[Michael]

As we figured out, it’s not that the capture is cleaner, it’s that when you render your green screen that the jaggies start appearing. It’s the render in the crappy codec that causes this, not the DV itself. You’re right though, looking at the end results, the differences are staggering in uncompressed, you’d hardly know you were working with a DV source.

-mjd

[Michael]

Absolutely. Any time you render, add a title, nest a few layers, export a clip, you’re going to dirty the image. The DV codec isn’t clean. We just went through this! 🙂

If you capture SDI uncompressed when you conform, that is, when you’re show has been offlined, and you’re ready to color correct and master, you want the best image possible. Cut in DV, fine. Conform in uncompressed. Absolutely. This isn’t a wedding video for gosh sakes! It’s for broadcast. It’s going to be tech-evaluated at some point.

Check with the stations that are taking the video. Some won’t take betaSP as a master. You might, just for the conform, want to dub out a digi-beta master (rent one for the day you are mastering), then generate your subsequent masters from that. At least you’ll have a good archival copy of the show.

-mjd

[Michael]

I’m using 10-bit only with FCP 5 and Tiger. You need a capture card that will support 10-bit (Like AJA’s Io, Kona2, or Decklink’s cards) to capture, but you can also import 10-bit uncompressed footage and work with it provided your drives are fast enough, and you have the appropriate 10-bit codec loaded. AJA has a free download called AJA KONA system test that will tell you how much data your drives are capable of writing per second and how many streams you can get in various resolutions.

I believe Motion 2 also supports 10-bit, because Apple’s video apps are resolution independent, from DV to HD 1080i. I have opened my 10-bit SD footage within motion with no problems.

-mjd

[Michael]

I’d suggest an SDI option for post. Don’t just record off of firewire, put it in a real bay when you’re ready to conform and capture uncompressed off of SDI. Then you’ll avoid the DV artifacts that come with the compression. Remember, the DV gets re-compressed only when it’s rendered. If you are doing dissolves and cuts only, you’ll never compress the signal. CBS takes our projects all the time with DVX-100a footage included, but we bump it up and record 2:1, again avoiding the 5:1 DV codec. Native DV is pretty clean, though it’s only 720×480. Most broadcasters don’t care, as long as the rest of the signal looks good The horizontal blanking is the PBS no-no. If you’re outside of 12 microseconds, it’s toast. They’ll look the other way on the vertical, so 480 shouldn’t getcha.

I think PBS has loosened up quite a bit with their requirements. In 1994 I got them to take a documentary I’d cut at.. get this.. AVR 26. Talk about your artifacts! Hell, I don’t think AVR 26 was even full frame!

-mjd

[Michael]

I’d suggest an SDI option for post. Don’t just record off of firewire, put it in a real bay when you’re ready to conform and capture uncompressed off of SDI. Then you’ll avoid the DV artifacts that come with the compression. Remember, the DV gets re-compressed only when it’s rendered. If you are doing dissolves and cuts only, you’ll never compress the signal. CBS takes our projects all the time with DVX-100a footage included, but we bump it up and record 2:1, again avoiding the 5:1 DV codec. Native DV is pretty clean, though it’s only 720×480. Most broadcasters don’t care, as long as the rest of the signal looks good The horizontal blanking is the PBS no-no. If you’re outside of 12 microseconds, it’s toast. They’ll look the other way on the vertical, so 480 shouldn’t getcha.

I think PBS has loosened up quite a bit with their requirements. In 1994 I got them to take a documentary I’d cut at.. get this.. AVR 26. Talk about your artifacts! Hell, I don’t think AVR 26 was even full frame!

-mjd

[Michael]

You’re in for a treat. This camera and it’s big brother are making the prettiest SD images of any camera package right now. It’s ideal for outdoor shooting. I’ve been working with this camera for over a year now and to this day I still get people asking me how I could afford to shoot on film. I use a little filtration, a ProMist 1/4 Black with regularity, UV occasionally and a Polarizer once in a while. I’m constantly having to ‘dress up’ beta SP footage in post to look as good as the DVX.

-mjd

[Michael]

Start with sound editing skills. The bits of equipment are just tools, a means to an end, don’t forget that. Some of the best editing gear out there is worthless in the hands of inferior skills. Read everything you can about editing first, watch movies and television from a technical eye, figure out what the editor is doing, and, more importantly, why he’s doing it. Sound television signal knowledge is essential if you’re serious about getting work. You can have great cutting skills, but your video isn’t legal, it can’t air anywhere. Be thankful it’s not 15 years ago before the NLE’s dumbed-down the need for total signal knowledge. Learn how to read a waveform and vectorscope, and learn what the parts of a video signal are. You don’t need to know what the different parts do at first, just learn what to look for and how to keep things legal.

That said, if I had an unlimited budget (this is going to be fun), could put any system together I wanted, I’d want the following: FIRST: a GREAT engineer to help purchase and professionally install all of my gear. He should be your first purchase, because he can steer you clear of stupid purchases and get you deals that will save you money. eBay is LITTERED with cast off gear purchased by naive people who didn’t know what they were buying. In a FCP system, if that’s the platform you’re limiting yourself to, you would start with software, a G5 DP with 4 Gigs of memory (you can add more but FCP will only use 4 Gigs), and cinema displays. If you’re going to do HD, you’ll need an HD broadcast monitor to view your output. You’ll need an SD broadcast monitor to view SD. I’m talking about a pro monitor with SMPTE specs, I like Sony, but JVC makes some good monitors, too. You’ll need a black burst generator to keep everything locked together. You’ll need a vectorscope and waveform monitor, Tektronic here. You’ll need a capture card or box, I like AJA products, I own an AJA Io, but Black Magic makes great stuff, too. The Kona2 from AJA is probably the hottest card going, because it does both SD and HD. You’ll need drives, and fast ones at that. I’m using Medea’s RTXR, but Apple’s Xserve RAID and HUGE systems are near the top of the list, you’ll need fibre-channel for reliable HD, don’t forget, you’ll need a fibre-channel card to contol the drives. You’ll want a great speaker set. I have Genelec, but Dynaudio’s Air series is the best right now. You’ll need a mixer, a Mackie 1604 will do the job, I have an older Yamaha 03D that keeps everything digital, it’s complex and confusing, but after a while you figure out how all of those busses really keep things flexible without patching or cable swapping. If I had my sky’s-the-limit choice, I’d want Yamaha’s O2R or a DM3200 from Tascam, with the ADAT card, of course. Throw in a DA-98, because sometimes you need to play with 8 tracks (another reason for a digital mixer – – 8 tracks of digital audio on capture), and a decent microphone to record a scratch track, I’m a sucker for a good mic (a terrible personal weakness), they smell me a mile away and pull out their top shelf stuff when I walk in the door. And as long as were shooting for the sun, I’d love one of those Mackie MMC surfaces for mixing inside of FCP, those are cool. Gonna need a big desktop for this bay. Decks: I’d want a DigiBeta and an HDCam from Sony. Probably a BVW-75 for practicality. Going to need a DSR-1500 or a Panny AJ-93 for DV with the SDI board in our scenario. I’d want to keep the video SDI in SD, and the audio digital. I’d want everything going through a patch bay, I like to route stuff my own way. I hate hard wiring.

All of this stuff is just tools, though. You’re entering a larger world, and most of the stuff I just listed is totally unnecessary, but it sure is a fun exercise. You can get by and get a decent workable system together with crafty eBay purchases and smart decision making for about $20,000, not including decks. The engineer, though, is gonna cost ya. Do not attempt this without him.

-mjd

[Michael]

You just helped me solve the damn explaination! It IS the codec! Just not the way I explained it. I’ve been here before at this crossroad, and you just tipped me to what’s happening. When the footage is blown up, it needed to be rendered to play. When the export to AE happens, it needs to be rendered, too. FCP doesn’t pass an exported clip along native, unless you simply open the raw file in AE. Apple does re-compress when it renders, and that’s where the artifacts are introduced. Which actually does make the codec the source of the gunk in the image.

I first saw this test done at a Final Cut Pro user’s meeting in L.A. At the time, the ProMax tech threw out the theory that allowing more head room by up-rezing to SDI and 10-bit was the reason the footage was cleaner. I grilled him on it during the meeting because his explaination wasn’t logical. How can you add information to an image? I went through the same arguments you were giving me, then started testing and re-testing for months. But no one could or can dispute the results, it was shown on a 100 foot projector in front of us all, there simply wasn’t a question, the uncompressed capture was cleaner. I was so interested that I went home and repicated the test to the same results. I got my friends involved and the only logical explaination we came up with is the codec. Based on what we discussed, we were right! Just wrong in the application of our thinking!

But I’m back at the same place as far as working in uncompressed though. Any time you add a filter, you’re going to render in the artifacts that are avoided by working in 10-bit.

As far as drive space, it costs nothing these days. The cost of a good RAID stripe is pennies per gig. Well worth the gain, to me anyway.

Great discussion!

-mjd

[Michael]

>Your setup — going from FW to 10-bit SDI — is somewhat the same as going from vhs to D-Beta. >You gain nothing in the process.

Ah.. but you do! Follow me here. When you capture in FCP via 1394, the raw data gets sent over FireWire, and gets put in a QuickTime wrapper using Apple’s DV codec. Apple’s DV codec is dirty! The edges in footage captured using the DV codec have a lot of crap along them. This is not the fault of DV as a format, it’s not a function of 8-bit or 10-bit, it’s just that the Apple DV codec sucks. By bypassing the DV codec, and recording in uncompressed, there’s a lot (and I mean A LOT) of gunk that gets omitted from the image. I have personally done a test of this. Under controlled circumstances I captured the exact same footage, one in DV via 1394 encoded in the DV codec, one off of a DV deck output SDI and encoded 10-bit uncompressed. The 10-bit uncompressed was clean enough to pull a good chroma key. Try this with DV encoded material. It doesn’t work. Blowing up the image in AE nets a very telling inclusion of artifacts in the DV material. My friends and colleagues traced through every part of the system looking for where the DV was getting degraded. It’s the codec! Try this for yourself, you will be amazed by how much crap the DV codec introduces.

[Michael]

If you’re doing a lot of work, I’d advise against using a camcorder as a deck. Camcorder heads are very soft, and are prone to wear. Video deck heads are made of a much more durable material, suitable for the shuttle/jogging that video editing demands. You’ve got a very nice camera, and using a good deck, like a DSR-11 will serve you for a long time. If you insist on using a camera, pick something cheap because when you wear the heads out, it’s gonna cost you. You can pick up a deck for a reasonable price on eBay. Or just rent one when you’ve got a project.

-mjd