Magic Bullet w/HDV camera- Anyone?
 

Hello Everyone! :)

First, I hope I'm posting this in the correct forum. Here's my situation: I'm planning on shooting a feature in the next few months, and am debating as to which camera would be suitable.

I already have access to a Sony PD-150 and a JVC HD10-U, but here's where I'm in need of opinions: I have the Magic Bullet software, and was wondering if the footage shot with the JVC (which shoots 720p) won't really improve with MB.

Of course, the Sony PD150 isn't HDV, but would probably get me the "film look" with MB. Given that the software is intended for interlaced, perhaps I should look into one of the newer Sony cameras that shoot 1080i? I know a thread was started on this...

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=45059

...but there hasn't been an update. If anyone has a handle on this, I'd love to hear about it.


Jon P.

P.S. - My usual method of operating is to just do experiments, but I'm stuck changing a newborn's diapers, so my days of carefree shooting have been cut abruptly short... ;)

Magic Bullet
 

I have Premiere Pro 1.51, which includes 1080 i editing. I have an FX1.

I captured a 40 second clip to Premiere. Premiere captures in cineform intemediate. Magic Bullet came as a plug extra with Premiere Pro. I set up the Filmic warm filter on the clip. Right away the editing window went dark, and had some weird effect on it. I went ahead and rendered anyway, and the result was a black screen. Doesn't look good for magic bullet in that program.

Actually, the plug-in won't work with HDV footage. (I tried this months ago.) You need to purchase the software (and have After Effects) to make 1080i work- which brings me back to my original question: Does 1080i transformed with Magic Bullet look better than 720p???

If you shoot 720p 24fps with the JVC I believe you will get some benefit from MB's deartifacting, which is supposed to clean up any digital artifacts in the footage, and IMHO wou will certainly benefit from their Look engine which is fantastic.

Will it look better than 1080i HDV deinterlaced in MB to 1080p? That's a great question, and I think it would take a shootout to really know for sure. But if you consider that to deinterlace 1080i, MB really has only 540 interlaced lines per frame to deal with, versus' having no deinterlacing and a true 720 lines of info, I would guess that true 720p may end up edging out MB deinterlaced 1080i.

But like I said, I think we'd need an empirical shootout to say for sure.

720p24 from the JVC will be sharper than 1080i de-interlaced on the Sony. Remember, that because of the interlace filtering, the 1080i on the Sony will only have a max vertical resolution of <800 lines anyway, so a throwawayafield de-interlace brings you down to about 400 lines, way below that of the 720p.

As for looks, you'll get 99% of what MB does by playing with colour correction in your NLE, perhaps with some layerd video and blending modes.

The JVC10 shoots 720p30 which will still look filmic, but is not true 24p and MB won't convert it to 24p either.

Paul and Graeme, I thank you for your input! :)

What about when using your smart deinterlacer? I would assume that would result in a vertical resolution which was not much different than 720p, correct? Except perhaps for very high motion scenes.

With a smart de-interlacer you avoid loosing resolution, so yes, you stand a greater chance of making sure that the 1080i has as much resolution as 720p when converted to progressive.

Graeme

So, do you mean that it's possible to have a conversion from 1080i to progressive without to lose any resolution (including vertical one) and then to get better results than 720p native?

1080i60 to 720p30 is very transparent.

Graeme