[Mickey Power]

Hi Mario and Walter

Fascinated to read your varying appraisals of IO and MXO2. Pity to bury it here in this thread.

Why not start new thread and get broad representations of views?

Anyway, respectfully I repeat my question, are the results coming out camera SDI markedly better than the images compressed as long GOP?

Thanks

Mickey

[Mickey Power]

Thanks, Walter

Certainly the uncompressed signal would have to go before being recorded otherwise what’s the point? Interesting if the MXO2 can handle this, given it’s portability. It would hardly be a run and gun affair with a macbook pro and silver box hanging off but for shooting something with good logistical support this could be a step up.

Is the potential in this regard worth getting excited about, ie the gains in colour depth and general picture quality?

No comments on photo jpeg for uprezzing? I’ve used it a lot for programs played off hard drives and downrezzing to mpeg2 for DVDs and it is very clean.

Mickey

[Mickey Power]

Honestly, I would love to invest in an MXO2 (can you take uncompressed straight out of an EX1?) but for the moment have to work within certain parameters, namely the uncompressed footage has been delivered to me on hard drive and it’s up to me to do the best with it I can.

I’d like to return to something I raised earlier, the possibility of meeting somewhere in the middle. After the offline edit has been locked off, I’ll set up a new seq in FCP in HDV for the final hi res version but will change the pixel aspect to square. Why? Because the specific size of 1440×1080 is close to the projecting size of 1400×1050. Since subtitles are required, the 16:9 HDV footage is positioned in the top 4/5s (some downscaling here but is inevitable given final output size). This finally is dropped into the output sequence and outputted as photo jpeg 75%. Maybe the render setting of the HDV seq should be prores?

Re the archival footage, I’ve experimented with uprezzing the uncompressed SD footage into photo jpeg and it looks good, plays real time within sequence and file size is good. There is mucho rendering from Compressor but this can be an overnight job.

Grateful for further comments and insight.

Mickey

[Mickey Power]

So I guess uprezzing in Compressor to HDV is a terrible idea? What other HD codecs fit the bill in being easy to work with, smaller rather than larger and suitable for cutting with other footage?

I was looking keenly at the MXO2 ads on this site but that or another hardware purchase for uprezzing is not the short term solution here, not for the bunch I’m producing for anyway.

Thanks

Mickey

[Mickey Power]

Thanks Rafael

I thought prores took up less space than uncompressed but I tried exporting out of Compressor and FCP and my already scaled to HD 10sec test clips are 119mb.

But the SD sized prores clips are only 49mb for 10sec. So do you trust FCP to do sufficient high quality scaling? I’ve done this before and not felt entirely satisfied.

Just thinking of a system where all this neatly meets in the middle resolution, avoids double handling (esp sizing of individual 4:3 clips) and allows real time playing. Then I think, the output size is very close to the native HDV …

Mickey

Mickey

[Mickey Power]

Good on you for the reminder of the economies of the situation.

But, more a matter of keeping the project all on the client’s one drive, not to mention curiosity as to potential quality loss between two formats.

Mickey

[Mickey Power]

The original film footage is far from perfect but my client is working to a budget and so original was transferred at a local facility set up for SD only, not HD.

The final film will be screened at an historical property on a large possibly HD monitor and intercut with interview footage I’ll shoot on HDV (damn annoying we could only get SD xfer).

The question remains, will I have lost quality if I keep the prores not the uncompressed? Thanks.

Mickey

Mickey

[Mickey Power]

Interesting – media on USB2 drive shows up in FCP but plays badly. I thought the intermittent playing was due to the uncompressed footage.

Thanks anyway.

Mickey

Mickey

[Mickey Power]

Thanks, I’d given that thought. But the question remains, what codec do you choose to maintain highest quality possible?

Mickey

[Mickey Power]

Try deleting preferences which can be found in your home directory>library>preferences>com.apple.Batchmonitor.plist [or com.apple.compressor.Compressor.plist] then reboot.

Worked for me.

Mickey