Tom Brooks
Forum Replies Created
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If your capture preset digitizer says “[Missing] DVCProHD”, it means you have set the capture input to DVCProHD via Firewire, but the deck is not connected at the moment. If you’re set to capture via Firewire, you’re not going to capture 8-bit uncompressed.
The only way you’d get 8-bit UC is to have an analog or SDI connection through a capture card such as Kona and having set the capture digitizer to one of the Kona presets or a custom preset.
Could it be that you used an Easy Setup that set the capture to one of the Kona presets for one session? If your deck has all the connections hooked up, including RS-422 deck control, you might have missed that. That’s the only explanation that comes to mind at the moment.
What you need is a custom Easy Setup that specifies DVCProHD over firewire for capture and your Kona card for output.
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Looking at all the angles, your approach is good. Basically, HD material put on an SD 4:3 timeline will letterbox by default. Then you scale it up and adjust each clip right or left if you like.
Speaking of “each clip”, you might want to select all your clips on the HD timeline and copy and paste into the SD timeline. You’ll have to scale them all up (create a motion favorite) to eliminate the letterbox and then you can center the clips if needed by turning on the wireframe in the canvas and then shift dragging them left or right. Or pan them with a motion effect if that works for the shot.
I was just reviewing this in the FCP6 Manual under “Combining SD and HD Material.” An alternative is to drop the HD sequence into and SD sequence, but think about the consequences of that.
Maybe Shane Ross will chime in. He’s written a lot about these combinations and his blog might be informative on this.
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I neglected to comment on the use of the .dv stream. It’s technically compatible with FCP. You can import them and FCP will deal with them, but those will require rendering if you bring them into a DV timeline. FCP has to separate the muxed audio and video into separate tracks.
You can still export them with Quicktime conversion. You could also do the conversion just with Quicktime Pro or with MPEG Streamclip. The FCP and Quicktime methods will result in the video being recompressed in the DV format–I presume the same will happen with MPEG Streamclip. So you will see a slight reduction in quality. That’s the price of originally recording in the wrong format.
Premiere can also use Quicktime .mov files with no problem. It doesn’t require .AVI. So, .mov files in the DV codec will be compatible cross-platform.
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You didn’t spell it out specifically, but if you just need to export clips so that you can use them in a Quicktime compatible Windows encoding application (such as Squeeze), any lossless or near lossless codec that exists in Quicktime for Windows will work well for you. Marco Solario has a website dedicated to codec information that has been a great resource.
https://codecs.onerivermedia.com/
On the 4:4:4 page you’ll find Bitjazz Sheervideo, PNG, Animation and others. PNG is a real workhorse codec with a small file size. It’s free and it comes with Quicktime. Works real well for sharing QuickTime renders between platforms.
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Yes, the Quicktime conversion process you spelled out should be fine. I’m not completely familiar with Premiere and the differences in types of AVI files, so there could be variables. Any way you can do a shorter test run? Otherwise, try posting your process on the Premiere forum if you like.
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BTW, I calculate your 80 minute movie would be about 135GB in the “None” AVI format and about 18GB in the DV format (using the AJA data rate calculator).
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I believe the best you can do is to keep the compression set to DV. “None” is giving you a file size around ten times the size of the original DV and you’ll have to get back down to DV (or whatever codec you edit in) for Premiere anyway. So there is no further loss by keeping it DV for this conversion (assuming you’ll be editing in the DV format in Premiere).
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Bitjazz would probably be very good. I’ve been happy with PNG, set to None compression. It comes free with Quicktime.
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Looks like it can use up to 4GB. Other programs like After Effects can suck in a lot more. Next version in new OS might be able to use more??
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720p60 records the highest frame rate possible with a regular video camera. 720p60 is easily downconverted to standard def 480i. A Kona card does a nice job on that.
720p30 is recorded to the P2 card as 720p60 with flags embedded in the recording to tell the capture software to remove the duplicate frames on ingest. So, you are recording 60 frames per second but only using half of them in your edit.
720pN30 records only 30 frames per second (29.97 really) to the card. So, the pN30 mode is able to record twice as much time on a P2 card.
Similarly, you can record 720p24, which records 60 frames per second to the card, or 720pN24, which records only 24.
Barry Green’s The HVX Book is good. Also this on formats:
https://manuals.info.apple.com/en/FCP6_HD_and_Broadcast_Formats.pdf