I'm still using MT2 files and converting

[David Knaggs]

Originally Posted by Paolo Ciccone

I bought a 500GB Western Digital SATA drive for $160.00 including taxes.

It's very similar over here. I can get the exact same drive at a nearby store for $132 (US$123).

That's why I was (and still am!) interested in the size ratio of .m2t to SheerVideo Quicktime. I'm editing a feature (alongside some corporate jobs) and am now considering trialling SheerVideo for the feature footage (and am wondering what size hard drive I should pick up). Even a year ago something the size of SheerVideo would have been "out of the question" storage-wise for a large job like a feature. (And two years ago I wouldn't have considered ProResHQ, even if it had existed back then.) But not today.

Originally Posted by Paolo Ciccone

Sheer can be used for acquisition, editing and, giving away the free reader, for delivery.

So I take it that this would mean I'd simply take my hard drive with the SheerVideo Quicktime to a post house and, so long as I provided them with the "free reader", they can lay it off to HDCAM tape?

Originally Posted by Paolo Ciccone

It's definitely much faster than Uncompressed and more than twice the speed of HDV when rendering. Testing was done with the HD100 footage inside FCP 5.x

That's very good to know, Paolo. Thanks.

[Paolo Ciccone]

Originally Posted by David Knaggs

So I take it that this would mean I'd simply take my hard drive with the SheerVideo Quicktime to a post house and, so long as I provided them with the "free reader", they can lay it off to HDCAM tape?

Yes, as long as they are willing to install a QT plugin. Once installed any QT-compatible application will be able to access the clips. The reader is available for both Mac OS and Windows and it's free so you could copy it to a thumbdrive and carry with you all the time.

[David Scattergood]

I recently went to buy an additional hard disk, I didn't shop online, I just took my car and went top the local electronic store here in small Santa Cruz, CA. I bought a 500GB Western Digital SATA drive for $160.00 including taxes. This is approximately a cost of 33 cents per gigabyte.
Now, I know that a lot of us, including myself, used to get those FW disks.

Looking at around £64 (incl Vat here). That's very cheap. I've recently purchased a GTech Graid 500Gb but now wondering whether I should've gone that route. I'm a little confused over how you would hook these up to your mac however (I'm on an iMac)? Do the enclosures have FW connections or are you connecting some other way - and if USB2, is this fast enough?
At these prices I can how experimenting with the aforementioned codecs make real sense.

[David Knaggs]

Hi Paolo.

I'm running a test tomorrow with a High Definition projector. I'm trying to determine the best codec to use for digital cinema projection of JVC ProHD footage (720p24) and I'm starting to suspect that SheerVideo could turn out to be the perfect codec for digital cinema with ProHD.

I've just downloaded the trial of SheerVideo (I'll get to my question about SheerVideo shortly but first I'll give a bit of context) and made a couple of test clips. They played back perfectly in the Quicktime player. Surprisingly easy and smooth (for such large files). I also made a clip in JPEG2000 (the codec of choice for the Digital Cinema Initiative [DCI]) and it had a very stuttering, jerky playback in the Quicktime player. And this was on a six-week old iMac (2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 4 GB of RAM). So I'm now testing purely with SheerVideo for Digital Cinema.

My question concerns verifying the best settings to convert the .m2t file into a SheerVideo Quicktime with zero loss or alteration and you are definitely our "resident expert" for best results with this codec and JVC footage.

When I go to do the Quicktime conversion of the .m2t file with HDVxDV I get about eight different codec choices for SheerVideo, and then each one contains several different options internally for fine tuning. So far (and under the time crunch of getting the clips ready for the forthcoming test) it seems to me that plain, old "Sheer" might be the best of the eight and, under the Compression settings select "Best Depth" (or should it be "Millions of Colors+"?) and under Options select:
Algorithm: Self-check
Coding: Automatic
Pixel Format Conversion: Perfect
Video Color Standard: HD (I'm not sure where HD 1035 would apply)
RGB input Range: Automatic

Will these settings give me the best results for ProHD footage? Or am I way off?

I guess the result that I'm seeking is getting the same pristine results as I saw over a year ago when some of my .m2t files were projected at a JVC event with their player and projector. I truly was stunned and amazed at how good it looked. And I guess the challenge is to replicate that all the way through post, including a trip out to Color and a couple of clips to Shake and Motion, and then to the final projection.

We're also testing a purpose-built computer box to hook up to the projector (currently with Windows but later it will run on Linux - I'm fortunate to have a computer/IT whiz helping me with that aspect as I'm pretty hopeless with such matters) and we'll download the free Windows SheerVideo reader for that. And I believe SheerVideo are working on a Linux reader as well. (It can't come soon enough!)

I really appreciate any tips on this, Paolo. Because, if this test works, I think I'll "bite the bullet" and go back to the original .m2t files of this feature-length movie and transcode to SheerVideo and insert each clip one-by-one to match the existing timeline. (I've been dreading this but, if it results in a better viewing experience for the audience, I'll have to take a week off and just grind through it full-time. But that's why I want to make sure I'm using the right settings in the first place. I wouldn't want to do this twice!)

So thanks, Paolo!

(Note to moderators: Feel free to move this if you think there's a more appropriate forum. It contains ProHD, Digital Cinema, Mac, Windows and Linux. I just took a guess on ProHD.)