Sean Oneil
Forum Replies Created
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[JeremyG] “Holy cow, the jig is up. I am glad someone else has said this, because no one seems to believe me that capturing through an HD SDI pipe (or even SD SDI) has advantages, and I am not just talking about RS-422 transport. HD SDI is HARDWARE not software. WIthin the deck are little electronics that are meant to push every last bit of quality out of the DVCPro HD tape and into the HD SDI. Hardware conversion almost always do a better job than software.”
Sorry guys. It’s just not true. Sure, hardware conversion is better than software conversion. BUT, hardware conversion is not better than NO CONVERSION AT ALL – which is exactly what firewire xfer is.
Capturing DVCProHD over SDI takes a hit. Plain and simple. One could subjectively say that hit actually looks “better”. Whatever. To each his own. But I think people should use filters for this kind of creative alteration, as oppose to recompressing lossy video.
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I also have an entire instruction sheet given to me from when Columbia/Tristar Home Ent. officially changed their name to Sony Pictures Home Ent. It has all kinds of rules about when and where you can use their new SPHE “logo”.
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I have digibetas of some from the studios themselves. I’m in L.A. – studios are where most of our business comes from. The labels on the tapes call them logos. Everywhere I’ve worked, they call them logos.
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Those aren’t SANs.
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Studios call them their logos. That’s it. Nothing fancy.
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[mattso] “I will bet HARD CASH”
I’ll take you up on that. How much are we talking? Cause I know you are completely wrong.
I have both Blackmagic and Kona machines in my studio. We share all kinds of media.
They both use the same Apple codecs dude. Sorry, but whatever problems you’ve had are due to something else.
Blackmagic and AJA have never made a DV codec. Nor an HDV, DV50 or a DVCProHD codec. Never. Cinewave may have. Pinnacle may have. But not BMD or AJA. They’ve only made uncompressed codecs and those are for legacy systems and 4:4:4 RGB only.
Sean
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[szumlins] “Decklink cards DO NOT have hardware scalars. If you ever plan on ingesting signal to DVCProHD, you will experience lossiness. In addition, the lack of hardware scalar and tie in to RTExtreme means that a Decklink card is not doing any math scaling out your images for output or monitoring. This literally equates to less real time using DVCProHD (even if you captured using a P2 card).
AJA’s cards all have hardware scalars on the card. This frees up processor time by handling all scaling of non full raster codecs (HDV, DVCProHD, XDCAM). You can argue that you don’t need the real time performance on output, but I would think that when doing a capture/transcode to DVCProHD, the quality of your ingest would matter.”
I’m sorry, but it just amazes me what a lack of understanding there is around here. If you’re so nit-picky about the quality, why the hell are you capturing over SDI instead of firewire?
You realize you are re-encoding it. This is a very LOSSY process. No matter how good the scaler is. Firewire avoids this process entirely.
I know there are very, very respectable people here (like Walter) who capture these formats over SDI. But reality is reality. You are decompressing it to uncompressed, and then re-compressing with a completely new lossy process. And it makes no difference that the codec you choose happens to be the same codec that camera used. All that information is thrown away once you plug it into the SDI port.
There is one very odd and very complicated exception. Certain situations it may be better to upscale from DV to 4:2:2 using hardware instead of software (if you use FCP chroma smoothing filter it makes no difference). I don’t want to get too much into this – all that matters is that it doesn’t apply to DVCProHD whatsoever.
Sean
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[JeremyG] “That truly doesn’t make any sense.
Can anyone shed some light on this?”
You’re right, it doesn’t make sense.
DV/DV50/DVCProHD are all Apple codecs. As far as RT playback, it makes absolutely no difference what you capture it with. It’s just a quicktime movie encoded with an Apple codec. Might wanna check the anamorphic flag. That could cause non-RT playback if the sequence isn’t set for the same.
As far as capturing over SDI vs. Firewire, the image quality can definitely look different. Capturing FW is like copying a file from a disk. Capturing SDI means that the deck is first converting it from DV to Uncompressed (SDI only carries Uncompressed video), and then the Mac’s Quicktime engine re-encodes that file.
As far as differences between capturing SDI->DV over Blackmagic vs. AJA – they should look identical. Quicktime is doing the encoding, not the card. If they look different, that doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. The Kona 3 has hardware assited DVCProHD decoding. But not encoding.
Sean
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I think Rory’s problem might be different than mine.
Anyway, mine is solved I think. I trashed the AJA Control Panel preferences, and the QT preferences, Now I just see black in ETT.
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[JeremyG] “Oooooooo, pretty.”
So I take it nobody else has that going on? And this is the replacement card. Good times.
Sean