Transitioning to HD workflow at DVinfo.net

Daniel Russell · July 29th, 2009, 04:30 PM

I am a student editor who is in the proccess of transiting from working mostly in standard to working with a HD workflow. This past year, I interned with a well equiped public access facility. The staff and people involved with them were impressed with my work and saw potentional in me. It opened a lot of doors for me and I am now going towards the next level, which includes editing fully in HD.

Untill now, I have mostly edited in standard; for the longest time shooting in HD and downconverting at capture. I am working on a big project that was orignally going to be done in SD, but after doing some work with HD, I decided that was the way to go. Over the last few months, I have learned a lot about the technicals details of video editing

My System Specifications

Adobe Production Premium CS4
Vista 64 Bit
Core 2 Quad-Core (Intel Q660)
8GB Ram
ATI Radeon 4890 1GB Memory
2TB Media Space

I also just replaced the Motherboard to include onboard firewire ports as I was tired of dealing with seperate cards.

The cameras I mostly use are Canon XH-A1's (capture from the camera).and JVC HD200's (capture through a JVC HD deck).

Overall, my computer is handling HD editing farely well. There are long render times for effects such as color correction, but I expected that. I have had problems at capture though.
Heres some of the problems I have had:

After the audio conforms and indexes, audio only plays up to a certain point, there is a waveform, but nothing plays. I have been able to get around it by restarting premeire where the audio plays.

When it comes to capturing,I have not had much problems capturing with XH-A1 in premiere, but the HD200 footage is a different story, I am using a JVC HD Deck to capture.

Everytime I have used it, it has been a pain in the but to get Premeire to recognize the deck, and when it does, I don't have device control. To get it to capture, I had to hit play on the deck and hit the record button in the capture window and it seemingly starts to capture.

Now, this is where it gets weird and confusing for me.

After capturing some tape the other day, I looked at the raw footage in windows Media Player and the length was listed only at 2:50 when the capture was nearly an hour long. When I tried to scrub through the video, Media Player became unstable and quit on me. What is strange is that in this situation is that when imported in Premiere, it recongined the entire capture, but audio stopped completely at 2:50, no waveform or anything.

Currently, I am suspecting that something went wrong when Premeire was creating the MPEG file. Am I doing something wrong or is there something more deeper going on?

Through research I have gathered the idea that editing HD through the MPEG codec, especially through Premeire is a bad idea. I am thinking that I should find a way or some kind of hardware that can capture and handle HD better then MPEG.

Again, I am still farely new to handling HD and am slowly fiquring things out.

I was looking into a Matrox card, but through several hours of research on the subject, I noticed a lot of people don't reccomend it due to compality issues and codec problems.

I heard of something called Cineform, but from what I heard there is no CS4 version yet(I may be wrong).

I also heard of something called HDVsplit that captures the video and converts it into m2t files. Does anyone know more about this program? Is it good? Does it keep the quality?

Im willing to invest later down the line in a accelerator that can give me SD like editing speeds, but I really have no idea where to start on that that issue.

Does anyone have any suggestions for the above problems or what to go with in terms of HD acceleration?

I am excited about transiting into a HD enviorment, the results are just plain stunnng, and well worth the extra work. I just need some help getting a stable and maybe faster workflow, so I can spend more time editing and less time troubleshooting.

Ray Bell · July 29th, 2009, 04:42 PM

you should download Cineform and try it out for yourself... it has lots to offer and
for your situation at the minimum it will convert your HD footage to where you are thinking
your still in SD land as to editing.. and the options just get better and better from there.

Cineform as this moment does work with CS4... the only thing missing, that they are
working on, is the real time engine... but the program still works great as is...

it also has a footage importer that works well too...

July 29th, 2009, 04:30 PM	#1
Daniel Russell Tourist Join Date: Apr 2009 Location: Manchester, Maryland Posts: 1	Transitioning to HD workflow I am a student editor who is in the proccess of transiting from working mostly in standard to working with a HD workflow. This past year, I interned with a well equiped public access facility. The staff and people involved with them were impressed with my work and saw potentional in me. It opened a lot of doors for me and I am now going towards the next level, which includes editing fully in HD. Untill now, I have mostly edited in standard; for the longest time shooting in HD and downconverting at capture. I am working on a big project that was orignally going to be done in SD, but after doing some work with HD, I decided that was the way to go. Over the last few months, I have learned a lot about the technicals details of video editing My System Specifications Adobe Production Premium CS4 Vista 64 Bit Core 2 Quad-Core (Intel Q660) 8GB Ram ATI Radeon 4890 1GB Memory 2TB Media Space I also just replaced the Motherboard to include onboard firewire ports as I was tired of dealing with seperate cards. The cameras I mostly use are Canon XH-A1's (capture from the camera).and JVC HD200's (capture through a JVC HD deck). Overall, my computer is handling HD editing farely well. There are long render times for effects such as color correction, but I expected that. I have had problems at capture though. Heres some of the problems I have had: After the audio conforms and indexes, audio only plays up to a certain point, there is a waveform, but nothing plays. I have been able to get around it by restarting premeire where the audio plays. When it comes to capturing,I have not had much problems capturing with XH-A1 in premiere, but the HD200 footage is a different story, I am using a JVC HD Deck to capture. Everytime I have used it, it has been a pain in the but to get Premeire to recognize the deck, and when it does, I don't have device control. To get it to capture, I had to hit play on the deck and hit the record button in the capture window and it seemingly starts to capture. Now, this is where it gets weird and confusing for me. After capturing some tape the other day, I looked at the raw footage in windows Media Player and the length was listed only at 2:50 when the capture was nearly an hour long. When I tried to scrub through the video, Media Player became unstable and quit on me. What is strange is that in this situation is that when imported in Premiere, it recongined the entire capture, but audio stopped completely at 2:50, no waveform or anything. Currently, I am suspecting that something went wrong when Premeire was creating the MPEG file. Am I doing something wrong or is there something more deeper going on? Through research I have gathered the idea that editing HD through the MPEG codec, especially through Premeire is a bad idea. I am thinking that I should find a way or some kind of hardware that can capture and handle HD better then MPEG. Again, I am still farely new to handling HD and am slowly fiquring things out. I was looking into a Matrox card, but through several hours of research on the subject, I noticed a lot of people don't reccomend it due to compality issues and codec problems. I heard of something called Cineform, but from what I heard there is no CS4 version yet(I may be wrong). I also heard of something called HDVsplit that captures the video and converts it into m2t files. Does anyone know more about this program? Is it good? Does it keep the quality? Im willing to invest later down the line in a accelerator that can give me SD like editing speeds, but I really have no idea where to start on that that issue. Does anyone have any suggestions for the above problems or what to go with in terms of HD acceleration? I am excited about transiting into a HD enviorment, the results are just plain stunnng, and well worth the extra work. I just need some help getting a stable and maybe faster workflow, so I can spend more time editing and less time troubleshooting. __________________ Daniel L. Russell \| Post-Production Department 91 Productions \| On Que Records \| RandoMMan Productions

July 29th, 2009, 04:42 PM	#2
Ray Bell Regular Crew Join Date: Nov 2004 Posts: 1,414	you should download Cineform and try it out for yourself... it has lots to offer and for your situation at the minimum it will convert your HD footage to where you are thinking your still in SD land as to editing.. and the options just get better and better from there. Cineform as this moment does work with CS4... the only thing missing, that they are working on, is the real time engine... but the program still works great as is... it also has a footage importer that works well too...