Any difference in quality between capturing with --Firewire or HDMI?
 

I was wondering if their is a difference if I capture with an HDMI cable as apposed to my regular Firewire? Would it be better quality with an HDMI cable?

Thanks

It will be better, but you will need a Blackmagic Intensity Pro card to save it to.
Blackmagic Design: Intensity

Perhaps,
But I think you lost the timecode!
Dirk PEL(NL)

Yes that is exactly what I was thinking to get the blackmagic card. So I don't have to work in HDV anymore. I think I will change it to DVCPRO HD and edit in that codec.

I hope I don't lose the timecode. Are you sure?

You could also use an AJA IO Express to capture via HDMI.

...I'm not sure about the timecode issue as I typically work with SDI.

The only way to get the timecode is to use firewire. But why would you want to capture via HDMI anyway? There's no advantage -- it's a bit for bit transfer either way. Once your picture has been written to tape it's been compressed and there's no advantage to HDMI capture. The only time this benefits you is if you capture live while you are shooting.

HDMI is designed for display, not capture.

Adam, mainly because I want to get out of working in HDV, and did some research that I could get a blackmagic card to transcode on import. I am going to try working in DVCPRO HD.

There is one on Ebay:
Blackmagic Design Intensity Pro | TRUE HD CAPTURE!! - eBay (item 190381318074 end time Mar-26-10 17:51:43 PDT)
And yes, it only is benificial if you capture life.

Why? What do you think transcoding to DVCPRO HD will give you that you don't have in HDV? Once you've recorded to HDV, you can't get back what you've lost.

You might look at Cineform's tools for a better post workflow.

http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/cineform...-cineform.html

Adam I am not expecting better quality because like you said once you record in HDV you cant get better.

What I am looking for is my editing to work smoother. I think I have a pretty good 8 core mac pro but when I put third party filters, (joe's filters, nattress, etc) transitions, color changes, etc it slows things down. I want to use a codec that from what I understand works really good with Final Cut (DVCPRO HD)

I have never heard of Cineform before. I will have to look into it.

You can simply select Apple Intermediate Codec a.k.a. AIC (or maybe one of the ProRes 422s, check with the transcode options first) to transcode your footage upon capture using firewire. It's in the Log and Capture window. I used to work with AIC a lot and can assure you all editing is faster and snappier on all Macs as compared to DVC ProHD. As you don't have the 4:2:2 10 bit color sampling to maintain and don't expect better quality than your HDV source footage, I think this is the way to go. Using HDMI+capture card for the sole purpose of getting an editing-friendly format on capture may not be worth the hassle, I believe.

Try Gearshift by Vasst...it is a very nice solution when working with HDV.

I have a Blackmagic card and have captured via HDMI, but the problem with capturing as true HD (for example bringing it in as ApplePro Res 422) is the file sizes are HUGE... 3 times as large as capturing via Firewire as HDV.

So if you need to bring in tons of footage like 8 hours of wedding footage, then forget it unless you have about 3TB of extra space.

I also didn't notice any difference quality.

Thanks Jeff............Unfortunately I just found this out yesterday.

I got the card/installed it and imported more than 8 hours of footage and was very surprised how quickly I was at 500GB importing with DVCPRO HD.

The main reason I went the blackmagic route was not for quality but for work flow. I wanted to get out of the HDV format to speed up my render times/editing.
But the problem is I use the Multicam editor in Final Cut (my shoots are with 4 cameras) and I can't edit because the harddrive cannot process the 4 streams of video fast enough.

So I think I am going back to HDV.