disadvantages of fx1

[Andrew J Hall]

Hi Mike, well those images impress me. Are they deinterlaced. They look a lot sharper than I achieve shooting less action (for example table-tennis) - but that is not surprising since I have much to learn with using the camera. How did you do it.

Andrew

[Mike Tiffee]

125 shutter speed- and yes, I believe I deinterlaced the stills in photoshop.

[Steven Gotz]

Alex,

Let's go back to what you said about GOP errors. I don't get any. Ever.

So, let's take a look for the root cause. If HDLink gives you problems when capturing, and CapDVHS gives you problems (it must or you would not be correcting GOP errors, right?) then it isn't the software package. Have you tried directly into a HDV project in Premiere Pro 1.5.1 ?

It is probably either your PC firewire card, hard drive, memory, or worse yet, your camera. Can you find a different PC to capture to?

What do you mean by "then I fix GOP errors with Womble's tool"? What are you seeing? This bothers me since it doesn't happen to me (knock on wood) and I am a big Cineform fan.

[Marc Faletti]

Yeah, I have to say that in my 30+ hours of footage with the FX1, I've had one dropout and no "GOP errors," whatever those might be.

I've found the color does have a little trouble keeping up with heavy manipulation, but nobody I've worked with seems to notice in the end product; it's just me in the editing room that sees the diff. And usually when it's noticeable to me it's because I f***ed up the lighting somehow and am trying to make something out of nothing. Light decently well and this won't be a problem. :)

PPro 1.5.1 has worked very well for me, but I'm running 2gig RAM and a 500GB RAID 0. You ask me, the extra $1K to build a box like that is totally worth it.

[Alex Raskin]

GOP errors: I'm out of my depth here. It seems like Womble's GOP Fixer tool finds "timecode GOP errors", whatever they might be.

I highly doubt that my hardware (PC/camera) is actually faulty. I do think that somewhere there's not enough processing power. I also think that Aspect HD should precisely enable "normal" PCs to process HDV. See my PC's specs below - they meet Aspect HD's requirements. Yet something is not working right - see below.

CapDVHS also seems to work just fine.

Workflow that, umm, works: Capture m2t from FX1 to PC via firewire with CapDVHS. Once captured, fix GOP errors with the Womble tool (I *think* that if I omit this step, Aspect HD conversion of the long segments may or may not stop prematurely.) Once fixed, convert that m2t to Aspect HD, Medium quality, Progressive. (Note that my taped footage is Cineframe 30, which is simply a high-quality in-cam deinterlacer so the output is de-facto 30p.)

Workflow that does not work: Capture in PPro 1.5.1's cap utility. Problem: digital drop-outs randomly occur.

Workflow that does not work: HDLink's standalone capture. Problem: digital drop-outs randomly occur, whether I choose to keep m2t or not.

My PC is Win XP Pro, P4 3.0 Ghz HT w/512K on-board cache, Memory Kingston 512Mbx4=2Gb timing 2-3-3-8, dual channel DDR-SDRAM PC3500 in "performance mode" set in BIOS, on mobo Asus P4C800-E Deluxe with on-board firewire, 400 FSB. The PC is *not* overclocked. Capture in all cases happens onto a HUGE SYSTEMS Raid 3@2K, via SCSI PCI 32 card. Actual (conservatively measured) sustained bandwidth is 65Mbs read, 55Mbs write.

[Steven Gotz]

You say that CapDVHS works fine, but then you say you have to correct errors. Which is it?

And I see where you say "whether I choose to keep m2t or not", but have you tried just capturing the M2T with no conversion?

By the way, your PC is about the same as mine and I have no problems.

[Alex Raskin]

Steven, CapDVHS is fine in terms of it actually captures m2t's without any visible problems. Womble still finds and fixes errors in m2t's. Check your m2t's and see whether Womble finds GOP errors in them - it'd be interesting to see whether that error report is even relevant.

[Steven Gotz]

I downloaded and installed Womble. Interesting program, by the way.

I captured a M2T with HDLink - just a little over 10 seconds.

When I run the MPEG Video GOP fixer, I use the test option of Scan GOP time code, video and audio PTS and GOP size errors (Read-ONLY)

But I do not understand the response. I looked in the help, but there are no examples.

Here is what I get - but what is the [20] ?

http://www.stevengotz.com/support/womble.jpg

[Alex Raskin]

In my version of Womble, it clearly shows GOP TIME CODE as [1]

...and then it shows errors [1] = 2356 (for example), and fixes them.

So it's FOP Time Code errors, in my case.

No other errors are ever found.

I do not know what [20] refers to on your photo snap, sorry.

[Kyle Edwards]

Originally Posted by Mike Tiffee

http://www.miketiffee.com/hdv/sugarbowl1.jpg
http://www.miketiffee.com/hdv/sugarbowl2.jpg
http://www.miketiffee.com/hdv/sugarbowl3.jpg
http://www.miketiffee.com/hdv/sugarbowl4.jpg

http://www.uploadhouse.com/images/406601443sugar_0.jpeg
http://www.uploadhouse.com/images/939282290sugar_1.jpeg
http://www.uploadhouse.com/images/544597664sugar_2.jpeg
http://www.uploadhouse.com/images/872279471sugar_3.jpeg

I couldn't pass up getting rid of that blue haze that the FX1 gives.

[Steven Gotz]

Alex,

I highly suggest you find a way to test your camera on a known good PC.

[Alex Raskin]

Installed HDLink on an ancient PC with AMD 1.8Ghz, 512 Mb memory.

Captured about 2 min. of footage using HDLink with on-the-fly conversion into aspect HD codec while keeping m2t file.

Guess what, no drop-outs whatsoever (sure it took 3x real time for the AHD conversion, which was expected with the slow processor.)

So maybe there *was* something in my "fast" PC that screwed the whole thing up. I'm now capturing/transcoding 1 full tape of HDV footage using HDLink on the ancient PC (see above) to see if glitch-free operation was just a coincidence or what. Will let you know later.

[Steven Gotz]

I often get shouted down on this one, but the problem could be with the RAID. I do not know why, but many people have trouble capturing to a RAID.

[Alex Raskin]

My old PC is capturing on the RAID 0 - 3ware Escalade card sits in the PCI 32 slot and feeds 4 WD HDDs.

My new (bad?) PC has SCSI card in PCI 32 slot that feeds Huge Systems' Raid3 formatted with 2K sectors.

So both are capturing to the RAIDs, just different ones.

[Steven Gotz]

If I were you I would throw a cheap IDE drive into the system and capture to it. Just to see what happens.