done in software.

If all you want is a quick and dirty DVD with TC, why not get a cheap (i.e. $199) DVD recorder from Costco or Sams and run the composite signal (or component if possible) from your deck/Kona card to the DVD recorder. Then, as long as FCP can output your DVCProHD50 footage (with the TC filter applied) in realtime, all you have to do is play in the timeline and record on the DVD recorder. The DVD recorder gives you a cheap, hardware-based mpeg2 encoder which allows you to off-load that processing from your G5. If you really care about the mpeg2 quality, you could buy a much more expensive hardware-based mpeg encoder to do high-quality, real time compression.

John Christensen
cdesign@airmail.net

[John]

Sorry.. I think I got my lux ratings reversed: 4lux minimum for the v1u; 3lux min for the z1u.

John

[John]

Rick… Regarding the low-light capabilities of the V1U:

First of all, the sensors in the Sony V1U are 1/4″ not 1/3″. And as you may know, Sony is using a very new technique of rotating the sensors 45-degrees and doing some tricky processing to obtain a sharper image (supposedly) than otherwise.

I just bought a V1U last week and played around with for the first time over the weekend. I have shot with Sony PD150/170 extensively and the Z1U a little bit (maybe two hours worth). For the past three years my main run-gun-camera has been a Sony PDX-10 and I also have a Sony DSR-570WS. I have not yet had an opportunity to direclty compare the Z1 with the V1 yet (hope to this weekend), but here is my hunch based on past experience:

In terms of low-light sensitivity, the v1U performs about like its 1/4″ chip size would suggest. That is, it is not as sensitive as the Z1 (which itself it not great in low light). Sony rates low-light capability of these two cameras as 3lux for the V1U and 4lux for the Z1, which I think is fair. I have compared the V1U with my PDX10 side by side, and in my opinion, they are very comparable — even though the PDX10 has even smaller chips (roughly 1/5″). If I had to rate all the cameras I’ve mentioned for low-light performance (from best to worst) it would be as follows:

1- DSR-570WS
2- DSR-PD170
3- DSR-PD150
4- HVR-Z1U
5- HVR-V1U and DSR-PDX10

Now.. when it comes to sharpness and contrast it’s a totally different story. The V1U creates beautiful pictures: very sharp, no smear, and with a very acceptable contrast ratio. In my opinion, the picture quality of the V1U is as good or better than the Z1U — of course that’s completely subjective. Ergonomically, the V1U is the best pro-sumer camcorder I have ever used. It is much better balanced than the Z1U or either PD170/150. And, it only weighs 0.4 lbs more than my little PDX10. So it is a very light package and beautifully designed.

All in all, I am thrilled with the V1U. My only hesitations in transitioning to this camera from my DVCAM equipment are:

1) the V1U isn’t great in low light (but that’s the price you pay for inexpensive, small, light 1080P camcorder)

2) the HDV format is a major pain to work with compared with DV/DVCAM (again.. the price you pay for cheap HD resolution)

3) FCP 5.1.3 still is not yet fully compatible with the V1U (esp. 24p/24pA mode; you have to capture as AICodec and run individual clips through Compressor)

Hope this is helpful. John

John Christensen
cdesign@airmail.net

[John]

I’m well aware of Sony’s vested interest in Vegas and its PC business. I was just pointing out that it appeared in Jan 2006 when the CEO of Sony appeared on-stage with Steve Jobs to announce the ‘Year of HD’ (they showed iMovieHD importing Z1 footage) that perhaps Sony was now going to take a more platform agnostic roll and begin to support the Mac platform (i.e. QuickTime) equally with win formats. While Sony does sell PC gear, they don’t really need to help MS isolate mac users. They could easily support QuickTime in Vegas (that may not make economic sense, but they could do it) and easily support QuickTime on the Mac.

Focus was able to create a hard disk recorder that records to either QuickTime or AVI so it is platform agnostic. Sony could easily do the same. And I don’t see Sony supporting QuickTime as an option on it’s HD recorder as threatening either Vegas or their PC business. But.. it looks like maybe nothing has change; that, unless someone can verify otherwise, the new Sony hd recorder probably doesn’t support QuickTime and probably never will.

John Christensen
cdesign@airmail.net

[John]

So.. would it best to get a FireStore unit to record to (ie. a FS-4 Pro) if I decide I really need to record to disk? Or is there something better?

John Christensen
cdesign@airmail.net