SDI out...
 

If you recorded something in HDV onto the camera's tape and then wanted to play it back through the SDI output so you could load it into an HD Adreniline, what would happen--ie., can you play back the HDV tape and get something out of the SDI?

Hi Bill,

If I'm reading it right, your question is will the H1 playback HDV through SDI when in VCR mode. Too many acronyms. I believe it will, don't see why not, but I'll try to confirm this in a couple of days at PhotoPlus Expo in NYC.

Of course, since HDV is lossy, even if recorded HDV can be put out the SDI port, you're going to get HDV quality rather than the full quality of HD-SDI passed directly from the camera head. I suppose there might be practical reasons to put the HDV out by SDI rather than Firewire, but quality-wise I'd guess there's probably no advantage?

The reason would be an NLE that has only SDI in.

Correct. Then you'd get an uncompressed, very large HDV quality file, with the benefit of having every little nuance, colorshift, and blocky edges perfectly preserved.

If you have not already captured this media, then I'd rent a camera that had higher quality for the shoot.

Pete

The one good thing about capturing this way is that, without talking about hard drive space here, uncompressed HD is much easier to edit on current edit systems compared to mpeg2 compressed HDV. Also for heavy effects work with multiple passes of rendering uncompressed would be better than native HDV not to mention render much faster.

There are even products coming out now to do exactly this. Convert firewire HDV into HD SDI. If you can get by the massive hard drive space issues uncompressed HD is much easier to edit.

Not to mention you don't have to capture it uncompressed, you could simply capture it in something that is easier to edit... DVCPRO HD, HDCAM, one of the Lumiere or Cineform lossless intermediaries... It opens up a lot of choices for you, without having to capture the native HDV and then wait while it rerenders into another format...

Listen, shoot in a 4:2:2 format if you want the real benefit of uncompressed. How are you going to archive that material? Back out to HDV? Yuck.

If you have a mac, then it's a native edit with hdv, For the PC, get cineform and capture to an already easy to edit format on the fly that is still smaller than uncompressed.

... of course, you could consider working with proxy files.

Adrenaline has IEEE in but with HDV you need to use an external card ... I guess if you have an HD board then Adrenaline should be able to cross-convert on the fly from the IEEE port to DnxHD. Do you know if this is the case Thomas? I don't have the HD board option.