Editing footage

[Josh Martin]

Hey guys, I know that it is possible to edit the footage from this camera in final cut pro because you've all said it is possible. Could you possibly elaborate on how it is actually done, and if it is a huge pain in the butt or not. Thanks,
Josh M.

[Heath McKnight]

<<<-- Originally posted by Josh Martin : Hey guys, I know that it is possible to edit the footage from this camera in final cut pro because you've all said it is possible. Could you possibly elaborate on how it is actually done, and if it is a huge pain in the butt or not. Thanks,
Josh M. -->>>

I tried loading up that JVC editing software but got no further than seeing the wild serial number fail. I say wild, because it has upper and lower-case letters and "O," which is a b-tch because it's so easily confused with zero...ARGH!

And, to top it off, my Tibook's harddrive died. Now I am dealing with a friend who has been waiting patiently for her video. She's growing angry....So, I haven't cut anything yet.

heath

[Steve Mullen]

By the time more folks have bought HD10s and HD1 there will likely be a solution for those who own FCP 3 or FCP 4.

Experiemts and coding are underway. Until Apple directly supports MPEG-2 TS editing in FCP 4 -- the solution will involve multiple steps. And, of course, an HD MPEG-2 TS encoder.

Stay tuned.

[Yang Wen]

If you read the current edition of Videography, there's a parapraph saying some company is currently working on a plugin for Premier to make it accept JVC's MPEG2 format, but prolly still with the MPEG2's frame inaccuracies.

[Raymond Krystof]

Yang, I think the product your referring to is Aspect HD by Cineform (www.cineform.com). They’re also mentioned on the JVC site thus apparently working in conjunction with JVC. I don’t know anything more, including anything about frame accuracy. The product is pretty pricey so I hope it is full featured. Steve Mullan do you have any more information on this product?

In the mean time has any one had more experience with the editing software bundled with the cameras? So far the only things I’ve read are that it can’t be loaded or it locks up all the time. I would like to know if I could do some simple editing when I get the camera, hopefully next week.

[Paul Mogg]

Yes you can do simple editing using that software. The first problem you have to get over is entering the seriial # correctly though, it is very weird in what it thinks are the letter "l" and a number "1" etc. etc. I nearly gave up and then ....whammo it worked! I found that on a fast PC I could add titles, trim clips, do transitions, but certain actions seem to crash it, so you have to avoid those when you find them. It's very weird software though, I've no idea what the "temporal composer" or whatever they call that window, is for, even after quickly reading the "help" which is in JapanEnglish by the way. I think whoever designed it must have been on a major mind warp. it took me 3 hours to import and line up a few simple clips that would have taken 3 minutes (literally) in FCP. I look at it more as a puzzle than as software.
It's really unfinished IMHO.

[Raymond Krystof]

Thanks Paul,

Right now I’m only interested compare raw footage to down converted footage burned to a DVD. I’m anxious to view this on my CRT projector. Should be interesting.

[David Newman]

<<<-- Originally posted by Raymond Krystof : Yang, I think the product your referring to is Aspect HD by Cineform (www.cineform.com). They’re also mentioned on the JVC site thus apparently working in conjunction with JVC. I don’t know anything more, including anything about frame accuracy. The product is pretty pricey so I hope it is full featured. Steve Mullan do you have any more information on this product? -->>>

I can answer your questions. Yes CineForm's Aspect HD product is frame accurate editing of your 720p footage. It enables all the features of Adobe Premiere to be applied to the JVC footage, most of this features are performed in real-time (full 30 fps -- not a stuttering preview like other editing solutions.) On a 3GHz 800Mhz FSB PC, I have achieved 5 real-time streams without a single frame drop. Not all that pricey considering what it does. :) (Yes, I work there.)

[Raymond Krystof]

David,

Thanks for the reply. Your comment that Aspect HD enables all the features of Adobe Premiere is, all-inclusive. However, I have a question. The Cineform web site states that the compressed bandwidth allows two real-time HD streams simultaneous on a 7200-rpm drive. “Using RAID 0 configuration, up to four simultaneous HD streams plus transition, effects, and motion, are possible, using a fast Pentium 4 based PC!” You’ve also just stated that you’d achieved 5 real-time streams without a single frame drop. My question is, can that RAID 0 setup be external using “Firewire”? That is to say, does “Firewire” have the required bandwidth? As far as my comment about Aspect HD being pretty pricey, I’m an amateur hobbyist, most of the people on this forum are professionals, everything is relative. It certainly doesn’t mean I’m not interested.

[David Newman]

The number of streams is both disk and CPU dependent. The system that achieved 5 streams was running a Serial ATA RAID (the first I have ever used.) Firewire drive can't match this speed, and they wouldn't be a good solution (until 1394b.) These serial hard disks sustained a good through-put. The performance also depends a little on the video content as the CineForm approach does not use the Transport Streams directly. Transport stream are too inefficient to edit in real-time (check out the white paper on the CineForm web site.) There is patent-pending technology behind this engine, and it doesn't use Premier's built-in RT features (CineForm replaces the Premiere playback engine.) Basically an excellent editing experience is what we are targetting.

[Raymond Krystof]

Okay. Still sounds good. I’m running a 3GHz platform with a second independent 7200 RPM drive. If I can run 2 streams, that’s probably good enough for now. It’s good to know if my needs grow, I can compensate by adding horsepower.

Next question, what about the interface with Adobe Encore?

[David Newman]

I haven't use Encore yet, however we do use the Adobe MPEG encoder (Main Concepts) to produce DVD content from the 720p source. The results are amazing. I wish JVC would stop promoting the 480p mode for DVD work because that is just silly (you would have to throw away every other frame if you want a progressive DVD, and if you wanted an interlaced DVD why shoot progressive?) We find that shooting in 720p for DVD output has huge advantages. The effective oversampling allows you to zoom into your footage without loss of image quality. The flexibility of this takes a while to sink in. We do some of this on our demo DVD to show off our real-time Pan-Zoom-Rotate plugin. Basically real-time StageTools using HighDef video sources. Oversampling also greatly cleans up any source MPEG noise. As a hobbiest myself and can't imagine doing anything in SD now.

[Paul Mogg]

David, can you elaborate on the statement "Oversampling also greatly cleans up any source MPEG noise" Are you saying that some of the choma noise we are seeing in solid color areas such as skies shot on the JVC HD1OU can be cleaned up using your tools? If so, this would be very interesting.

Thanks

[David Newman]

<<<-- Originally posted by Paul Mogg : David, can you elaborate on the statement "Oversampling also greatly cleans up any source MPEG noise" Are you saying that some of the choma noise we are seeing in solid color areas such as skies shot on the JVC HD1OU can be cleaned up using your tools? If so, this would be very interesting.

Thanks -->>>

That isn't quite what I'm saying, although we have looked into adding real-time chroma noise filters to our product (if there is enough interest we will do it.) The oversampling was refering to Raymond's question reguard Encore (DVD authoring.) The oversampling is inherent for DVD production from 720p footage. Basically there are more pixels in the 1280x720 source than needed to produce an anamorphic 16:9 DVD 720x480 pixels. This 2.7:1 pixel difference effectivily means each DVD pixel is oversampled. This will inherently reduce noise when using a decent scaler. Of course if you outputing HD rather than SD, this oversampling doesn't apply. As the CineForm product outputs to either HD and SD, we figure we can great enhance SD production by using this oversampling for PZR operations and hopeful other resolution based filters (anything where source resolution is greater than target resolution can be greatly enhanced.)

[Paul Mogg]

Thank you for your reply. Does the cineform product allow re-compression to MPEG2-TS? and if so, from what working formats?

Thanks