Sean Oneil
Forum Replies Created
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[Michael G] “This signal can be captured by a 1080i setting in FCP.
If you are delivering to a broadcaster, then use the 1080i setting. As always, check what format the broadcaster will accept.”
That’s actually a mistake. If the footage is 23.98psf, you absolutely want to capture and edit in 23.98, regardless of what the delivery format is.
Capturing and editing in 1080i60 will destroy the 3:2 pulldown cadence.
If the delivery needs to be 1080i60, then you just output that from your 23.98 sequence. Its very easy to do this with a Kona or Decklink without any additional rendering. That way the 3:2 cadence will be consistent throughout the piece.
Sean
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One time I was desperate working with a very low-budget single-camera interview. I used the Motion Tab to zoom in on the subject and created a fake “B Camera” I could cut to without there being any jump cuts. The footage was shot in HD and shown on the internet, so it looked fine.
Sean
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Forget about the 1440 thing. It’s purely academic unless you have a Sony xpri editing system. HDcam is always 1920×1080 once the signal leaves the deck.
Don’t fool around with settings. Trust the Easy Setups. Use a ProRes 1080 setup. All ProRes 1080 setups are 1920×1080.
As for the framerate and scan type, you’ll have to ask the cameraman what format it was shot on. 99% of the time it will either be 59.94i or 23.98p.
Final Cut is the least of your worries if you aren’t familiar with these terms. The HDCam deck will be much more difficult to configure. Make sure you aren’t converting anything with the deck. Have it playback whatever format it was shot on.
Sean
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I asked them the same thing. They linked me to the system requirements page on their website. It says Mac OSX 10.4.4-10.4.9 I believe. They will update it once 10.4.10 has finsihed being tested.
I haven’t found any PPC vs. Intel issues.
Sean
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Let me tell you something I just discovered on my own. I captured a bunch of HDCam 1080i60 footage to ProRes HQ. The ProRes media will be used for onlining, but my MacPro can’t handle if for a pleasant offline experience (I need a 9 camera multicam).
So I used MM to convert it to DVCProHD for the offline work (I’ll reconnect to ProRes when I online). The footage looked pretty bad. Compression artifacts were clear as day.
I could have used Compressor instead of MM, but Compressor does use the same encoder. It just does a better job of scaling and deinterlacing. Since I’m going 1080i to 1080i, none of that matters too much. So I don’t think the results would have been much better.
Point is it looks bad. And it’s no surprise why. HDCam is very lossy, ProRes, while not nearly as bad, is also lossy. And DVCProHD is even more lossy than HDCam. 3 generations. And it would be a fourth if I were to master it back to tape D5 tape – let alone HDCam (which is much worse than D5).
All of the camera codecs and all of the editing codecs cheat (except Uncompressed). Even ProRes and HDCam SR. Some are much worse than others. HDCam AND DVCPro are two of the bad ones. And HDV is by far the worst.
DVCPro is good for a generation, maybe two. If that’s what you shot on, then onlining with it can make sense depending on the situation. Otherwise I would avoid it. Its a great camera format and it’s wonderful you can edit natively. But its not a good archiving/onlining/intermediate format. Not at all.
Sean
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Converting the HDCam footage to DVCProHD, and then back to HDCam – its not ideal. But its not the end of the world if that’s what you’re stuck with. The HDV footage will look bad though. You can minimize the damage greatly by not converting it to DVCProHD – at least not for the online. I’m not being a snob about this. DVCProHD is lossy by itself. Combining that with other lossy formats in the chain is a bad idea and you should avoid it if possible.
I don’t know your game plan as far as onlining. Where are you taking it? What are they using? Are they using an Avid, or Final Cut Pro (or something else)?
Are they charging you by the hour? Or is the finishing going to be a flat rate? Where is the color correction being done?
If they are charging by the hour, and they are using Final Cut, and you are doing your own CC, you may wish to sacrifice picture quality in order to save time/money. Delivering DVCProHD footage means they won’t have to spend time rendering anything. They can just open your FCP project and start outputting to tape right away. Even though the quality will be hurt, this may be necessary for your budget.
But if they’re using Avid, then they have to render/import your footage regardless. I don’t know if newer Avids can transcode DVCPro quickly and losslessly. If I had to guess I’d say it can’t. If that’s the case there’s absolutely no reason whatsoever to deliver DVCProHD.
All this said, your project is a classic example of when you should use the traditional online workflow. That which is to bring in an EDL or project file, and have them batch recapture everything there with full online quality. Better scaling, and they can capture it Uncompressed. It shouldn’t take too long. Certainly faster than importing footage on an Avid. Just makes sure they have HDV playback there.
Or you could just rent the decks, get a Kona, and do this yourself. That’s what I would do.
Sean
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That’s a complete waste of money. I hope this isn’t a public institution you are at, because my tax dollars better not be paying for such overkill.
First of all, you have four stations working with DV. That’s nothing. You could get away with just file-sharing and skip the whole SAN thing altogether. Get a Mac Pro, attach a cheap SATA array to it, and share it over the network. Maybe get a quad-port ethernet card (small-tree.com) so each station has it’s own dedicated 1gb. I honestly doubt you’ll need anything more than that. You can improve performance by using Jumbo Frames, and you can put a script in your “Startup Items” to mount the shared disk automatically after every bootup.
Don’t take my word for it. Try it yourself using one of the stations you already have. Share it’s local RAID on the network and see what it’s like working off it from one of the other stations.
Sean
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I was told by them not to upgrade to 10.4.10 yet.
In the meantime, if I were you, try setting your machine to be the metadata master. See if that changes anything.
I’ve constantly had issues with previous versions of MetaSAN that seem to only affect the non-master members.
Sean
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You can’t use HDV as a playback device. It will only work when using Print to Video.
Sean
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Certainly don’t fuss over MM’s quality if this is just for your offline. Do whatever is fastest.
I don’t understand how you plan to online to HDCam without a card. Are you taking an EDL to another facility and having them batch re-capture? Or are you delivering a hard drive with your media? If it’s that latter, don’t use DVCProHD. Whether you convert with a Kona, MM, or Compressor – it’s a bad idea no matter what. There is no purpose whatsoever in using DVCPro as an intermediate transport codec – unless you have to deliver on DVCPro tape.
HDCam is pretty lossly. DVCPro is also pretty lossy. And HDV is beyond very lossy. Your workflow idea will incorporate the worst of all three. Take the DVCPro out of the equation since the other two are unavoidable.
You should online at Uncompressed or ProRes. Do this by dropping your HDV media into a UC or ProRes sequence and rendering. Then export a QT Movie. Since those formats are lossless (virtually), the quality of the encoder means little. If those formats aren’t doable, there are still better finishing options than DVCProHD (like Animation, P-JPEG, Cineform, SheerVideo, etc.)
Sean