Capturing via V1 HDMI with Blackmagic Intensity card

[Dave F. Nelson]

Originally Posted by Raymond Toussaint

Keep it clear:

You can shoot uncompressed only if you are connected with the cam to a computer with fast RAID system and a component or HDMI card. So this is studio only.

If you shoot HDV on tape the compression is there. If you go out from camera tape --> component or HDMI, the compression is there already.

To prevent more degradition in editing you can do a rough cut in HDV.
Switch the compressor setting in the FCP sequence to AIC or Uncompressed. Let FCP render the sequence, it's a fast operation, and then apply color correction and other effects.

You can choose for another intermediate to edit in, like Sheer or others.

That's correct. For pristine uncompressed footage you must capture live.

[Daniel Boswell]

Originally Posted by Dave Nelson

That's correct. For pristine uncompressed footage you must capture live.

I just got my Intensity card. And am doing some preliminary test captures but I am having trouble capturing it to my HDs as they are not RAIDed. I am dropped way too many frames to make it even remotely usable.

This is from footage already captured as HDV that I am trying to capture as DVCproHD or as Uncompressed. Both are giving me trouble.

My question is, to no one in particular, as someone who will primarily be importing footage shot to tape as compressed HDV, what workflow would you recommend if you had my set-up?

(Mac Pro with 1.2 Terabytes internal space and BM Intensity Card)

Should I be converting it to DVCproHD? Uncompressed?

My output is always to DVD.

[Paul Frederick]

Originally Posted by Raymond Toussaint

Keep it clear:

Switch the compressor setting in the FCP sequence to AIC or Uncompressed. Let FCP render the sequence, it's a fast operation, and then apply color correction and other effects.

You can choose for another intermediate to edit in, like Sheer or others.

You lost me at this step. I usually edit Native HDV, apply Color correction etc. and then render out a final .MOV in AIC. Is this basically what you are saying? Or do you take your HDV sequence and nest it in an AIC sequence and render it that way, if so I don't see the benefit. As I understand it, FCP is never more than 1 generation away from your original HDV when it does the render. Regardless of how many effects you pile on.

[Zsolt Gordos]

Cant you make your disks RAID-ed? RAID would give the necessary transfer speed.

[Daniel Boswell]

Originally Posted by Zsolt Gordos

Cant you make your disks RAID-ed? RAID would give the necessary transfer speed.

Doing that right now Zsolt. Will report my findings.

[Raymond Toussaint]

@ PAUL
"You lost me at this step. I usually edit Native HDV, apply Color correction etc. and then render out a final .MOV in AIC. ""

You can do it like you did before, the step I introduced was to prevent recompressing the HDV and to have the best signal for CC. Basically it is an alternative answer for this thread 'Capturing via HDMI with BM card'.

[Dave F. Nelson]

Originally Posted by Daniel Boswell

I just got my Intensity card. And am doing some preliminary test captures but I am having trouble capturing it to my HDs as they are not RAIDed. I am dropped way too many frames to make it even remotely usable.

This is from footage already captured as HDV that I am trying to capture as DVCproHD or as Uncompressed. Both are giving me trouble.

My question is, to no one in particular, as someone who will primarily be importing footage shot to tape as compressed HDV, what workflow would you recommend if you had my set-up?

(Mac Pro with 1.2 Terabytes internal space and BM Intensity Card)

Should I be converting it to DVCproHD? Uncompressed?

My output is always to DVD.

First off, from what I understand, a raid system is mandatory if you plan to capture uncompressed footage with the Intensity card, whether you use a Mac Pro or a PC. The only exception I am aware of would be if you used a PC and injested the footage with Cineform's Prospect HD, but this package is only available for PCs running Adobe Premiere Pro and the Convergent card is not available yet. For PC users, Cineform has stated publicly that they intend to support the Intensity card soon also.

If quality of live recordings is your goal, never convert to DVCPROHD since you would be defeating the purpose of shooting full resolution uncompressed. DVCPROHD 100s highest resolution is 1280 x 1080. This would be a huge step down from 1920 x 1080 uncompressed. You would also introduce compression artifacts.

Try to use JPEG2000 75. This is lightly compressed but substantially better than DVCPROHD.

On the other hand, if you are not recording live but are playing HDV out of your HDMI port, DVCPROHD would probably be ok (Jpeg2000 would still be better) since your content was degraded as soon as you recorded to HDV.

We are an HD SDI house. We already use PCs with HD SDI and the Canon XL-H1 among others. We are waiting for the Convergent HDMI -> HD SDI converter to feed output from the V1U directly into the AJA HD SDI card.

I can't speak directly to the Mac Pro other than to tell you that we have one here and plan to test it with the Intensity card to compare results. We also need to get a repeater system for HDMI since we can't use the camera tethered less than two meters from the computer since we record live.

We plan to compare XL-H1 and V1U footage injested with HD SDI. We also plan to compare V1U HDMI -> HD SDI footage with V1U HDMI footage injested directly the BM Intensity card.

If the results are positive and the V1U's lens is good enough (comparable or less red and green fringing problems (CA) than we experience with the XL-H1, and from what I have seen, I believe this to be the case), we plan to replace the XL-H1 with a number of HDMI and/or HD SDI enabled V1Us for our next film project.

[Nick Hillyard]

I noticed that the Intesity card only supports capturing in the 1080i flavor. But the HDMI specs allow for 1080/24p.

Does the V1U support HDMI output at 1080/24p when shooting in the progressive modes?

What is the best work around to capture and edit 24p with the Intensity card?

[Dave F. Nelson]

Originally Posted by Nick Hillyard

I noticed that the Intesity card only supports capturing in the 1080i flavor. But the HDMI specs allow for 1080/24p.

Does the V1U support HDMI output at 1080/24p when shooting in the progressive modes?

What is the best work around to capture and edit 24p with the Intensity card?

>> Does the V1U support HDMI output at 1080/24p when shooting in the progressive modes? <<

No, Sony's V1U does not support 1080p24 or 1080p30 from the HDMI port. The V1U outputs 1080i60 ONLY from the HDMI port. If you shoot progressive footage, the V1U will output it as either 24p or 30p over 60i. The 24 or 30 progressive frames would have to be extracted with software. Currently BM's software does not support extracting 24p or 30p from the HDMI 60i stream.

>> What is the best work around to capture and edit 24p with the Intensity card? <<

Currently there is no solution that I am aware of. However, Cineform has stated publicly (on this board as a matter of fact) that they plan to support the Intensity card and will offer 24p extraction from 60i, but this is with Aspect HD and Connect HD which are available for the PC only, not the Mac.

[Derek Green]

Originally Posted by Robert Ducon

Say, uncompressed 8bit 4:2:2. Be aware: the Intensity does not support 10 bit.

Can anyone confirm this statement? According to the BM site it states Intensity does 10 bit...

Derek

[Dave F. Nelson]

Originally Posted by Derek Green

Can anyone confirm this statement? According to the BM site it states Intensity does 10 bit...

Derek

That is correct. The Intensity Card accepts 10 bit input. However, I was curious about this too, so I asked Douglas Spotted Eagle to confirm whether the V1U outputs 10 bit or 8 bit. DSE claims that the V1U outputs 10 bit color depth but sets the two least significant bits to null meaning that the V1U outputs 8 bit color depth.

[David Newman]

8-bit over 10-bit is just like the Canon XL-H1 puts over HDSDI, even so the uncompressed capture (to CineForm or uncompressed) is well worth it for the increased color resolution and losing all the MPEG artifacts.

Yes, to the early question regarding automatic 24p extraction from 60i within the CineForm products. We had to do the same thing for the Canon HDSDI cameras, it works great.

[Robert Ducon]

Sorry for the confusion - the HDMI spec of the Intensity board threw me off (it isn't v1.3 spec) - so, if it says it's 10bit, then that's really something!

Yes - as other users have said - RAID setup, Mac Pro.

Don’t capture in HDV - you're getting no advantage over capturing to HDV tape, and it's in a lowly 4:2:0 colour space, and compressed to 1440x1080. HDV is HDV regardless of if you got it from the HDMI connector or the tape itself.

The point of having an HDMI board it to bypass this codec.

DVCPRO also isn't a good choice IMO because it's still highly compressed - at the 1920x1080 60i single is squished to 1280x1080, which is worse than HDV's 1440x1080. While it is 4:2:2, it's a mere 100MB/sec ;)

Blackmagic offers many flavours of it's codec: 8bit, 10bit, RGB, various frame rates, etc. The hard disk test will let you know what you can handle. I recommend it over DVCPRO HD and HDV.

It depends how important the project is to you, how much storage you have, and how much post you intend to do. Best idea IMO is capture in a high end codec to a RAID setup (end up with massive files). If you have multiple day shoots, and after the day is done, do a rough edit and encode to a different, smaller, codec. For short films with lots of post in mind, I like the options of the OpenEXR codec (it’s compressed, but offers an incredible latitude in terms of bit depth).

[Tony Tremble]

Originally Posted by Robert Ducon

Sorry for the confusion - the HDMI spec of the Intensity board threw me off (it isn't v1.3 spec) - so, if it says it's 10bit, then that's really something!

Yes - as other users have said - RAID setup, Mac Pro.

Don’t capture in HDV - you're getting no advantage over capturing to HDV tape, and it's in a lowly 4:2:0 colour space, and compressed to 1440x1080. HDV is HDV regardless of if you got it from the HDMI connector or the tape itself.

The point of having an HDMI board it to bypass this codec.

DVCPRO also isn't a good choice IMO because it's still highly compressed - at the 1920x1080 60i single is squished to 1280x1080, which is worse than HDV's 1440x1080. While it is 4:2:2, it's a mere 100MB/sec ;)

Blackmagic offers many flavours of it's codec: 8bit, 10bit, RGB, various frame rates, etc. The hard disk test will let you know what you can handle. I recommend it over DVCPRO HD and HDV.

It depends how important the project is to you, how much storage you have, and how much post you intend to do. Best idea IMO is capture in a high end codec to a RAID setup (end up with massive files). If you have multiple day shoots, and after the day is done, do a rough edit and encode to a different, smaller, codec. For short films with lots of post in mind, I like the options of the OpenEXR codec (it’s compressed, but offers an incredible latitude in terms of bit depth).

It can be quite tempting to prescribe such mighty codecs creating massive files but for what purpose? You'll just end up making life difficult for yourself by over engineering the solution and no better quality output for the extra cost and effort. You'll have to spend 3-4 times the cost of the V1 to get a RAID of sufficient speed and reliability.

If you can capture to Cineform from the Intensity then that would be a very high quality and pragmatic solution. For a project based around a V1 you don't need more than a this.

Mr Newman, as soon as you have a Mac version I'm in!

TT

[Barlow Elton]

Dave,

I have the latest Kona LH drivers and could you explain how to capture XL-H1 24F HD-SDI output (24p embedded in 1080 60i) with pulldown removed upon capture?