FCP5: native HDV?

[Steve Connor]

You seem to be very confident in your comments on a product that hasn't even been released yet. Do you have experience of the performance of FCP 5? if not it's probably good not to make comments about it until it ships.

BTW when it does ship, I'll have the option of converting my native m2v's to 10 bit uncompressed HD for finishing in one step, without an intermediate codec, that's got to be good for professional users hasn't it? I could also go to DVC Pro HD as well if I wished, lots of options. I know cineform will give you more RT in the timeline, but it's still transcoded and for me I would rather avoid transcoding until finishing, even with a codec as good as Cineform.

We are currently editing our HDV footage on Prem Pro 1.51, but I expect to switch to our Mac system when FCP 5 arrives, providing the HDV implementation works OK.

[Kevin Shaw]

Steve: after thinking about this more last night it occurred to me that the FCP5 HDV solution may not be so bad after all, so I'd agree we should give it more time to be reviewed before comparing it to anything else. Regarding the uncompressed option, that's not very practical for most people but is a potentially useful possibility.

It's good to see Apple finally releasing direct support for HDV in Final Cut Pro. I'd still like to see them improve AIC to offer an alternative to native HDV editing, but maybe they'll prove me wrong that this is something they need to do.

[Steve Connor]

I agree, it would be nice to have an option of AIC, it's a shame because it's nearly there. I guess we'll see if it's improved when it ships.

I will be interested to see how conversion to DVC Pro HD looks, if it could do it on the fly during capture that would be even better.

4-6 weeks and we'll know the answers,

[Christopher C. Murphy]

Hi all,

I'm just getting home from 5 days in Vegas (recovering!), so I'm adding my 2 cents. I spoke with the Apple guy at NAB and he said the "dynamic" RT allows the native HDV files to be previewed at lower rez whenever needed. It will automatically jump up in rez if you have the processing power...he said that 2 gigs on a G5 dual 2.0 was enough to do just about anything with native HDV. Although, experience tells us that layers and layers of effects drops performance. But, the thing is...if it's using "dynamic" RT...we at least don't have to screw around with it. It will change on the fly and we an edit straight through.

Also, I saw the FCP 5 interface first hand and the "multi-cam" feature is great. It allows you to basically "switch" cameras in real time..just like you were in a studio. It's awesome. If you have 1 camera and decide to shoot multiple angles of a certain scene (event) you can easily switch clips with this feature. It's just really fun to sit there and switch cameras while seeing the footage play.

I was pressed for time, but overall I'd say that FCP 5 and ANY of the new HDV or similar products are excellent. The Panny and JVC looked awesome and you just can't go wrong with these new breeds of cameras and software to edit. It's probably the most significant NAB ever for independent producers. The vibe was definately there for $10,000 or under cameras, software and hardware. I was very impressed.

The only thing that wasn't exactly impressive that should have been was the Panny 3D HD presentation. It didn't really blow me away like it was meant to do. It was kinda boring actually...only 1 or 2 things looked really 3D to me. They could have gone without the huge 3D HD presentation and probably made the same impact. It was a theater in the NAB...literally a huge theater and you wore 3D glasses.

Ok, this was a little off topic. But, oh well...

[Steve Connor]

Just to add to this discussion

We have just finished the offline a short drama shot on the FX1 and edited in HDV/AIC in Final Cut Express HD. It's very frustrating not getting HD output from our Blackmagic Card, but it's a limitation of FCE.

When I tried opening the FCE project in FCP HD it was quite happy to open it but gave me a warning about optimized codecs. I then changed the easy setup to "Blackmagic 1080 50 DVCPRO HD" expecting to render everything, to my surprise it plays the whole thing in realtime, I can even add colour correction in RT as well. So I now get to view my edit for the first time on our HD CRT monitor and I must say the quality looks great. There are some artifacts from the Apple Intermediate Codec, but on the whole it is superb.

So in theory FCP 5 should be even better when using the native codec, if it can transcode on the fly to DVC Pro HD like thisl, that will be an extra bonus and may alleviate some of the problems with native HDV editing.

[David Kennett]

I guess I'm in a little different world than most of you guys. I've been told I open my mouth when I shouldn't - but I will anyway.

My first editing of HD10 material was with the JVC (KDDI) software. This is all native format. It is very obvious that the only frames that are re-compressed ar those with changes in them (effects, titles, etc.). Rendering is very fast (just copying frames) until modified frames appear. Because of this, no additional degradation of the signal will occur unless modifications are made. So if you go back to color correct a scene in a previously edited master, the only frames affected at all are the frames that are color corrected. It seems to me that the advantages of native format editing in HDV are the same as DV. The difference is scrubbing and previewing become more difficult because of MPEG.

I recently upgraded to 3GHz P4 and to Ulead MSP with HDV plug-in - still native format. Scrubbing is not the ultra-snappy I get with DV, but it's not a dog either. I just did a test with full-res preview of a complex effect between two clips, with color correction on second clip, and a title bridging the effect into both clips. It was perfectly smooth, with no rendering. I find the experience with the JVC 720p editing very workable. Maybe the 1080i is tougher?

Just an aside! I just tried re-rendering an animation (in Cool3d) that I made sometime back. Rendered to 720p AVI, then brought it into HDV project. Cool!

[Kevin Shaw]

"I find the experience with the JVC 720p editing very workable. Maybe the 1080i is tougher?"

Most definitely. 720p is 1280x720 = 921,600 pixels per frame while 1080i is 1920x1080 = 2,0736,00 pixels, so there's essentially twice as much data involved in editing 1080i. (Unless you're talking about 720p at 60 frames per second, but that's not what the JVC records.)

[Heath McKnight]

FYI, the FX1 and Z1 is 1440x1080i and I believe 1.1 million pixels, like the JVC. For more, visit this page:

http://www.hdvinfo.net/articles/sonyhdrfx1/compare.php

heath

[David Newman]

Heath & Kevin,

The data is somewhere between the two numbers you offer. Although the FX1/Z1 only has 1.1M pixels for CCD, these are offset to generate slightly higher resolution data. These cameras meet HD2 spec of 1440x1080, and therefore have 1555200 pixels per frame in the compressed image. JVC has 921600 as Zevin suggests. There are 68% more pixels in the Z1 image, making it harder to edit.

Note: The number of pixels doesn't mean the HD2 spec has a 68% better image as we a comparing an interlace image to a progressive one. It teams of resolved spatial detail they are very similar.

[Heath McKnight]

David definitely is in the know.

heath

[Kevin Shaw]

Thanks David. I knew about the Z1 numbers but not the JVC, so I figured I'd just reference the format definitions. By the way, when using Cineform to edit HDV footage and output to an HDTV display using the latest video cards, where and how are the calculations done to convert 1440 x 1080 pixels to 1920 x 1080 pixels? If any of that hits against the processor, wouldn't that also increase the performance requirements for 1080i editing?

[David Newman]

Kevin,

Note a subject for this thread, but the quick answer is no CPU impact, GPU does all the work to scale 1440 to 1920 (whether you are on the Mac or PC.) So this is no system performance hit or requirements change. For CineForm particular questions please post in the CineForm forum.

[Jack Zhang]

I have an important question.

Does FCP5 include HDV capture and export or do you have to use LumiéreHD?

[Bryan McCullough]

Originally Posted by Jack Zhang

Does FCP5 include HDV capture and export or do you have to use LumiéreHD?

It will support it.

[Jack Zhang]

Which? LumiéreHD or FCP5?

P.S: What I meant by export was to print to tape in native HDV in FCP5