4:4:4 10bit single CMOS HD project

[Obin Olson]

as far as you guys know I have nothing but MAC or $20,000 Boxx system that can deal with POST editing for my camera in 10bit or higher?

[Jason Rodriguez]

Hey Obin,

If you don't have the money (or they don't have the $$) to purchase a new system for the camera, then the easiest, simplest approach (although easily the most time consuming), is to do a simple match-picture online edit. That's what all my film-school buddies had to do when they messed up their cut lists. For each edit line up the appropriate shot in online (say After Effects) by matching the image(s) by eye, and try to record each and every take and scene to a seperate folder to facilitate finding the right frame. I know it sounds time consuming, but it's cheap, and it will get you the correct results every time.

[Steve Nordhauser]

David is much more of an expert on compression effects than I am but be careful about a work flow that does too many iterations of lossy compression and decompression. Each time you lose a bit more. A single cycle at 6:1 may be visually lossless, but taking the same video and cycling it a couple of times at 6:1 may become a mess.

[David Newman]

Steve,

Absolutely, multigeneration of a lossly codec an make a mess -- particularly when a codec isn't designed for that workflow (basically all the aquistion formats DVCPRO HD HDCAM, HDV etc have this problem.) When we set out to design production codec, multi-generations was planned up front. With our CFHD codec you can do ten generations without visual loss from the first to the last. This is why we feel confident that benefits of compressed based editing easily out-way the technically lossless nature of uncompressed.

[Eliot Mack]

I am especially interested in this as most of my work involves compositing 2D source footage with 5-15 layers of rendered 3D images. At HD resolutions, the amount of storage space consumed with this many uncompressed TIFF images defies belief. Being able to drop the storage requirements by a factor of 6 or so makes the whole process much easier to handle.

Is this the sort of use that the Cineform codecs are designed for? A good way to visually show their performance might be to put them through the same sorts of tests that are at onerivermedia.com under their 'codecs' heading. If that is too artificial a setup, perhaps a 'before and after 10x encodes' picture with something that is tough on codecs like outdoor scenes with moving grass or trees would be good.

Eliot

[David Newman]

Eliot,

Those are excellent ideas. Now to find the time. The problem with onerivermedia comparisons it the uses of apple as the testing platform, if they do testing under AE on the PC that might be fine. However putting the x10 generation examples on our web site is simply something we must find time to do.

[Freya Paget]

<<<--
The American cinematographer's manual will tell you the exact aperture dimensions. 16mm is from side to side. The real difference is that some cameras the K3 included use film perfed at both sides.

Super16 has the film perfed on one side and the aperture plate is enlarged to take advantage of the additional negative space where the perfs were.
-->>>

Going way back...

The K3 can actually take single perf film.
Single perf was not actually a S16 invention but arrived with the introduction of sound for the 16mm format.

Super16 uses the part of the film where the optical soundtrack used to be.

Some people enlarge the K3 gate to shoot S16 on it.

Just thought I'd mention this as some people with K3 cameras go to ever such a lot of trouble trying to get double perf film which is hard to get these days and it is silly as it will take standard single perf, it just will only shoot the normal standard 16 image on it unless it has been modified for S16.

love

Freya

[Obin Olson]

I am tired. Been downloadin codecs all day and encoding my footage to them..seems that lots work fine with windows media player for playback and none work in premiere pro..most almost work but drop frames every 2-3sec maybe 2-4frames dropped at a time...it's the code not hardware as windows media plays the stuff fine

I have used the LeadTools codec and it seems very nice..even Premiere color work looks great with that codec! Now if I could jsut get it to playback smoothly!!!! gawd this is a pain!

LeadTools for 8 bit is good and I would finish with that if I could get it to PLAY!

[Juan M. M. Fiebelkorn]

Which of the many Leadtools codec is the one you are using?
Mjpeg2000?

BTW, I need someone to post a zipped small video clip of RAW images to test some compression mixtures and quality.
To make this, first I would need to code an app that decomposes the RAW images as my proposal's description, so it would take me some time.If anyone just made it, please, post it too! :)

@Obin: Did you test Huffyuv for compressing the raw captured frames?
If the answer is yes, what is its speed in fps?


Does anyone know what's the speed of Huffy on a P4 3.X GHZ for a 640x720 video clip? And for 960x1080?
I'm talking about B&W, 8 bits but I don't know if it supports this format.

I ask this because I don't owe a P4 system (Athlon 2500).

Update: I've just tested a 640x720 clip with Huffy and it gives me 2.3:1 compression ratio and a speed of 25 fps on a P3 1GHZ with a slow disk....for an RGB compression.

[Obin Olson]

I just found out a strange thing, in the SOURCE monitor in Premiere Pro and Premiere Pro HD v1.5 the clips playback PERFECT..then when you drag the same clip onto the timeline and hit space(Play) the clip stutters...what could this be? why does the source monitor inside Premiere work and the timeline monitor not?

if this one tiny little thing could be fixed we can POST this HD stuff with a really great LeadTools Codec...arrgghh...someone MUST have a clue to this little mystery eh?


I am using this codec with VERY good results!:

LEADMCMPCodecE.EXE

from www.leadtools.com

[Rob Lohman]

I think this is just a Premiere problem Obin. I've heard such
things about Premiere before. Have you tried another NLE
(demo for example)? Try Vegas. Or perhaps an NLE that can
actually work with 10 bits?

[Matthew Miller]

Obin,
You've probably already thought to make sure that your project settings in Premiere Pro match the settings of your source. There is a chance that Premiere is trying to transcode your clips into some slightly different format for editing. This would explain why they play back smoothly in the source window. Are you at least able to advance frame-by-frame through the timeline without playing it back?

The leadtools web site seems to suggest that the MCMP codec puts a slightly higher priority on speed and compression than the MJPEG codec. The MJPEG codec seems to put more emphasis on video editing interoperability. I haven't tried either codec yet, but I have Premiere Pro 1.5

[Obin Olson]

hmm...on the timeline it does NOT have a red render bar and when I apply an effect it turns red till I render so I don't think it is transcoding...it's more like some type of playback issue...one thing I notice is that when I play from the timeline it seems to be in RAM as the disk does not read like it does when play is from source window...maybe this is a clue??

guys what NLE software is 10bit?

BTW I am using MCMP

[Rob Lohman]

Some versions of AVID support 10 bit I think. Try looking around
their website. I think that is the only PC NLE out there with
support for high bit depths. FCP on Mac supports it as well?

[Freya Paget]

Isn't 10 bit video a codec issue?
I mean presumably if you have a 10bit codec it should work with whatever?

Although having said that Avid DV Express only works with DV and premiere is weird and fussy about codecs generally, but surely Vegas would work?

love

Freya