Live Capture through HDMI
 

OK, i have a little dilema.

before i purchase the HV20 im doing alot of research on cameras i would need and this seems to be the best.

so anyway, I'll be shooting in 1080p24 (as i understand the HV20 cant shoot 720p24, so thats out of the question)

now i have a field capture station as i call it, PC built into a DJ flightcase with a LCd ripped from a laptop

specs if needed;

-Pentium D 2.8Ghz Dual Core
-4GB 667Mhz DDR2 ram
-Main Hard Drive. 80GB 3.5" 7200rpm
4 external SATA II Hard drives (im thinking to connect these 3 through the eSATA connection to a PCI eSATA, set them as dynamic disks and arrange them in a RAID-0 config. for capture
-windows xp pro

(audio will be captured on a different laptop using a rhode mic connected to a laptop via XLR using an audio interface to sound forge, so i dont need any audio solutions with this)

what i want to do is capture 1080p footage as best quality as i can onto the "PC", i have adode premiere, and sony vegas (final cut in the studio)

i dont want to capture uncompressed because i dont have the resources (as in hard drive space) but i want as close as i possibly can. ive read around and there's alot of talk of Cineform codecs, DNxHD, ProRes422 etc.

what's the best solution in your opinion for me to use?

ill be capturing though HDMI to the blackmagic card.

thanks

ive a 35mm adapter, lights etc if that adds to the equation

Cineform HD or NEO if you're on a budget. Very close to looking uncompressed and you can extract your 24p on the fly which will save you a lot of time.

Some codec examples I shot with the HV20:
http://www.hv20.dreamhosters.com/

User: canon
PW: hv20
*password is case sensitive

thanks.

what about DNxHD or ProRes422?

do they encode on the fly aswell? and is it possible to use the codecs with a different program to capture, like Vegas?

David,

You can capture with the HDMI port to Uncompressed Blackmagic, Mjpeg Blackmagic, or Cineform.

From there you will need to transcode in After Effects to get to DNxHD, or ProRes. It's a pretty straightforward process, it just takes some time.

Chris

also you can use a free utility to transcode to DNxHD or ProRes, if you have the codecs installed on your computer, it's called MPEGstreamclip.

You can pick it up here.

http://www.squared5.com/

Don't know if there is a quality difference, but it's free.

Chris

thanks ill check that out

uncompressed and MJPEG blackmagic

are there reccomended requirements for that? and how much space does it take for 1080p, im interested in the uncompressed due to the quality, but its a big load on the system isnt it?

ive checked out the comparisons between uncompressed and MJPEG, doesnt seem to me much visible change so i guess that would be good enough

A couple of post that might help you out.

Here is a good post on MJPEG vs CineForm HD
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showpost....56&postcount=1

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthrea...MJPEG+CineForm

The free MJPEG has visible artifacts, so do some testing.

Currently CineForm are the only ones that offer real-time 3-2 pulldown extraction, with better quality per bit than all the other offerings. Also as Chris pointed out, other formats require you to capture 60i first, the convert the footage to 24p through additional tools to render (not real-time) to a new sequence. Lots of time and disk space.

looks like thats the way im gonna go

but what CineForm codec is he talking about?

Either NEO HD ($599) or NEO HDV ($249) work well with Intensity and the HV20. NEO HD gets you 1920x1080 with 10-bit processing, NEO HDV a resampled 1440x1080 with 8-bit processing. Both can be tested before you make a purchasing decision.

Note : with a slight fast PC, you can removal pulldown and resample to 720p24 in real-time if you need. In noticed your 720p24 request.

great

appreciate the help

Cineform is a great option for capture with the Intensity. If you plan on editing with Premiere then Prospect HD is the way to go, but if you just want to capture and remove frame in practically realtime, then NeoHD is good enough. Sounds like you want to take this footage to Avid or FCP so Neo would probablly work for you and it's cheaper.

Check out www.cineform.com for more info on Neo.


As for data rates Uncompressed from the camera makes huge files, if you can capture it without dropping frames. I have a 1 min 30 sec uncompressed clip that is 11 gig. You can do the math on that. With Cineform the same clip is about 500 Mb, also about the same for the Mjpeg.

David is right, Cineform is a better compression technology than Mjpeg. I guess it all comes down to your budget.


Chris

Im going to be using Sony Vegas for editing, then exporting the scenes for colour grading in Apple Color which the guy who colour grades uses.

also the titles are made in After Effects, so the format needs to work with that.

PS, Mr. Newman

do you have a student discount available?

Is this what the SI-2K uses?

By the way David, why downrezing to 720p? For storage reasons?

David,

We have discounts for schools, but not for individual student sales -- we are already price aggressively for independent film makers. CineForm works very well with Sony Vegas, but not with Apple Color which is currently exclusive to a few Apple codec (greatly limiting the usefulness of Color.) We have voiced our complaint to Apple.