Petition to Panasonic to include hard drive option and 1080p24 uncompressed output

[Dave Ferdinand]

Who cares if it has 1080p24 uncompressed output, if the costs for the media storage are going to be enormous?

My first short was 22min long and I first output the entire film to uncompressed AVI, totalling 37GB. That's around 1.7GB per minute.

I had nearly 6 hours of footage, so 1.7*360 = 612GB!!!

And that's only for a 22min short shot in SD... God knows how many Terabytes you're going to need for a feature length film shot in HD...

[Chris Hurd]

I had nearly 6 hours of footage, so 1.7*360 = 612GB!

Honestly, I don't understand the attraction of uncompressed video. Compression schemes are excellent these days, so what exactly is the point of uncompressed? I don't get it. That said, it's worth pointing out that Dell sells a 500GB Hitachi Deskstar 7K500 hard drive for a few hundred bucks. The question is, what is your video worth? It's a value proposition. Besides, why not archive to HD tape. Rent an HD deck by the day every so often, no big deal.

[Dave Ferdinand]

Mind you, the 6 hours of captured raw footage were in DV format, not uncompressed. The 612GB were just a estimate to how much it would be uncompressed.

I was using uncompressed data to avoid recompression before sending them to DVD.

The process was: GL2 capture DV compressed AVI raw footage -> uncompressed AVI edited/corrected footage -> MPEG2 to DVD

As to the Dell HDD, I'm sure there's plenty of those around, but how do you record it directly from the HVX? If you're going to have a PC around during shooting, that might bring a lot of issues.

I also agree that tape storage is still the best at the moment, untill technology permits something better. What kind of HD tape are you referring to by the way? Any format like HDV, HDCAM, etc?

[Chris Hurd]

Originally Posted by Dave Ferdinand

As to the Dell HDD, I'm sure there's plenty of those around, but how do you record it directly from the HVX?

Well, as for myself, I wouldn't lug around half a terrabyte of storage if I were shooting with the HVX. I'd record in DVCPRO HD to either a much smaller portable FW hard drive or to the P2 cards. I mentioned the Hitachi Deskstar as one option for archival purposes.

Originally Posted by Dave Ferdinand

What kind of HD tape are you referring to by the way? Any format like HDV, HDCAM, etc?

Since this is a Panasonic forum, I suppose I'm referring to a DVCPRO HD deck. Where I live, it's a quick drive to an Austin or San Antonio facility that has one. I'd pay a daily rate and spend a few hours archiving my projects to tape every sixty days or so as needed.

[Emre Safak]

Dave: Do you know about frameserving? You can encode to MPEG-2 without an intermediate...

[Charles Papert]

A feature I shot on HDCAM is currently being cut in full resolution on Premiere Pro--they have something like 10 terabytes tied up, and that was selects only. I think transferring all of the raw footage would have required 5-8 more terabytes.

Part of the scheme was to avoid the cost of having to lease the HD deck--a few days at the beginning to digitize, then again for the final output, and everything else would be done within the system. However, the digitizing turned out to be a complete nightmare, with timecode breaks and Premiere glitches and took weeks...!

I hadn't ever run the numbers on HD decks, so I looked at Rule Broadcast's rate sheet (clickable link)...miss those guys from my Boston days!...and I was surprised to see the price discrepancy between the Sony HDCAM and the Panasonic DVCPROHD decks, nearly twice as much!

[Laurence Maher]

Well, here's something you guys should remember. Panasonic is heavily in bed with Apple and Final Cut Pro HD. Now my g5 isn't perfect, but it's close enough for the price I paid (probably 10k with around a terrabyte of storage and 2 HD Cinema displays). My guess says that when it sucks in the uncompressed footage taken from this HVX, it's gonna work. If I clear off everything else in the computer, do a fresh software install before editing and all that, and dedicate my editing system solely to this one project, I theorize it will perform fine. (Famous last words, hee-hee) Now . . .

If I'm making a movie, I'm making a MOVIE. Sure, I've also dabbled with the whole dv "semi-feature" like everyone else, but reality is that one of the main ingredients distributors want is production quality (Ya, ya, I know, story too.). Save for the few lottery winners like Open Water and Blair Witch, if you want theatrical distribution, you need to think production value. Where am I going with this?

I'm used to shooting seriously on 16mm film. How much more of a pain in the butt could the HVX and additional hookups be than shooting a movie on film? Ever shoot a micro-budget indie on film? HARD WORK my friends. So, making the transition to uncompressed HD, we don't give up the hard work, we just give up the extra baggage like spending ungodly amounts of money on film, having it developed, having it transfered, (spending on a one-time useable tool) having it dig a big hole in our eye sockets and suck the life right out of us.

The difference with going uncompressed HD is not a lack of hard work (which will be needed), it is the overall price difference you save in reusable tools, and overall quality difference that sets you apart from the dv "semi-features". These are great advantages. If you don't like a take, dump it right then on set. (I'm assuming you can). Re-shoot on the same space and now you've got what you want. You're can see exactly what you're getting so there's no questions or wasted money. No waiting for the film to come back from the lab to find out your precious shot had a damn hair in the gate. And going the extra mile to get uncompressed out, which will result in a MASSIVE big screen quality difference is well worth it. I heard a guy say in filmmaking, you don't have time to do it right, but you have time to do it again. So do it once and do it right, lugging a few things around like you would on any professional HD set anyway (like the sure to come HD version of DV Rack), including the extra firestore drives or what not. And treat it like you're shooting film. Your space is precious, so go only with the best takes. Doing this should allow:

A: enough storage space, and ...

B: Plenty-o quality shots that you can proudly show on a BIG SCREEN.

The market is only going to get harder as technology gets better, for more and more people will jump in the hollywood shuffle. The only way to the top is to be better than the rest. In Hollywood, there's no room for second place. If you can, shoot like the big boys, shoot uncompressed.

You'll have to be tricky with your budget like any other real movie.

It will be a pain. It will be worth it. And in the end, the one thing you'll have left over after that you didn't have with film, is a complete production system capable of shooting another high-quality film, instead of just one expensive 16mm movie. . .

. . . or a really lame hdv flick that tears apart when blown-up . . .

. . . Now the DVCProHD codec may be another story, but compare it to the uncompressed version (blown up on a big screen) before making that decision. Again, I think it will be worh the difference, even there.

Just IMHO.

[Barry Green]

Just keep in mind that if you really want to shoot uncompressed, you're going to need some sort of external analog HD capture system, which means either an HDCAM SR deck, or some configuration of an array of hard disks that can capture and sustain 166 megabytes per second of data transfer.

The P2 card stores data in DVCPRO-HD compression. Uncompressed is available from the analog outputs. But it is by no means a trivial task to capture/record uncompressed HD...

[Radek Svoboda]

Secret is to have computer compress image prior to putting on hard drive with near lossless compression. If you had PC, with dual Opteron processors, could encode real time with 6:1 compression with high performance 10 bit Prospect HD. HDCAM SR is compressed with MPEG4 about 2:1; is virtually lossless.

You need HDSDI converter, HDSDI card in your computer.

Radek

[Thomas Smet]

On HDV cameras uncompressed can make a huge difference in quality.

On the Panasonic I'm not so sure there would be that huge of a change.

1. DVCPro Hd is already 4:2:2 as is uncompressed output so you do not gain any chroma.

2. Analog isn't as clear as a direct digital recording from the camera image block. You will add softness and sometimes noise.

3. DVCpro HD 1080 is limited to 1280x1080. For all we know this might be what the chip size is in the HVX. If that is the case going analog out wouldn't gain any extra resolution of detail but maybe loose some in the digital to analog to digital conversion process.

4. In 720p mode we don't know anything about the chip block yet but based on the 960x720 aspect ratio any uncompressed output may also be limited to that same resolution.

So you may only reduce the compression artifacts by going with uncompressed. Now if we could get a nice uncompressed RGB image off of the camera that would be a different story. It is hard to say just how good the uncompressed signal will be before we know what the chip block will be like. If the 720p uncompressed output is still limited to 960x720 because of the shape of the image block then the JVC HDV camera would give you better uncompressed output since we know it's uncompressed is a full 1280x720.

[Thomas Smet]

Or you could capture to the bitjazz lossless codec. You may be able to get around a 2:1 compression ratio. Maybe even better for well lit blue screen work.

[Radek Svoboda]

Originally Posted by Thomas Smet

On HDV cameras uncompressed can make a huge difference in quality.

On the Panasonic I'm not so sure there would be that huge of a change.

1. DVCPro Hd is already 4:2:2 as is uncompressed output so you do not gain any chroma.

2. Analog isn't as clear as a direct digital recording from the camera image block. You will add softness and sometimes noise.

DVCPRO HD is compressed about 7:1 and is 8 bit. HDSDI is 10 bit, w/o compression; on Varicam you get full 1280x720 pixels through HDSDI compared to 960x720 on tape.

Overall improvement with uncompressed on 720p24 HD100 HDV and 720p24 HVX200 DVCPROHD should be similar, providing CCD chips, ADCs are similar.

Radek

[Kevin Dooley]

Originally Posted by Radek Svoboda

DVCPRO HD is compressed about 7:1 and is 8 bit. HDSDI is 10 bit, w/o compression; on Varicam you get full 1280x720 pixels through HDSDI compared to 960x720 on tape.

Yeah, but you aren't getting an SDI out. You're getting analog component outs. Which means the footage goes from Analog to Digi back to Analog... and that can't be great...

As for the chips... most people seem to think that the chips will probably be 1280x1080, or possibly 1280x720 w/ pixel shift used to get 1080... either way, the uncompressed out should be 1280x720 when in 720 mode... at least that's the hope...

[Thomas Smet]

Radek,

That may be true for the Varicam since it has chips that are 1280x720 but what if the HVX only has chips where in the 720p mode only sample 960x720 anamorphic pixels? If the HVX does use a 1280x720 area of the block for 720p then that would be great for uncompressed. That doesn't really help with 1080 though. I highly doubt the block will be any bigger than 1280x1080. The area where I get messed up with when trying to figure out what kind of block the HVX will have is the fact that 960x720 is a 1.333 ratio of 1280x720 and 1280x1080 is a 1.5 ratio of 1920x1080. This makes it very hard for the block to be anamorphic. The interesting thing about that though is 720 is a 1.5 ratio of 1080. That means the block could be 1280x720 and when you scale or pixel shift by 1.5 in both directions you get 1920x1080. Using pixel shift on the 720 would make interlacing very interesting. 1080p would be fine but how well would 1080i look with the vertical pixels interpolated? Unless they use pixel shift on all 60 frame samples from the block to give 1080 60p and then interlace those together into 30i. That is one powerfull block if it can sample 1080 60p.

I do agree about the 10bit option however. Even though we are dealing with analog to 10bit, SDI might still be better than 8bit. Well at least if there is a high quality analog to 10bit SDI converter. Also that will only help if we actually do get 10bits from the DSP out to analog. 7:1 compression to uncompressed can also make a big difference. People complain about DV's 5:1 let alone 7:1.

[Radek Svoboda]

CCDs must be made in quantity to make cost down. I would not surprised if same chips that are on JVC HD100 be used on this camera.

If ADC is 14 bit, signal should be more than enough clean get 10 bit HDSDI.

Radek