Editing for HDTV

[Peter Solmssen]

After considering various alternatives -- Hard Drive players, Streaming DVD players, I have found my solution to editing HD1 footage for HDTV.

I bought the new dual core Apple Mini computer and used the HDTV as the monitor. HD1 clips are easily imported and edited in iMovie. For the more professional, there is Final Cut Pro. The edited final is exported as HD Quicktime, stored and played back from the computer, which is very small.

This solution is not inexpensive; the dual core minis start at US$ 799, and at some point additional storage will be required. But I am really thrilled with the quality of the result, the ease of the process and how quickly it can be accomplished. Rendering takes about 3 or 4 times the running length of the video, as opposed to 32 times when rendering to WMV9 in Vegas on the PC, and then not knowing what to do with the product. There are also fringe benefits in having all the features of a computer, including internet access, presented on a crystal clear 60 inch screen.

This is a big step for someone who has resisted Apple computers for a very long time!

[John Alibrandi]

Peter,
How does the HD-1 video look on your 60" HDTV?

[Chris Wells]

Hi John,

Just a pleasant reminder to always search first.

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthrea...234#post446234

[Peter Solmssen]

To elaborate, the video not only looks fabulous on the HDTV, having it so readily available on the Mac Mini is a treat as well.

The render processing is sufficiently rapid that I am willing to go back, fix some little thing and render again (at least with shorter videos). With the interminable render times on Vegas, I would have just let it go.

[Chris Wells]

Peter,

If you are looking for good storage options for your Mac, allow me to suggest the XiMeta Netdisk. It's a cheap drive enclosure that acts like a fileserver.

The beauty of this drive is that you can connect it either by USB2 or LAN. I dropped mine onto a port on the router and have access to it from any machine that is behind my firewall. My enclosure contains a 250GB drive but I've read that they'll take more. You can also purchase an additional enclosure and RAID or mirror them, giving you twice the space or redundancy, whichever you feel is of greater importance.

With this option, both your Mac and PC can share the drive. You'll have access from either system, plenty of space, and sufficient performance.

Here's a link to the manufacturer's product information page:
http://www.ximeta.com/products/netwo...disk/index.php

and the brochure:
http://www.ximeta.com/files/netdisk_p.pdf

I should also mention that the performance of this drive is much faster than traditional fileservers offer (when accessed by a single system), which is why I think it will be a good option for video editing. Additionally, you can make the most of your hardware by using your Mac to store your primary video and this drive to receive your edits. The performance will be much greater than if you use either drive exclusively.

[Graham Jones]

That sounds great Peter.

Macs are brilliant.

[Maury McEvoy]

Originally Posted by Chris Wells

Peter,

If you are looking for good storage options for your Mac, allow me to suggest the XiMeta Netdisk. It's a cheap drive enclosure that acts like a fileserver.

Hi Chris,

Thanks for the heads-up on XiMeta.

The fastest network speed that I could find on ZiMeta's products was 100 Mbps fast ethernet. That is much too slow for high def video.

I would be very interested in their products at 1000 Mbps gigabit ethernet speeds.

[Chris Wells]

Originally Posted by Maury McEvoy

Hi Chris,

Thanks for the heads-up on XiMeta.

The fastest network speed that I could find on ZiMeta's products was 100 Mbps fast ethernet. That is much too slow for high def video.

I would be very interested in their products at 1000 Mbps gigabit ethernet speeds.

Hi Maury,

The sustained throughput I get on mine is 8MB/sec, or 64 Mbits/sec. I'm transferring 1GB in 2 mins 3 seconds while connected at 100BT Full Duplex. That's seven times the stream rate of our video and very close to the maximum sustained transfer rate of the drive I put in the XiMeta case.

I hope it's fast enough... my laptop's new internal drive is slower. ;)

Chris

[Chris Wells]

Did a little research... industry standard requirements for transfer rates are:
HDV 720 30p ......... 19.2 Mbps
DV50.................... 50.0 Mbps
DV25.................... 25.0 Mbps

Formats beyond these require faster drives, so if we expect realtime upconverting to the external drive in alternate formats, the XiMeta external isn't appropriate. The drive is also too slow for realtime 8 or 10 bit in 4:2:2 colorspace.

If we are transcoding to CFHD (CineForm codec on Vegas), we need 2 raided XiMeta drives connected to a gigabit router to achieve throughput sufficient for realtime encoding at the published rate of nearly 100Mbps... of course, we'll need a gigabit connection from the computer to the router as well. Now with all this throughput, the computer's ability to process at this speed comes into question. So does our need of realtime encoding. My cheap, single XiMeta drive shouldn't bottleneck until we reach about 64% realtime. I can be pretty happy with that.

Resources:

www.adobe.com
www.hdv-info.org
www.cineform.com
www.hdtvexpert.com

To my knowledge, we have yet to see anyone performing realtime upconversions with HD1 video. We should see some testing to determine the conversion bottleneck. I'm of the opinion it's the lack of a dedicated drive. Constant seeking from read/write operations to the same device will slow any single IDE or SATA system to a crawl. So will Windows. My Linux bootdisc allows my Centrino 1.4 to play native HD1 video at between 62% and 70% load... the same video skips on Windows and pegs my processor at 100%. Anyone know of good conversion software for Linux? ;)

[Peter Solmssen]

I finally got around to editing an actual (non-test) video with the Mac Mini, and was VERY pleasantly surprised. The HD1 clips, shot in the SHQ setting, totalled about a half an hour. I neglected to time the upload from the chip to the Mac, but I think that it was less than an hour.

iMovie seems to make duplicates of the clips, rather than shortcuts, so that took a little while too, but it didn't seem long (I'll time it with the next video).

What really amazed me was that the render from the 22 minute timeline to Quicktime HD 720P was also less than an hour! Rendering DV to MPEG2 in Vegas would have taken longer, let alone HD. I wasn't entirely happy with some of my editing decisions, and as mentioned before, with a render time of an hour, I'm perfectly willing to go back and do it over.

The file was made using a codec called Integer (Little Endian) Apple Intermediate, and appears indistinguishable from the original. The file size is 6.3 GB; perhaps I will explore conversion to H.264 to save space.

It certainly is a new experience to work with a computer monitor that looks great and is five feet across (my HDTV).

[Maury McEvoy]

Hi Chris,

I emailed ZiMeta and asked about gigabit ethernet. Their response follows:

"Thanks for your inquiry; however the current Netdisk does not take
advantage of a Gigabit Network. Ximeta is planning on release the Gigabit
Netdisk in about 2 month's time, please stay tuned to our website for more
details when available."

I am glad to hear that!

[Chris Wells]

Good to hear Maury, perhaps those new enclosures will do the trick. What I was suggesting was link aggrigation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_aggregation. Not much point to in now though; they appear to have a better solution in the works.

Thanks for letting us know Gb connections are on the way!

[Dan Euritt]

i'm trying really hard to understand what this thread is about.

you are advocating spending $800 just to transcode footage into some weird format? why not get a hardware card to plug into your pc?

have you explored the nvidia hardware acceleration for encoding?

ultimately, re-encoding footage is the wrong approach anyway... you want a solution that will allow you to edit the footage in it's native format.

[Peter Solmssen]

Dan: I'm not sure whether your question was directed to me, having started the thread, or to others who have joined in and expanded the discussion.

For me, the initial question was what to do with edited HD1 videos, since I could edit from the original in Vegas. The presentation devices that I found (e.g. TViX, Kiss DP-600) seemed complicated, cost quite a bit, and were currently unavailable.

The Intel-based Mac Mini seemed worth a try, and worked out really well. Editing on it was an unexpected benefit, not only because it was so fast, but also because I was seeing the clips on the same HDTV where the video would ultimately be played.

I am delighted with the results. I would only explore converting to another format if the quality was not noticeably degraded, and if the converted format took up significantly less storage space.

Now I am eagerly awaiting a version of Photoshop that will run natively on the Intel based Mini!

[Dan Euritt]

Originally Posted by Peter Solmssen

Rendering takes about 3 or 4 times the running length of the video, as opposed to 32 times when rendering to WMV9 in Vegas on the PC, and then not knowing what to do with the product

my point is that re-encoding all of the footage before it can be edited is not good for picture quality... if you had spent $800 and didn't have to re-render everything, i guess that it would be an option.

you need a solution where you can drop the native mpeg4 footage from the sanyo onto a timeline, and edit it directly.