Printing To Tape Problems

[Sharon Pieczenik]

Hi,

I shot a half hour piece on my JVC-GYHD110U and had many post problems with it since it embedded those breaks into my tape. However, I bought a harddrive disk recorder and ran the footage from my camera into the disk recorder and into Final Cut. I edited my piece as HDV 720p 30fps that I shot it in. For some reason the print to tape (which I did not do) was all stair stepping issues and digital looking and toothy in the background.

So - I compressed the whole video as ProRes 422 (oh, I am needing to print to DVCam) and it looks a lot less digitally but there is still a lot of toothy weirdness in the background forest when people move around. Any suggestions? Or is this another problem of the native footage from the camera or the fact I had to run it through such a process to get full tapes ingested into final cut? FYI - please no comments about the whole process I did...trust me, I tried everything under the sun before that.

Please Help!
Sharon

[Christopher Drews]

Please make sure your playback settings are set to realtime.

My thoughts are to create a QuickTime (Export>QuickTime>Current Settings) and save it to a speedy drive. Create a new FCP project and import that QuickTime.

Drop QuickTime onto New Sequence and Answer "Yes" to the make the settings the same.

Then try the same print to tape command. If at all possible, use Edit To Tape - this of course requires a DVCAM deck with a native capture card like Kona or Decklink.

Hope this helps,
-C

[Craig Parkes]

Sounds like either
A) Aliasing

or

B) A field order issue

Field order issue sounds unlikely as started with Progressive footage I imagine. Aliasing is generally caused by a badly done downscale.

To be honest - without seeing a still or some footage, or in fact being able to see it on a broadcast monitor, figuring out what exactly went wrong is going to be impossible.

Even then it sounds like the whole thing has had a pretty poor workflow implementation happen with a lot of work arounds, so even if the issue is found tracking it back to were it first occurred could be a bit of a hassle.

[Sharon Pieczenik]

These are great answers.

However, I compressed to ProRes422 and put it on a new timeline and printed to tape - looks good in the computer monitor while printing to tape, but horrible in the print to tape monitor. I put the tape into another deck and watched it and it was very very blocky and digitally.

The first time this was printed to tape it did go through a Kona card.

Do you think this could be an issue with going from HDV to DVCam standard definition?
If it was aliasing problems wouldn't that show in the computer monitor or no?

Thanks,
Sharon

[Robert Lane]

Sharon,

You're missing a big step here: You *first* have to down-convert your footage to DVCAM (or DV25) before doing a print-to-tape.

A KONA card can do the downscaling for you during export but if you're not using a KONA now then you only have 2 options:

1. You'd need to send the footage to an HDV deck that can down-convert on output (some Sony decks can do this just as all the HDV cameras can do an in-camera downconversion) or;

2. You have to use Compressor to create your HD to DV downsampling first, then drop that footage into a DV25 timeline, render it fully THEN print to tape.

[Rick L. Allen]

Originally Posted by Sharon Pieczenik

I shot a half hour piece on my JVC-GYHD110U and had many post problems with it since it embedded those breaks into my tape. However, I bought a harddrive disk recorder and ran the footage from my camera into the disk recorder and into Final Cut. I edited my piece as HDV 720p 30fps that I shot it in. For some reason the print to tape (which I did not do) was all stair stepping issues and digital looking and toothy in the background.

Your work flow is your problem - sorry;
1. If you had time code breaks on your tape (caused by taking the tape in and out of the machine, old tape, dirty heads or not setting the record mode to regenerate) then you will have to re-import by manually recording each set of clips. Clean your video heads first.

2. Your Main Problem. Recording to a hard drive recorder (disc recorder) as an intermediate step saves your footage in a heavily compressed mpeg format that no matter what you do will look bad on export and does not scale up well either. As long as your footage comes from the disc drive compressed version it will look like cocka when you up ress it back to HD regardless of your time line settings.

[Sharon Pieczenik]

Hi Robert and Rick,

You are both right. Sadly, the timecode breaks in the tape have nothing to do with dirty tapes or heads or stopping and starting tape. They are straight from JVC building a crap camera that embedded problems into the tape. You can look this up on other forums. I promise you that I am not making this up. I have been living this nightmare due to this camera for a long time now. Anyway...enough on that.

So I did try exporting the HDV timeline with its current settings and then dropping it into an NTSC standard definition timeline and rendering. Is this not good enough for downconverting? Do I need to take it into compressor to do this properly? Doing through the timeline drop did not make it look very good.

Robert, I will definitely be buying the Brian Gary book you recommend on other forums. I live in Montana so it takes a little bit of time to get to me.

Thanks for your continued help!
Sharon

[Rick L. Allen]

Originally Posted by Sharon Pieczenik

So I did try exporting the HDV timeline with its current settings and then dropping it into an NTSC standard definition timeline and rendering. Is this not good enough for downconverting? Do I need to take it into compressor to do this properly? Doing through the timeline drop did not make it look very good.

To reiterate; you need to import your footage DIRECTLY from the camera to the NLE. Make sure your camera is set to output HDV and your NLE is set up for HDV OR set up your camera to playback DV and your NLE to record DV. Do Not use the disc recorder between your camera & NLE. After the edit you can export to the format of your choice.

Also, take a class at your local community college.

[Steve Oakley]

with the JVC 110, the TC breaks are most likely .... operator error or FCP. sorry. they fixed the problems a long time ago.

that said, FCP has HUGE bugs in HDV 720P capture where it generates NON EXISTANT TC breaks. you can take the same tape and load it into prem pro without issue. so don't blame the camera, its FCP's problem.

if you use the HDV->ProREs capture mode, you'll find the TC break problem magically goes away. who knows what they did to make this mode work. but it does.

after that, its very hard to say where your problems are coming from without seeing anything.

[Sharon Pieczenik]

Originally Posted by Rick L. Allen

To reiterate; you need to import your footage DIRECTLY from the camera to the NLE. Make sure your camera is set to output HDV and your NLE is set up for HDV OR set up your camera to playback DV and your NLE to record DV. Do Not use the disc recorder between your camera & NLE. After the edit you can export to the format of your choice.

Also, take a class at your local community college.

I don't know if you mean to, but your comments come off as amazingly snide. Why help if you are going to be rude? Actually, it would be amazing if that worked. But if you had read my posting carefully I said that I tried everything, like the obvious of capturing from a deck or camera. I'm not going to go into the timecode drop out problems with you ... but there were major issues that resulted from JVC and Final Cut issues. They worked it out, supposedly, these past few years - but when I shot my material the issues were embedded into the tape. Anyway, I have spent too much time on this issue and I know a lot about it. And, amazingly, I have a graduate degree in what I do...which doesn't mean much but if you were being rude with the community college comment - I just wanted you to know.

Either help and watch your tone or just don't help at all. When people are needed help it is stressful enough. They don't need an ass comment to make things worth.

[Sharon Pieczenik]

Originally Posted by Steve Oakley

with the JVC 110, the TC breaks are most likely .... operator error or FCP. sorry. they fixed the problems a long time ago.

that said, FCP has HUGE bugs in HDV 720P capture where it generates NON EXISTANT TC breaks. you can take the same tape and load it into prem pro without issue. so don't blame the camera, its FCP's problem.

if you use the HDV->ProREs capture mode, you'll find the TC break problem magically goes away. who knows what they did to make this mode work. but it does.

after that, its very hard to say where your problems are coming from without seeing anything.

I was using Premiere Pro due to the JVC-FInal Cut issue that the camera had. It had its limitations as well. Perhaps this is just one cursed project.

I wish the timecode problems were operator error...that would have been much easier to swallow. I took the camera to JVC to get updated to fix the issue and supposedly (according to my friend who used my camera last week) it is fixed. But my old tapes have these embedded timecode issues and I am editing in final cut due to Prem Pro issues. JVC should never had put out this camera and it took a very long time for JVC and Final Cut to admit to the problems. On the forum, I have heard a JVC 200 person having this problem. I guess that is why at NAB JVC showed a totally new gut system. They know they have issues and they should take back their lemon cameras or compensate people like me who got screwed on our projects.