[Kevin Duffey]

Have you looked into Magic Lantern the nightly builds? With the 14-bit RAW and a fast (expensive) flash cards, you can record in amazing quality using 14-bit raw. I say this so that you record both your backgrounds and then your models using 14-bit RAW.. it will provide amazing green screen editing!

[Kevin Duffey]

Yes.. you can. The Canon t2i, 3ti, 4ti, and 5ti put out a 1080i60 signal, as I recently learned on my t3i. What you do is go into video mode, and do NOT record. The HDMI out live mode is 1080i/60. Using Magic Lantern you can clean up the output and get a 1620×1080 output (it’s actually 1920/1080 but there are black bars on the right and left).

Not sure about 7D, 60D, 6D, etc..but I am guessing they also put out a 1080i/60 live mode signal. If you go into anything other than video mode, you’ll need to press the button that in camera mode starts recording. It would switch other modes into LCD mode (instead of view finder) and should also put out the 1080i/60.

[Kevin Duffey]

Hi,

I am able to get a 720p signal from my laptop to initially work… but then the output of the Shuttle 2 to my monitor (8″ ikan) keeps flipping around for a while until it finally stabilizes. I have the latest 3.8 version for the hyperdeck too. I think my HDMI input is bad on this and naturally it’s past my warranty period… as it almost always happens. I am basically holding a brick.. $350 that I didn’t use and now can’t use because it won’t record anything. Very disappointed. Maybe it will record other formats, but the 1080i/60 doesn’t turn on the video signal so I am stuck without any use for it. I am planning on purchasing the BM Cinema camera soon anyway, so hopefully this won’t happen on that recorder once I get it!

[Kevin Duffey]

Really? Interesting, I’ve read the opposite in a few other threads elsewhere. The preamps on the H6 are much improved. Still, for the price and the feature set, the H6 at least to me seems a much better value. I am curious if my Tascom DR-40 is as good as the DR-60 in terms of noise or if they improved the preamps on the DR-60 that much over the DR-40.

[Kevin Duffey]

I think Rick summed it up perfectly.. I will only add one thought as to why the BMCC may be better.. given what you get with it and all that Rick covered.. the 2.5K image size gives you a little wiggle room with a 1080p output format. Not sure you’d need that, but if you needed to stabilize a video, or perhaps it wasn’t framed perfectly, having that extra resolution could make the difference in having to reshoot or not.

I was leaning hard for the pocket camera.. and still want one, but with Resolve and the SSD drive and higher res of the BMCC, I am now considering that option. If I can find a way to save 4K though, having the 4K res AND a global shutter to me is the far better deal.

[Kevin Duffey]

Nice..thanks. I’ll take a look at the white paper. So transcoding to DNxHD from h264 or AVCHD.. what you’re basically saying is, the color of the original source may get truncated during the transcode, losing information. I then am wondering.. why and is this all transcoders, or is it different for every one? The reason I ask is..it seems to me again if DNxHD (and I suspect ProRes) are such industry standards, why would any software developer write the DNxHD encoder in such a way that it loses information during the transcode?

So I should be safe if/when I can record with a BM Pocket Camera or Cinema Camera that records in DNxHD right?

[Kevin Duffey]

Thank you again for the info. More info than I can shake a stick at! I am still not quite sure about the whole YUV, Rec709 and RGB differences in terms of actual visual quality on say a 55″ HD screen or the big cinema screen.

Question though, can DNxHD save in 4:4:4 quality? Or is it limited to 4:2:0 and that is why it’s losing anything over 100? Or am I totally misunderstanding this?

Any links that you know of that may explain a bit more about this?

Thank you.

[Kevin Duffey]

Interesting about the loss of detail when transcoding. Seems wrong that transcoding a lesser (in my opinion) format like h264 would lose detail when going to an intermediate editing format like DNxHD.

So two questions. First, how do you preserve this if you still want to transcode (and adding to that.. if you did edit the source, but then export to DNxHD at the end, I assume you’ll still lose the detail so how do you preserve it there)?

Second, cameras like BM and my Shuttle 2 record in DNxHD directly. Do they lose the detail from the start, or is it only the transcoding process that does this? Again I can’t imagine why the format would continue to be used and popular if it’s causing the loss of detail.

[Kevin Duffey]

To be clear, if I take the original source h.264, sync audio, cut it up a bit to get just the parts I need, there is no way to just save it without re-compressing it again? What if I save the project itself, and don’t export the edited/synced clips? I assume that saves the in/out point refs, but doesn’t do any extra compression at that time? In other words, if there is no way to just save the fixed clips for later assembly (possibly in a different app) without more compression being added, can saving it as the project avoid this until we’re ready for the final output?

[Kevin Duffey]

Thanks for the reply Tim. My bad on the avchd.. I confuse the two all the time.

I’ve read that editing h.264 is not ideal and an intermediate format like dnxhd is better to work with. As well, when I get a BMCC, it will use either DNxHD or ProRes.. I’d prefer DNxHD being Windows based. So I wanted to “practice” using that format.. not that it matters once it’s brought in to PP. But I think for this project, I am going to do as you suggest as I am having too many difficulties getting everything to work right. I am curious though.. if I were to use DNxHD as the actual source (from a BMCC for example), is there a way to save the edited DNxHD from PP? The only option I seem to have is the QuickTime wrapper. I know there is an MXF wrapper but I don’t see that option anywhere? The other reason for transcoding or at least I thought was a good reason to do so.. is because I was trying to sync up the audio to each clip I have, then export the audio/video together again, so that I can give those clips synced up to the teacher so she can assemble the clips in her editor as she wants. I thought that if I edit DSLR footage, then render it again, it adds more compression.. then she’ll get it, assemble it and the final media file will be compressed even more.. is that not the case? Is there some way to just save the file as is but have audio added without recompressing the video more?

So basically QuickTime on Windows 64-bit is a problem and shouldn’t be used or relied upon?

As for audio, I had one boom mic plugged in to my camera and two mics + the two on board mics on my DR-40. My hopes was to use the clap method (which I did most of the time) to sync up.. however I later discovered that I had my DSLR mic turned off for 1/2 the video.

What I was more interested in is how, while filming you pros keep track of external audio clips to the video clips? We’re not a pro set so a clapper board would take too much time. In fact with school kids and during school hours we’re kind of rushed to get each scene going so they have some time to learn each day as well. I’d love to have more time to set things up each shot, but the teacher (director) is in a bit of a rush. Sadly my DR-40 headphone socket broke so I can’t monitor audio anymore either. In my rush I stepped on the cord and bent the dang socket a bit.. at least the recorder still works. Anyway, was wondering if writing something down somehow helps? Back in the tape days, I could mark down the offset on the screen, since I’d have to rewind then play it back while I captured. But with media files on both the DSLR and the audio recorder, I am not quite sure how to match everything up. For the most part, I am trying to stop/start both the dslr and the audio at the same time.. but I didn’t do such a good job of that yesterday.

I picked up Magic Bullet Looks and also Magic Bullet Mojo.. I figured if I could clean up the video a little bit first (lighting in classroom is horrible and again..no time for any sort of lighting setup), then apply Mojo and/or Looks, I think that should be good enough for this. Trying to give it a movie-like look.

Thank you again.