Sean Oneil
Forum Replies Created
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720×486 is the standard resolution for D1/NTSC. It is found on Digibeta, D2, D5, etc. 720×480 is the size used for DV and DVD.
The proper way to handle it is to crop 2 lines from the top and 4 from the bottom, or 4 from the top and 2 from the bottom Most applications aren’t smart so they will automatically crop 3 from the top and 3 from the bottom, which is bad because it throws off the field dominance. Or they will scale it which is even worse.
Final Cut Pro automatically takes care of this, and properly handles 480 media on 486 timelines, and vice-versa. It’s built in Media Manager also recognizes this issue and takes care of it. I don’t remember if Premiere Pro does this as well.
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Yes, I occasionally get crackles and pops over the SPDIF.
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This is like asking if a strawberry milkshake is better than fresh strawberries. Clients should not be giving technical advice to editors. Just my $.02.
Uncompressed video is the best quality you can get. Period. HD-SDI is uncompressed. It can’t get any better. So if you’re mastering to D5 (which you should be if your client is this picky), then it makes absolutely no difference whatsoever because D5 is an uncompressed format.
SDTI is similar to DV over firewire. You can capture the native HDCam codec without decompressing it. Of course decompressing it is fine and 100% lossless (in this case at least). But if you master to HDCam after doing this, the deck will recompress it to the HDcam codec which is 3:1 or something like that.
The advantage of SDTI, aside from using less disk space, is that you can avoid this re-compression for cuts-only frames. It’s just like DV over firewire. Any frames that are part of a transition, anthing with color correction applied, any frame with any effect or filter whatsoever will still have to be recompressed and thus, not be able to take advantage of this.
More importantly, you can’t even capture HDCam natively over SDTI with anything other than Sony’s xpri non-linear editing system. Sony has decided to exercise what in my opinion is ethically unsound. They own the pro tape formats w/ strong market penetration, and they own a movie studio – so they decided to exploit this by only allowing their own NLE to have this capability, hoping that people will find themselves in your situation and feel pressure to switch to their system. Panasonic on the other hand, allows Apple and Avid to use their DVCPro formats.
A D5 deck is probably cheaper than an xpri, and you’ll get a lot more use out of it. But if you do go HD-SDI back to HDCam, the loss is minimal and visually non-existent. It’s what just about everyone does because they have to. Very similar to Digibeta in the SD realm.
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Are you using FCP 5? It adds an improved scaling engine. You select the quality in the sequence settings.
Sean
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Yes absolutely. It’s a very low amount of compression, so it will be visually lossless after many generations. It’s not like DV where the compression is so high, one generation of re-encoding takes a big hit.
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Sony chooses to only allow the HDCam codec to be transferred natively using tape to tape transfers, or on their own editing system called xpri.
Sean
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You mean just Command-L? That’s strange. I’m sure I’ve done that since upgrading to version 5, and I never noticed that not working.
Anyway, I’m not some programmer or hacker or anything like that. I wouldn’t have a clue how to solve that. I just figured out the P-JPEG thing by dumb luck.
Sean
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What is the link function?
Sean
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Luke, like I just mentioned to Gary, Apple purposefully prevents any RT effects for the JPEG codec if it is larger than 320×240 and the spatial quality is higher than 36%. Every effect shows up as a red bar. It doesn’t matter if you have a quad processor 4ghz G6. The enabler script prevents JPEG from being RT at high quality no matter how fast the machine.
This tweak does away with that, so it can and does work.
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A very detailed description of my config is actually in the thread about the bad 5.01 drivers.
It doesn’t matter what your config is when you do this – it will process it all as Full RT. What this “tweak” (or should I say hack) does is trick FCP into thinking that JPEG @ 75% quality at high resolutions falls within the OfflineRT category.
From what I’ve learned playing around with it, I pretty much get one basic effect at a time w/o dropping a frame. So I can do a dissolve, or I can do a Basic Motion resize. But I cannot dissolve between two clips that have been resized w/o getting dropped frames. Make sense?
If you use more effects, then the trick is to force render “Full” before mastering to tape.