Mary Haverstick
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COW Coin
Forum Replies Created
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My decision was made fairly simply by the intervention of the editing Gods.
I was leaning toward consolidating and had tested a sequence that was long and complex and seemed to run well, from consolidated footage on my system. But then I did some simple house cleaning on my hard drives making additional space for any new footage- and even though I did nothing that should have interrupted my existing footage or hierarchies I had one of those buggy days where nothing runs well. In particular I had trouble accessing and linking some of my AMA footage- and that was stressful. I did relink it thru disk permissions, but I hate those buggy days.
Realizing how incredibly stressful that would be should I be 3-4 months into my feature edit- and knowing the AMA links can be more finicky than avid DNxHD I decided the slight, perhaps imagined and viewed on inferior monitors, possible tiny quality drop did not compare to performance headaches that could induce heart attacks near the end of the edit.
Transcoding over 30 hours of Canon footage took only one long day and I am up and running with my edit already. I immediately felt a sense of additional confidence knowing my important footage was now saved and accessible several different ways. I thank everyone of you experts who assisted my decision and I will drop an update on the project from time to time. I hope this thread helps a few who are planning their Canon workflows.
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Good question- quality was viewed on full screen playback on the cinema screen as well as via Blackmagic design IO to a sony HD 1080 TV, consumer set. No studio level HD set avail here- but quality difference seen at cuts and confirmed by my assistant editor as well. Direct AMA linked footage is the tiniest bit better-problems seen in same areas of the frame- small differences in skin detail on close ups in motion- very consistent. I shouldn’t say the word “problems” as it is acceptable- but I am just seeing the smallest amount of loss differential.
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Hi all-
I wanted to follow up on my question and your great responses with a little testing phase before I make my final decision and have to live with it for the next few months. I am sharing this in case others reading this thread find themselves in a similar situation.My first test was to take a scene and transcode it to 175X dnXhd and see if I could perceive ANY quality loss. I intercut shots from the 175X series against the same shots from directly AMA linked files. I know avid says you can’t perceive any difference- and on most shots I didn’t, but on a few shots where I had a speaker on a close up I felt I did perceive changes in the detail on the skin pores and eyelash details- ever so slight but just a little softness compared to the AMA file. These were viewed full frame HD and not altered in any way. Could I be imagining a tiny difference? I think it is there- and while I could not perceive anything on architectural shots I was able to pick the AMA file consistently on a close up. My subject in the CU was a person who moved a lot and that could have been the reason the compression/transcode showed up on these shots more than the architectural wide shots. As some mentioned, the color on the dnXhd175X showed no degradation.
Would this be enough to sway me not to transcode? Not necessarily-the difference was so slight-But since I did not film in 4k I am not in a mood to lose anything of what we DO have in detail here. I am now going to consolidate a fair amount of footage and create a very long complex gibberish sequence and see if my system chugs- Will post results on that soon!
Mary -
Michael-
This is all great info- I thank you for sharing- I am running some tests and comparisons before making my final decision- this has been MOST helpful!
Mary -
John,
I think I am going to run a test by creating a long sequence of gibberish (from consolidated) but see if the system starts to bog down. I can throw some color effects on and just see it it doesn’t run or play well. I don’t want to get wayu into an edit on consolidated media and find it isn’t running well enough.
I am also interested in testing the image quality difference of 175X- if it is even noticeable. And thanks for the reminders on color grading!
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Thank you Shane- this is great info and very thorough- much appreciated!
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Bill,
Thank you so much. You are right, it seems I should have known how my AVID displays fields, I assumed it was showing both together in some sort of composited way. Of course I have run into the many mysterious ways fields create issues in special effects, tracking etc., and am hoping by demystifying and understanding them better I will improve results.
Thanks so much for your help!
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Thank you Danny,
this is so helpful.
I have one more question tho, if I am to use this reference movie to then encode to DVD do you recommend me using the quicktime interlace setting on or off for best results? It seems to me when I watch my encoded DVDs from these reference movies that I sense the lines issue on moving sections, but I am not certain if it is that or other compression issues.
let me know on that setting, and you are a champ!
Mary