Call To Editors! HDTV Footage Available

[Sasha Froyland]

Hello,

I have a 22 meg, 5 second .avi file that was produced from Cineform’s Aspect HD software and I was wondering if I could get a few of you to try and edit it on your non-linear editors?

I’m trying to determine which editors can edit these kinds of files. I already know Adobe Premier Pro 1.5 can edit the file.

Thanks for your help.

Sasha

http://sashafroyland.home.comcast.net/

[David Newman]

Sasha,

Only other CineForm customers can currently edit these CineForm clips (it played fine here.) Clips from Aspect HD are compatible with Connect HD and Prospect HD. To use the CFHD clips on other systems requires the decoder components to be installed. In the future we intend to make the decoder components freely available, to allow for more clip sharing (including cross platform support.) If you want other non-CineForm systems in your workplace to decode, email me and I will tell you what components need to be installed.

[Sasha Froyland]

Thanks David,

Hey, is there an automated way I can convert these clips to mpeg-2 or back to native .m2t.

My goal here is to make some of my footage available to others and I'm looking for a format that will not degrade quality but increase the number of non-linear editors that can edit the footage.

Any help here would be greatly appreciated.

Sasha

[David Newman]

MPEG2 or M2T are not good choices for downstream editing work (because of quality issues, plus many editors don't support MPEG.) It is best to output to MPEG formats only once (when you are making the final distribution.) But you have struck the very issue that makes HD so tricky, the only high quality sharing formats are very large (uncompressed). For a good intermediate formats for HD it is CineForm HD and Avid DNxHD (plus maybe the Canopus codec.) Neither CineForm or Avid have completed their plans to make these format wide spread (working on it.)

You might try HUFFYUV, but that only halves the space over uncompressed HD. HUFFYUV is free and has good compatibility (it is very slow however -- always a trade-off.)

I cause I believe CineForm is the best for this application, but today you have a limited number of potential editors (note: this a about to change in a large way.)

[Sasha Froyland]

Thanks David,

I was looking for an alternative format to distribute footage but maybe it's current form is best. It's large file size will require some further thought as to how best to distribute the footage, high quality and editing speed are paramount. At a file size of somewhere from 3-5 megs per second, DVD is not a viable medium for distribution of raw HDTV footage. Maybe distribution of stock footage could be achieved at a low cost point by using IDE hard-drives as the distribution medium. It would save file copying time and 120 gig drive is going for less then $75.00 these days. However, I am unaware as to if Macintosh computers can read IDE as I was under the assumption Macs use SCSI. Thoughts?

Cheers,

Sasha

[Dylan Pank]

Sasha - modern macs (g3 and up) all use standard IDE/ATA for hard drives.

[Sasha Froyland]

Thanks Dylan.

With a MAC can an IDE drive be read if the drive is formatted FAT32 or NTFS?

Sasha

[Dylan Pank]

As far as I know - Macs can read FAT32 but not NTFS, but I've not tested either.

[Sasha Froyland]

Dylan - I was also starting to look at external hard drives via firewire as a medium to share large amounts of HDTV footage betwen PC & MAC. I think that MAC & PC both use Firewire and if the external drive was formatted FAT32 then I think that would work.

Agree?

Have you tried to share files between PC and MAC?

[Dylan Pank]

Sasha, I've frequently shared files between Mac and PC - I did a lot of work with a a designer who only used PCs, and I only had Mac OSX - and we never had problems trading files back and forth as long as we had the right software to open them.

Your Fire Wire Hard Disc plan should work.

In terms of video it's childs play, as long as you have the codecs installed, and they're usually cross platform (wmv9 may be an exception).

We never shared hard drives, portable or otherwise, but at times we did manage to take stuff right of each others' hard drives over the LAN (this was XP to OSX)

Other than that DVD-R might be a possibility. There are dual layer DVD writers and DVD-R media available now, and in theory you'd be able to put around 40 minutes (>8GB) of HDV footage on a dual layer disc. Even single layer discs would hold about 20 minutes.

I've had no substantial problems playing and editing all of Kaku's m2t's on my Mac, I'll run them on to a DVD-RW tomorrow and try messing around with it on the Windows2K edit suites at work tomorrow.

[Joshua Starnes]

<<<-- Originally posted by Sasha Froyland : Dylan - I was also starting to look at external hard drives via firewire as a medium to share large amounts of HDTV footage betwen PC & MAC. I think that MAC & PC both use Firewire and if the external drive was formatted FAT32 then I think that would work.

Agree?

Have you tried to share files between PC and MAC? -->>>

It is possible to share some files between PC and Mac, but not all of them. For this, among other reasons, it's not a good idea to share harddrives. However, it is possible to network a PC and Mac together with programs like Dave, which let them talk to each other, and pass large files across the network (all Mac G4s and higher are built with GigE, so you can pass files pretty quickly with a good network setup). It is a bit more timeconsuming than swapping external hardrives, but ultimately less trouble.

[Dylan Pank]

Joshua, I think we're not talking about "sharing" hard drives, in terms of two computers using them simultaneously, but rather trading them - using them as a storage medium, and I think FAT32 is something they can both read. However FAT32 has the 2GB file size limit I believe - that's about 10 minutes of footage.

With OSX 10.2 or higher, and windows XP, programs like DAVE are unnecessary. They have all the networking capabilities built in.

[Sasha Froyland]

Joshua - I think I stay under the 2 gig limit.

Dylan - I leaning towards External Hard Drive - Firewire/USB 2.0

The numbers:

Duel Burner = 18 gigs burner cheep under $100.
Media about $10 each! Much more then single sided 4.7

4.7 = $1.0 x 4 = $4.00 for 4 single sided dvds.
Not yet cost advantage for double-sided burners and still slow transfer rates.



Firewire/USB External Hard Drive - 250 megs - top of the line.
Ebay: $180 - latest chip sets - Maxtor. Should work on the majority of machines.

Can you do me a favor and try and download sample video I have and see if your editor will import it?

One video I have available - 5 seconds - 22 megs.
http://sashafroyland.home.comcast.net/

I am hearing that it might not be editable by most editors but I like to check with multiple sources.

Cheers,

Sasha

[Dylan Pank]

Sasha - I cannot open the cineform avi as on Mac, as I don't have the cineform codec - neither Quicktime nor VLC will do anything with it.

Therefore the best thing would be to see if you can extract the original m2t or .ts stream - maybe the cineform software doesn't allow you to do this. In fact, not all PC users would be able to open such a file - only those with the cineform codec/software, which is why we all prefer the native mpg transprt streams - there are a number of freeware/shareware options which allow you to open, play and transcode the original TS clips.

I've found Streamclip is good to demux them and then transcode into DV and AIFF, and the the demuxed M2V files can be opened directly in FCP (though they gum up FCP pretty thoroughly - it's impossible to actually EDIT with demuxed m2v files)

Thaks for putting up the files though - it was worth the try. I'll give your clip and some others a go tomorrow on the PCs using the new DVD2AVI and Vdub.

[Sasha Froyland]

Hey Dylan,

Thanks for trying.

The Cineform software, when you first extract the data off the camera does come into m2t or .ts files but then I converted them to AVI for working in Premier Pro and deleted the original m2t files. The only way to get them back is to re-import from tape and that is a HUGE time consumption as each cut has to basically be extracted manually - Premier's Batch Capture doesn't operate with JVC's HD10U camera - total pain!

So, in order to share my footage, it sounds like I must convert the .avi files back to native m2t format. I worry that all this demux will reduce quality.

Appears from what you are saying is that I'll need a series of freeware/shareware products in order to accomplish this task. I will check out Streamclip and ask Cineform if they have any suggestions.

Cheerrs,

Sasha