Ryan Holmes
3
COW Coins
Forum Replies Created
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[hamid ghodrati] “and beside bit depth and frame size there are some other number in dn hd codec info “220/185/..” what are those numbers”
Those are data rates associated with that flavor of DNxHD.
Google is your friend for questions like these:
https://www.avid.com/static/resources/US/documents/DNxHD.pdfRyan Holmes
http://www.ryanholmes.me
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[Leonard Frankford] “everytime I capture footage it always breaks the capture into dozens of small clips where I stopped and started the recording instead of just using my in/out points.”
This is the nature of HDV. Everytime you hit start/stop it will make a new clip. It’s a bi-product of the compression algorithm used to capture HDV to a miniDV tape ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDV ). FCP will capture from your In point to your Out point, but if that covers multiple times you hit start/stop you’ll end up with multiple clips in FCP.
[Leonard Frankford] “Also, I unchecked Abort Capture on Dropped Frames and it aborts anyway. Why does it do this and how can I prevent it?”
If you ignore dropped frames then you do so at your own peril. Dropped frames mean that your computers hard drive could not keep up with the signal being ingested. So if you shot at 720p30 and it drops frames then it may only be capturing 10 or 12 of the 30 frames per second that you shot. Aborting capture when that happens makes you aware that the ingest was not successful. If this regularly happens it probably means that either (1) your hard drive is too full or (2) your hard drive your ingesting to is too slow to record the incoming signal.
If you want to ignore it, go to Final Cut Pro –> User Preferences… and uncheck the “Abort Capture on Dropped Frames” box. Though, again, I’m not clear why one would do this.
Ryan Holmes
http://www.ryanholmes.me
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I second Timo’s recommendation. DNxHD is a great alternative intermediate format from ProRes, especially if your a Windows user.
But transcoding from h.264 footage to an intermediate (like ProRes, DNxHD, etc.) won’t buy you any more quality. The damage was done to the signal when it got compressed to h.264. You can’t add quality to the image by transcoding to a different format. The reason people typically transcode from h.264 to a DI format is that h.264 doesn’t play well with all software packages. ProRes, DNxHD, etc. work well in a variety of softwares (PPro, FCP, Avid, Smoke, Resolve, etc.).
Summary: It’s not bad to transcode from h.264 to something else. Just keep in mind that the primary reason for doing so is easy of workflow, not improved image quality.
Ryan Holmes
http://www.ryanholmes.me
vimeo.com/ryanholmes -
PPro has no problems handling ProRes as a format. It’s smooth as butter.
With either the Ninja or Pix240 you can record in ProRes or DNxHD. Both formats work fine in CS6. I use a Pix240 and record ProRes for several shoots per week.
You can also get a Blackmagic HyperDeck Shuttle and record Uncompressed (as well as ProRes and DNxHD) if space is of no concern to you:
https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/hyperdeckshuttle/Ryan Holmes
http://www.ryanholmes.me
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Glad to hear you found the culprit and got it ironed out. Thanks for posting a follow-up…I’ll keep that in mind for the next Cow user who posts something similar.
Ryan Holmes
http://www.ryanholmes.me
vimeo.com/ryanholmes -
It’s likely because you have some seriously unstable footage. In order to make it appear smooth after stabilizing it has to zoom in.
You can adjust the settings of the warp stabilizer….you may try backing off a bit (i.e. not making it so super smooth).
Ryan Holmes
http://www.ryanholmes.me
vimeo.com/ryanholmes -
What’s the codec of the avi’s in question? avi is just a wrapper (like like mov) but the codec inside is what you need to unpack.
Do you have the correct codecs installed on your machine? Did they get deleted? Become corrupt?
Do the files work on a different computer with PPro (ask a buddy if you can try importing your files on their setup)?
Ryan Holmes
http://www.ryanholmes.me
vimeo.com/ryanholmes -
This is a difficult question to answer. If they are not editors by nature any “professional” codec you use like Apple ProRes, Avid DNxHD, etc. will cause them problems. These codecs will do a good job retaining your image quality though.
You could export h.264 mp4 files for them. Which they would probably be able to read on most any platform, but are largely a reduction in quality even at high data rates.
If they just want to review it – h.264.
If they want to edit it – ProRes or DNxHD, but you’re going to have to explain to them why they can’t open the Quicktime file on their $400 netbook! 😉Ryan Holmes
http://www.ryanholmes.me
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Make sure you have Read/Write permission to that directory. You may even try moving the location to a different location just to make sure that Audition can build the temp files it needs.
It’s a long shot to be sure, but might be worth a quick look.
Ryan Holmes
http://www.ryanholmes.me
vimeo.com/ryanholmes -
[Jamie Pickell] “As for the AE to AME Matrox export, I was expecting a lot faster given the Matrox built in H264 encoding.”
I would agree with you here. You may need to contact Matrox and verify that it is setup and running correctly. I would expect that a h264 encode using Matrox would run faster than realtime given the hardware in there.
[Jamie Pickell] “it sounds like you recommend not going that route, but rather exporting direct from the host apps”
It probably won’t change your export times much, but I’ve found on some projects that PPro can export the file fine while AME will hang at some point. Seemingly no rhyme or reason why PPro works….my only guess is whatever engine runs in the background to enable the handoff of the sequence from PPro to AME gets gnarled up. Once it does it’s game over for the export in AME. That same handoff doesn’t seem to be taking place if the sequence is exported from within PPro. If any Adobe guys are reading I’d love to know more about that backend between PPro and AME (maybe an Adobe blog post?).
Keep us posted Jamie on how it works out. That sounds like a cool project!
Ryan Holmes
http://www.ryanholmes.me
vimeo.com/ryanholmes