HD251E + Black Magic Multibridge & Adobe Pro 2
 

Hello all, ok we are totally sold on the HD251E and now need to know if our proposed plan of ingest into our NLE is the correct way. We plan to capture via HD Sdi out on the camera playing back off the HD100 Hard drive. The Adobe preset we intend to use is HD720 60p. Is this correct?

Thanks Heather

by the time your source material gets written to the HD100 hard drive, it's already been compressed by the camera's codec into an m2t file. anything that's gone out over the firewire port has already been compressed into 4:2:0.
In order to capture 4:2:2, 14 bit, you need to capture directly from the camera sensor and out the HD-SDI connection. Playback of the m2t file back thru the camera coder and out the HD-SDI connector has already seen a loss in conversion twice.

as Bill said, capture of tape via HD SDI will net you nothing in most cases. Just capture via FW and you'll save a decompression step. all that said... with upper end sony DVcam decks, they do some chroma smoothing to make for what some people feel is a better picture. Thats SD however. If your plan was to capture to uncompressed, thats a lot of HD space. There are times when it might be useful, like when pushing color correction. From experiance, I can tell you that you really need to be on the money when you shoot. While small corrections to change color temp of the image and basic contrast adjustments are ok, you need to avoid major under/over exposure. uncompressed may net you something here in 10 bit, but thats a very specific case.

you could capture the HD SDI live signal and skip tape - that should yield you the uncompressed 10bit camera signal. I'd only be doing that for chromakey work. again, big space requirements.

finally the last thing you want to do is take in the HD SDI signal and save it as DVCpro100 - its a un-needed compression hit, and a loss of resolution - 960 pixels vs the native 1280 from the camera or tape in the first place

Steve Oakley

Hello and thanks ever so much for your help. I'd like to pass on so trouble I had with the Sony ZI. When I captured via Firewire Premiere was sluggish and almost impossible to use. So I recaptured using component uncompressed HD 8bit and all worked well and there was an improvement in picture quality. Could you please tell me what preset do I use in Prem Pro to capture native Pro HD.

Thanks Heather

JVC has a file you can get from their website that will install presets for PP to capture with JVC gear. as for an improvement in picture quality, where are you making that judgement ? if you are talking about on the computer screen, there you shouldn't be. I'd suspect that there is a problem with your FW capture setup because PP has edited HDV fine for me... but if course thats the way it always works, everywhere but on your setup :/

what CPU are you using ? how much ram ? what capture & project setup are you using ? that would help in figuring out what PP isn't working quite right.

Steve Oakley

Heather,

I'm sort of scratching my head here... you had sluggish performance editing HDV yet no issues with uncompressed 8 bit. This sort of does not add up, unless you simply had a problem either with the system spec not being ideal.

I also have the Multibridge and have looked at uncompressed 8bit from component (too soft), HDV via 1394 (as good as it gets if the camera (or) drive encodes the images first), and SDI straight from camera via Multibridge as uncompressed 8 bit. The later being the only real winner in image quality, naturally.

Whoever sold you on the idea that going SDI at any point after you have gone to tape (or DTE drive) that has already been MPEG encoded was leading you down the wrong path/solution. Although technically you can do this, as mentioned you lose more than you gain. It sounds more like you should figure out why your 1394 / HDV is not working as it should. An older system will easily have this problem and can sometimes be compensated by using Cineform Aspect HD. For reference we work with the Premiere Pro 2, 24P from the HD100, and Cineform without a hitch.

Question: are you looking at a workflow for studio work or more run and gun shooting?

With the new HD251 and it's SDI & a Multibridge, you have a great combo for studio work, very clean in fact. Run and gun however is still the same old HDV workflow.

Thanks for your input. Could someone please send back the link to JVC where they have the PPRO presets to download. Once I have these presets how do they marry up with BM Multibridge Extreme?

Thanks again, Heather

sorry, the link was on adobe's site... middle of the page

http://www.adobe.com/support/downloa...atform=Windows


from there, all you should need to do is change your output to be the multibridge.


Steve Oakley