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Old June 19th, 2004, 12:02 AM   #1
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Best Mac codecs for HD10u editing?

Any suggestions regarding the best format to edit the HD10u footage in on Macs? Graeme Nattress has previously reccomended PhotoJPEG. I want to use mild color correction and mild enhancement filters, including chroma noise filtering when needed. Any reason to decompress completely to uncompressed Hi Def 1280x720P?
Thanks
Frank
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Old June 19th, 2004, 07:44 AM   #2
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Frank,

Could you describe your setup. (CPU, RAM, Displays, HD Monitors, etc.).
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Old June 19th, 2004, 09:21 AM   #3
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My setup:
1. PowerMac G5 Dual 2 GHz, 2.5 GB RAM, Final Cut Pro HD/LumiereHD, ATI Radeon 9600 Pro Mac G5 edition graphics card (one ADC out for a 19" Mac flat panel {1280x1024} and one DVI out for the Epson). 23 foot DVI cable. DVI/HDMI adaptor. 6 foot HDMI cable. Optional Geffen 4 channel DVI switcher. Epson Powerlite Cinema 500 front projection DLP (highly recommended for home theater use and editing; native 1280x720 60 fps).

The following was taken from the LumiereHD website www.lumierehd.com Final Cut Pro HD discussion forum. Thanks to Paul Mogg. This looks fine to me. Now I have to get a 1-2TByte external array. I'll use single slower, cheaper, larger Firewire/PATA drives for backup.



Paul Mogg
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My Lumiere/FCP workflow
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hi folks,
I just wanted to outline quickly my current Lumiere/FCP editing workflow for HDV.
Lumiere allows you to be quite flexible in how you edit, especially in how you offline edit, and after trying quite a few alternatives I've found that this method produces the very highest quality output (if that is your priority), and works well for me on a G5 dual 2ghz with a 1 Tb SATA software RAID.

I won't go into the details of how to operate Lumiere as that is covered in it's documentation but in a nutshell my steps are as follows.

1. Capture my footage clips using the capture utility in Lumiere to my hard drive.

2. Demux the captured transport stream files to program stream using Lumiere's demux facility. (I make a separate folder for each format of files)

3. Convert the program stream files to DVCPRO HD 720p format using Lumiere's timeline format conversion utility.

4. Edit my piece in FCP HD in the DVCPRO HD format. I use a 23" cinema display, and a standard VGA CRT right now as my two monitors. While editing normally I use the VGA monitor as my HD monitor (to maximize my timeline screen real-estate on the cinema display). But when I'm colour correcting, sharpening, or adding any other filters that involve the final visual look, I switch monitors (using the Apple/12 key combination) to use the Cinema display as my HD monitor. I've found that CRT monitors vary too wildly in their color rendition to be used for this, and are also too soft. I have my Cinema display set to 1280*800 resolution during this phase.

5. When I'm completely finished I then use Media Manager to create an offline version of my current timeline sequence, with the new sequence being set to be 10 bit uncompressed, 1280*720 format with square pixels.

6. In FCP I then recconnect my offline media files to my source .m2v (program stream) files, and render out the timeline in 10 bit uncompressed format, then output my master file in that uncompressed format. You will need a lot of hard drive space for this depending on the size of your project.

7. I then compress my master file back to the Transport stream format using Lumiere's compressor, and back up my master uncompressed file to data DVD's or a spare hard drive depending on the size.

That's it!

Note: The reason I'm now using Uncompressed 10 bit as my final online format is that I've recently discovered that I get vastly superior results if I want to saturate, color correct, or add multiple filters to the footage, (as I normally do). This seems to greatly reduce the induced Chroma noise and Compression artifacts caused by multi-layered compositing or editing in ANY kind of compressed formats (including DVCPRO HD), and gives me the very best results. I understand that this method may not suite everybody's hardware setup.

I hope this is of some help.

__________________________________________________

Now for RAID suggestions?
1. See Barefeats.com for tests regarding SATA (internal) vs SCSI arrays and disk drive speeds. The Hiachi 7k400s or 7k250s look fine.

2. I need to decide re: internal vs. external U320 vs. external Fibre Channel. HUGE arrays have great throughput specs but I'd rather aviod SCSI drives due to costs. Two uncompessed HD streams (1280x720P, 30 fps) would be nice, though.

3. Noise is a concern as it will be in a recording studio. I will need longer cables to put an external array in sound isolation. 10 foot to 30 foot.

4. Any other suggested workflows?
Thanks
Frank
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Old June 19th, 2004, 05:13 PM   #4
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Frank,

Paul's workflow is exacctly what Iwas going to suggest. I would add a 20" Cinema Display to your arsenal for monitoring your 720pp real-time from the timeline.

If you are going to stay with the offline DVCPRO HD/online HDV workflow, the SATA drives are fine.

If you decide to edit online using HDLink Pro for instance then I would go the Fiber Channel route.
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