Martin Baker
Forum Replies Created
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Reading your wishlist was very interesting, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed with our new product 🙂
Can you contact me off-forum (martin*at*digital-heaven.co.uk), there’s some stuff I’d like to discuss privately with you.
Martin
Digital Heaven, London UK
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NEW! VideoSpace – free diskspace calculator widget -
In the early days of FCP capture cards there were other examples of hardware acceleration besides Cinewave and the RTMac – Blackmagic certainly offered RT dissolves in hardware, as did Aurora’s Igniter. They had to do this because at the time the Mac CPUs weren’t fast enough to support RT rendering in software. But the days of rendering complex effects on a PCI board are well over…why? Because it’s expensive to develop, has a limited market and isn’t scalable. To give one example, for any RT effect offered on Cinewave, Pinnacle would have had to reprogram the effect for their own specific hardware chip, so the stuff we REALLY want accelerated (3rd party effects) becomes unfeasible to recode into all these different hardware versions. (I’m excluding the scaling hardware that AJA and Blackmagic have on their cards because that seems a perfectly good way to handle incoming and outgoing video.)
So…the way things are going, we’ll get more RT effects and quicker processing in the future through using the GPU (graphics chip) and distributed rendering amongst multiple systems, not through assistance from an extra processor on the capture card.
FWIW Cinewave managed to do mixed codecs on the timeline because the CPU actually decompressed the movies and then handed the output to the Cinewave card for compositing. As far as the Cinewave was concerned it was still handling uncompressed streams of video, it knew no different.
There’s no technical reason why mixed codecs in the same timeline can’t be done in a software only system – we can do the decompression and compositing on the CPU, they just aren’t joined together in the middle! Here’s hoping that a future version of FCP gives us this feature because as more and more acquisition formats appear, being able to mix native codecs together is a REALLY big advantage.
Martin
Digital Heaven, London UK
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NEW! VideoSpace – free diskspace calculator widget -
The G5 towers are very quiet in my experience, the G5 iMacs are quite a different story!
Martin
Digital Heaven, London UK
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NEW! VideoSpace – free diskspace calculator widget -
I’m fully aware that multiple generations through a lossy codec will technically lose quality on each generation but it boils down to this – for some post workflows the advantages of using a 4:2:2 compressed codec such as DV50 (low datarate balanced against perfectly good broadcast quality) outweigh any disadvantages. Simple as that.
I’ve worked exclusively with a “digibeta footage > DV50 codec in FCP > digibeta playout” workflow for two years now and in this particular situation the choice of DV50 as the intermediate codec was the right one. As you say, the visible deterioration of the image does in fact come further down the chain…
Martin
Digital Heaven, London UK
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NEW! VideoSpace – free diskspace calculator widget -
In my experience there are two sides to the DV debate:
DV25 for acquisition is actually pretty good and for most material is perfectly good enough. If you shoot with a decent camera like a DSR570 then you can get excellent results. I did a corporate job a while back (shot well on a DSR570 with a experienced cameraman) and once the shots were colour corrected and film effected you would never guess that it hadn’t been shot on digibeta. In short, for acquisition a good quality camera is far more important than the codec.
DVCAM for post production is a different story…the DVCAM codec is lousy – the reduced colour space is a real problem so you should aim to work in either DV50 or uncompressed for final output.
Martin
Digital Heaven, London UK
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NEW! VideoSpace – free diskspace calculator widget -
OK let me drop a hint. There will be a solution from us (released in the next 1-2 weeks), that will give you what you want and hopefully more. Watch this space…
Martin
Digital Heaven, London UK
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NEW! VideoSpace – free diskspace calculator widget -
Autosave has changed in v5 and for the better. It is now quietly done in the background without popping that ever-so-annoying window up that had a habit of appearing when you least wanted it to!
Martin
Digital Heaven, London UK
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NEW! VideoSpace – free diskspace calculator widget -
and here’s another rave review of DVCPRO50! On real world footage (i.e. not test gradients and stuff like that), I defy anyone to spot compression artifacts on screen. The codec is very good and a significant step up from DV25.
Martin
Digital Heaven, London UK
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NEW! VideoSpace – free diskspace calculator widget -
As a cinewave user for over two years until last week, I’d put another vote in for the AJA Kona cards. We just replaced Cinewave with a Kona 2 and so far it’s working great. The control panel app is very nice and it’s certainly been a pleasure to have genlock that works properly when you Edit to Tape!
Martin
Digital Heaven, London UK
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NEW! VideoSpace – free diskspace calculator widget -
That’s exactly what’s required Walter. Everyone go here now!
https://www.apple.com/feedback/finalcutpro.html
and let’s clock up a few feature requests for it.
Martin
Digital Heaven, London UK
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NEW! VideoSpace – free diskspace calculator widget