Paul Mogg - Editing question

[Heath McKnight]

Paul,

How do you edit with the HD10 on Apple Final Cut Pro 3 and 4? Do you use 4HDV (Steve Mullen's plug-in) or something different?

Thanks,

heath

[Heath McKnight]

Paul, no advice?

heath

[Paul Mogg]

Oops sorry, I missed this one Heath. I've really done very little editing of this cameras footage, full stop. But when it first came out I experimented a bit with using different shareware utilities on the Mac, which I posted about here. I had no problem demuxing, converting to uncompressed HD video, making proxy clones of the HD footage in DV format, editing that, colour correcting, then simply pointing my edited project to the uncompressed HD footage and rendering the project out in HD uncompressed. I only tried short series of clips but it worked just fine, though it's very time consuming. This is also basically what Steve Mullen is doing I believe, though he's skipping the uncompressed stage, which takes tons of hard drive space. I've also done a bit of converting the HD to SD, and I really like the results, though it looks a bit soft to me, as though a promist filter had been applied, but there was still lots of the HD detail visible at SD.
My hopes are with Pixlet for a better editing pipeline on the Mac, but we'll know about that next week I guess.

If anyone's tried Steve Mullen's plugin for the shareware ffmpegx MPEG2 encoder I'd be interested to know how good the results are, as this still seems like the best (low budget) bet for getting your footage back to MPEG2, if that's what you want to do.


All the best

[Heath McKnight]

Thanks, Paul. Do you think Panther will also have the stuff that we downloaded this past summer, the SDK 16 and 17?

heath

[Paul Mogg]

It would seem very strange to me if they decided to eliminate those useful capture tools, but it also seems strange that they let us have those MPEG2TS tools in the first place, showing clearly that they're working on support for it (which is essentially HDV), and yet haven't announced any other support for the format. They're pretty good with maintaining their secrecy really, but it's frustrating for Mac users, not knowing when to expect support. But I guess by doing that they don't have to feel pressured to ship something which is unfinished or not up to a good standard, which many other software developers do.

[Heath McKnight]

I'm hunting around for word that Apple will support it, but they sure are sneaky!

heath

[Frederic Lumiere]

Paul,

Could you tell us which shareware you used to import the HDV footage and to convert it to DV? On the MAC.

Thanks,

Frederic

[Paul Mogg]

For import from the camera I use Apple's DVHSCap utility, and for capture from D-VHS (from my JVC 30K deck) I use Apple's VirtualDVHS utility (setting the input channel # to 63). For demuxing there are several shareware utilities available, I think I last used something called MM2C, I'm not at home right now but I'll check. Once demuxed, conversion to other formats (including uncompressed HD) can be done through Quicktime Pro or several other shareware MPeg to MOV utilities. I would imagine you could also use Compressor but I haven't tried yet.

Cheers

Paul

[Heath McKnight]

<<<-- Originally posted by Paul Mogg : For import from the camera I use Apple's DVHSCap utility, and for capture from D-VHS (from my JVC 30K deck) I use Apple's VirtualDVHS utility (setting the input channel # to 63). -->>>

The DVHSCap and VirtualDVHS utilities were found in the SDK16 and 17, right? Wonder if they'll be on Panther...

heath

[Frederic Lumiere]

for these utilities right? I like 75% of MAC users can't wait until Friday to get Panther but just for my info, these utilities you speak of don't work on OS X 10.1.5 right?

[Paul Mogg]

I think they might actually, I'm on 10.2.3 I think. You have to download the SDK 16 or 17 from the Apple site and read the docs, they work really well, no driver problems like on the PC.