Okay, let's cut to the chase, folks... NDA's or no NDA's - my cam is about to be shipped and I'm a PC guy - what can I do NOW to work with the footage?

Any updates as to when the NLE's will have an HDV update? Specifically with regards to capture-to-PC?

David Newman - you've provided a beta of new Connect/Aspect HD to Kerr Cook for his FX1 evaluative purposes - why not throw a beta up for us at www.cineform.com and we can give it a spin?

I've got vegas 5 b - I need a way to get it into the computer - okay, I saw a post somewhere about software bundled with cam - any capture utility included?

Can some programmer dude out there take 5 minutes and whip up a freebie HDV capture app along the lines of "windv"?

Connect and Aspect HD will have a Sony HDV compatible version very soon (the camera was made available a few weeks earlier than we expected.) The beta version isn't for general distribution.

I would think the camera must ship with some sort of rudimentary capture program, so any application which can load and edit the native HDV files should be able to work from that.

Otherwise just capture to a 2-head VCR and play back on a 13" black and white TV! :-)

Saw the cam tonite at my dealer - he just has demo and the one he sold - I can confirm - no bundled software!

at least not in North America!

Now that I think about it, I may have seen a comment somewhere that Pinnacle Liquid Edition 6 is ready to go for the Sony cameras, but I'd check with Pinnacle first to confirm.

I think there are posts abound on this - the requirements are heavy to start with and expected you'll need like dual xenon pentium 4 3 GHz processors to start with 2 gigs of RAM to edit the HDV "efficiently" in Liquid 6...

Everyone seems to be in agreement that native HDV mpeg2 editing is "heavy" - I guess that's why Cineform and Lumiere are here!

If David Newman is reading this - why RAID 0 SATA's as per cineform.com specs? Is that what it takes to play back cineform codec in "real-time" on dv timeline? It's not for capture, is it? Also, how does cineform avi compare to say uncompressed avi in terms of file size? and there's some "rendering" time involved? Lumiere uses proxy files, is that right? I'm a PC guy... okay, okay, I'll hunt around these forums to find my answers - but a nice "Reader's Digest" version of these pipelines would be nifty for us HDV newbies... There's probably a post somewhere on that too, right?

HDV = Highly Demanding Video???

We recommend a couple drives in RAID 0 only for enhanced multi-stream performance. A single drive can sustain 25-30MB/s but it may struggle with two 10-12 MB/s streams (although not always.) A very inexpensive RAID solves this (included as standard on most modern motherboards.) This is only used to enhance editing performance; capture can occur to any hard drive. CineForm AVIs are online quality (http://www.cineform.com/technology/quality.htm), the average size varies as this is a constant quality compression (size depends on content.) An uncompressed 1440x1080i30 (4:2:2) would be around 90MB/s, CineForm will compress this between 6:1 and 10:1 (9 - 15MB/s.)

"HDV = Highly Demanding Video???"

I personally don't think so. My work desktop 2.8GHz P4 can do dual streams of 1440x1080i30 in real-time, and I haven't put a RAID in it. It is an off-shelf type of PC, with some neat CineForm software (coming soon) :).

David,

Are we supposed to have those raids set up for striping or mirroring?

I'm about to set up my CPU this weekend...

Thanks!

Definitely striping so that your overall disk performance goes up (nearly doubling.)

Marc: RAID 0 = striping, see the following links:

http://www.prepressure.com/techno/raid.htm
http://www.acnc.com/raid.html