I just attended the Apple Final Cut Pro seminar and I spoke with the Apple rep about the possibility of an Apple supported method to convert the transport stream of the HD1/HD10 and he said that it would be very unlikely that Apple would create a method to convert any form of transport stream due to various license agreements with various studios and music studios.

That doesn't make sense...

heath

I was asking him if Apple would release some sort of transport stream (.ts or .m2t) solution that would allow these files to be used with Final Cut Pro...sort of like what Heruis has with their solution.

He said that the they have the ability to do it now, but due to the agreements signed with the studios (copyright agreements, mostly) they will not produce their own solution.

So in other words, do not expect Apple to come up with a converter solution to turn your .ts or .m2t files to a format that Quicktime or Final Cut Pro will understand and support.

So we are stuck with the current shareware and the few commercial solutions out right now.

I would still take that with a grain of salt.

heath

From what I saw on this seminar, Apple is going more towards the uncompressed side of things. They were showing off their new set-up to be used with a Aja box and their Xserve Raid...they had a pretty sweet set-up...

Today they talked about the uncompressed 10bit SD video capture and he said that in the next few months Apple will team up with an unknown vendor to introduce an uncompressed HD solution for broadcasters.

I believe that Apple wants to take over this market by combining FCP and the ease of these new boxes and their Raid.

But that is my opinion by what I noticed at the seminar.

You might want to change the heading of this post to NO Apple solution with a question mark. It's still a rumor. Apple is notorious for keeping their mouths shut.

heath

Maybe the "unknown vendor" is Seagate or Maxtor? ;)
-Les



<<<-- Originally posted by Carlos Salcedo : From what I saw on this seminar, Apple is going more towards the uncompressed side of things. They were showing off their new set-up to be used with a Aja box and their Xserve Raid...they had a pretty sweet set-up...

Today they talked about the uncompressed 10bit SD video capture and he said that in the next few months Apple will team up with an unknown vendor to introduce an uncompressed HD solution for broadcasters.

I believe that Apple wants to take over this market by combining FCP and the ease of these new boxes and their Raid.

But that is my opinion by what I noticed at the seminar. -->>>

That rumor does make sense. Apple is very cozy with the studios, record companies, and other content creators. They are going to bend over backwards to protect their buddy's intellectual property. If Apple provided a solution to work with the .ts files created by this camcorder, the same solution could be used to copy, edit and distribute (i.e., steal) over the air broadcasts, because the format is the same -- MPEG-2 transport stream.

<<<-- Originally posted by Carlos Salcedo :Today they talked about the uncompressed 10bit SD video capture and he said that in the next few months Apple will team up with an unknown vendor to introduce an uncompressed HD solution for broadcasters.

I believe that Apple wants to take over this market by combining FCP and the ease of these new boxes and their Raid.

But that is my opinion by what I noticed at the seminar. -->>>

Like I said here, Apple was working on bringing some sort of HD editing...check out these...

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2004/apr/18panasonic.html

and

http://www.apple.com/finalcutpro/

Guys,
check apple's website

http://www.apple.com/finalcutpro/

Officially it's an upgrade not only to do realtime playback of DVCPro HD effects, transitions etc. over FireWire, but also upgrades for CinemaTools, DVDSP3, Shake, Compressor, LiveType -- a whole slew of improvements. FCP 4.5 is the new version number.

Nope

Apple just passed HDV by.
This new version of FCP may be targeted to HD production, but it still does not talk to your JVC -- nor the other HDV cameras to come.

Apple Computer is pleased to announce that it has joined the growing list of companies that are supporting the HDV format. HDV will be implemented in future versions of Apple products. Customers can begin using HDV with Final Cut Pro today through third party products such as Lumiere HDV and the Heuris Indie HD and Pro-Indie HD toolkits.

Not the total answer I was looking for from Apple, but it's good to know it's coming. We'll see what happens, I guess.

And congrats to a certain someone we know very well who got a mention, along with Heuris (who never calls back), about the Lumiere HD solution!

heath

Campressor now lets you output a 1280x720 mpeg2 elementary stream, I am going to see if I can put this through VLC to produce a transport stream, I'll let you know what happens.

I've just seen Frederic in action, demonstrating LumiereHD, and it looks great. He's bang in the middle of the JVC booth and getting crowds to watch his presentations.

Graeme

<<<-- Originally posted by Paul St. Denis : Campressor now lets you output a 1280x720 mpeg2 elementary stream, I am going to see if I can put this through VLC to produce a transport stream, I'll let you know what happens. -->>>

Are you sure about this???

I just played with it and it seems that it will accept the 1280x720 file but it will only output as a SD file (720x480)...

If you know how to do it let me know cause I would love to try it out...

Carlos, I posted too soon on this one, if you pick MPEG-2 as the encoder and then "automatic" under "Video Format" the summary shows the width and height to be "100% of source", but the output is still 720x480 (720x404 for 16:9).
Even if we could raise the resolution, the maximun bitrate is still 9 Mbps, far too low for decent HD encoding.
Sorry about the mislead.

Has anyone learned about Apple's new codec H.264?
http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/2004/04/19/videocodec/index.php?redirect=1082466803000

How does the output of the 1280*720 material look at MPEG2 ?
I heard this is a new feature that Apple put in, that is supposed to give much better DVD quality for HD material without having to downconvert first. Anyone tried it?

Paul,

I am testing the new MPEG encoder from Apple via compressor.

I chose the 60min High Quality Encode Widescreen preset. It's taking 6:30 hours on a Dual G5! for a 17 minute film...

It better be good. 56 min to go

Yes I'm trying the same thing on a 5 minute piece and it's reporting a 1 1/2 hour processing time, ..as you say, better be good!
So far my experiences with trying variable bit rate encodes have not been good and I've been sticking to the old constant bit rate which seemed more reliable, but maybe they've improved it.

Did it finish ;)

Hows it look at what bitrate ?
-Les

Went to NAB trying to figure out a solution to edit existing JVC HD footage, but with timecode, and initially for an SD distibution, that could later be turned into an HD solution if necessary.

Using products from various developers we were able to figure out a solution to keep the resolution and add 30F Non Drop Timecode, by moving it over the new Panasonic DVCPRO HD format through an AJA convertor box. This way we could make a timecoded Digibeta for SD mastering. The thing is this solution isn't exactly what one would call inexpensive, though it would work.

Actually all my research has led me to the conclusion, that for any high end production/editing environment it is better to wait for for a HDV that includes timecode, as Sony has promissed.

The finished result looked very good, a lot of the detail from the HD has been preserved in the downconvert to SD, very few artifacts as I had expected.
I will definitely use this setting again. I believe the bitrate was 6.8, which is pretty high, but it seems to play back without a hitch.

Cheers

The quality was excellent for me as well.

6.5 hours for a 17 minute piece seems excessive however.

Hmm I tried the same compression from within FCP and it only took 20 minutes, very strange!

Paul,

Based on Apple's feedback, one of the things that could slow down the encoding is a mismatched frame rate.

How long was your piece?

Frederic

5 minutes, I think maybe there's a bug in Compressor.

Matching frame rate improved encoding speed considerably. (29.97 fps)