Chris Kenny
October 31st, 2004, 12:28 PM
I've been working with Kaku's great clips on a dual 2 GHz G5, and I thought I'd share some of what I've found.
Mostly I've been using MPEG Streamclip to convert clips to DVCPRO HD at various resolutions. I've tried deinterlacing and scaling to end up with to 1280x720 30p. This looks pretty good, but it is not a particularly fast process; converting an 11 second clip takes over five minutes. Converting to 1080i DVCPRO HD (no scaling or deinterlacing involved) is *much* faster (just over a minute). I wouldn't recommend this workflow for production situations though -- the converted video occasionally breaks up or skips.
Another alternative to this is using MPEG Streamclip to simply convert the TS file to an M2V file, which QuickTime understands (if you have the MPEG-2 decoder, of course). This is very quick, because it requires no reencoding of video data. Then you can use QuickTime Pro or Final Cut to make the conversion to DVCPRO HD. I haven't seen glitches with this method, but I haven't done very much of it. And of course you can only produce 1080i like this -- there's no deinterlacer built into QuickTime.
For the most part, I've quite impressed with how good the video looks. I've got Panasonic's Varicam demo DVD here, which has a few gigabytes of raw Varicam footage, and the 0dB-gain FX1 footage looks just as good most of the time -- in many cases it actually looks more detailed. Of course Panasonic shows off some shallow depth of field and slow motion stuff that the FX1 obviously won't be able to match, so nobody should be writing any Varicam obituaries yet.
In terms of actual editing, FCP on this machine can do quite a lot with 720p or 1080i in real-time. On 'Medium' quality playback with 1080i and Unlimited RT turned on, you can stack most simple filters (Levels, Color Balance, etc.) two or three deep and still remain real-time. Simple transitions (dissolves, wipes, etc.) are also no problem. And I can play back one video track with its opacity turned down a bit over another track quite easily as well -- I start dropping frames with three tracks, but that could just be the hard drive (the tracks are 13.9 MB/s each, after all.)
All in all, it looks like (assuming using QuickTime Pro for conversion continues to work smoothly), I've got a fairly usable workflow here. And the final product would be a DVCPRO HD project ready to be exported to a professional deck or whatever.
These 1080i DVPRO HD files run 840 MB/minute, though. I'm going to have to buy some more storage.
Mostly I've been using MPEG Streamclip to convert clips to DVCPRO HD at various resolutions. I've tried deinterlacing and scaling to end up with to 1280x720 30p. This looks pretty good, but it is not a particularly fast process; converting an 11 second clip takes over five minutes. Converting to 1080i DVCPRO HD (no scaling or deinterlacing involved) is *much* faster (just over a minute). I wouldn't recommend this workflow for production situations though -- the converted video occasionally breaks up or skips.
Another alternative to this is using MPEG Streamclip to simply convert the TS file to an M2V file, which QuickTime understands (if you have the MPEG-2 decoder, of course). This is very quick, because it requires no reencoding of video data. Then you can use QuickTime Pro or Final Cut to make the conversion to DVCPRO HD. I haven't seen glitches with this method, but I haven't done very much of it. And of course you can only produce 1080i like this -- there's no deinterlacer built into QuickTime.
For the most part, I've quite impressed with how good the video looks. I've got Panasonic's Varicam demo DVD here, which has a few gigabytes of raw Varicam footage, and the 0dB-gain FX1 footage looks just as good most of the time -- in many cases it actually looks more detailed. Of course Panasonic shows off some shallow depth of field and slow motion stuff that the FX1 obviously won't be able to match, so nobody should be writing any Varicam obituaries yet.
In terms of actual editing, FCP on this machine can do quite a lot with 720p or 1080i in real-time. On 'Medium' quality playback with 1080i and Unlimited RT turned on, you can stack most simple filters (Levels, Color Balance, etc.) two or three deep and still remain real-time. Simple transitions (dissolves, wipes, etc.) are also no problem. And I can play back one video track with its opacity turned down a bit over another track quite easily as well -- I start dropping frames with three tracks, but that could just be the hard drive (the tracks are 13.9 MB/s each, after all.)
All in all, it looks like (assuming using QuickTime Pro for conversion continues to work smoothly), I've got a fairly usable workflow here. And the final product would be a DVCPRO HD project ready to be exported to a professional deck or whatever.
These 1080i DVPRO HD files run 840 MB/minute, though. I'm going to have to buy some more storage.