A good overview...
 

Ok, just breaking into HDV...

So, I am looking for a link to a good overview of all the Adobe/Cineform factors to take into consideration when editing HDV. I am very well versed in SD, and this is all a little confusing... my main point of confusion comes to premiere's HDV abilities.

I have premiere pro 2.0 and a sony HDV deck, yet i cant export an MT2 file out to tape. It says it has exported, but I get nothing on the tape but black..

How good is cineform's solution? What type of effects do they offer and will my entire realtime preview be disrupted if I add a non-cineform add on? Is there anyway to Preview HDV over a firewire or do I need a different type of card going out to my monitor?

Also, My comp is running a P4 at 3.0ghz and has 1.5 gigs of ram (only pc2700 tho). Seem suitable or should I forget the cineform thing and jsut do all my HDV directly in Premiere native and spend the money on a hardware upgrade?

So foncusing... errr, confusing.

Matt

>> I have premiere pro 2.0 and a sony HDV deck, yet i cant export an MT2 file out to tape. It says it has exported, but I get nothing on the tape but black..

Have you seen this: http://supportcenteronline.com/ics/s...asp?deptID=614

>>>How good is cineform's solution? What type of effects do they offer?

Color balance, color correction, chroma noise filter, zooms, pans, rotates, dissolves, page turns, pushes, covers and wipes

>>Will my entire realtime preview be disrupted if I add a non-cineform add on?

Only if you add the non-cineform effect to the whole timeline. otherwise, it will just affect the clips you've applied it to.

>>>Is there anyway to Preview HDV over a firewire or do I need a different type of card going out to my monitor?

There may be a way, but if so it ain't cheap. There are mid-range graphics cards with true HD component out (e.g. Nvidia 6600GT, QuadroFX560, etc) and they work fine hooked to the component-in of an HD monitor.

>>> Also, My comp is running a P4 at 3.0ghz and has 1.5 gigs of ram (only pc2700 tho). Seem suitable or should I forget the cineform thing and jsut do all my HDV directly in Premiere native and spend the money on a hardware upgrade?

I expect you'll get a range of opinion on that. If you already like using Premiere, personally I'd recommend Cineform. If you were considering Vegas or Edius or whatever then a faster machine would be the way to go.

Do you have any experience how to Component out actually looks? I have heard some shaky things about interlace lines over these cards. True?

I have the 6600GT...my display correctly interprets its component output as being 720p or 1080i, depending on the settings. Others' mileage may vary.

I see the QuadroFX models being recommended by Videoguys etc, so that may be a safer option. Their breakout box is certainly more substantial.

Edit: Oh and you asked how it actually looks ... essentially identical to what I see when I play raw m2t files from my camera on my 42" Sony HDTV through my Linkplayer2, which is all I really ask of my system. I did need to tweak the card's overlay settings slightly to get the color balance and gamma matched.

Could you explain that last little bit about tweaking the settings?

I right-clicked my desktop to bring up display properties, selected the HDTV (which shows up as my second monitor), and went to Settings/Advanced/GeForce6600GT/Color correction.

That provides the ability to adjust brightness contrast and gamma for each channel (red, green, blue) for your "Desktop", "Overlay" and "Fullscreen video".

I actually was mistaken in my previous posts - it was the fullscreen video that I tweaked to get the HD monitor looking right.

Now, these steps interact with the setting available on the HD monitor itself, which can also be tweaked! so it gets a bit confusing. Although I have a Spyder colorimeter, in the end I used an informal method: I began by playing a commercial DVD through both my 46" HDTV and my computer HDTV monitor using a standalone DVD player, and adjusted the computer monitor until they matched closely.

Then I ripped the same DVD footage onto my harddrive as mpeg, played that back through Premiere, and tweaked the Nvidia graphics card settings (as described above) until it looked the same as it did played from the DVD.

Not ideal, but a big improvement on my previous monitoring setup. Hope that explanation made sense...

Gotcha,

I am looking at the GeForce 7600 as it has twin DVI out and analogue component out... heard anything about it?

monitoring HD with Nvidia card
 

I have the Nvidia Geforce 7600 GS with AGP 8X with 512mb and I'm getting the monitor to work out of premier only as a mirror display that duplicates the desktop. I'd like to have it to get the clean 1080i HD signal through the component output but I can't seem to get Premier to recognize the HDTV as an output device. Also tried flowing back thru HDV firewire, thru camera and then into the monitor but that didn't work either. Anyone have some insight into this? Another interesting thing is that if I open the files with windows media, the HDTV monitor shows the desktop and windows but the inside screen within Windows media player is dark blue. Ditto if I go to full screen mode. I really want to have the HDTV as a real world evaluation of color correction even though the monitor I'm using is a Sony 21" trinitron that's pretty good. I've found the HDTV's usually build contrast and the blacks are deeper (probably since black is switched from 0% to 7.5% ntsc standard) Any insight much appreciated about configuring Premier or the sound card.

change of thread title
 

Do you think you could change the title of this thread to better reflect the content?

Keith, Try these steps...

1. In Windows Display Properties Click on the ‘Settings’ Tab
2. Select the second monitor in the ‘Display’ drop down menu
3. Be sure that the check box “Extend My Windows Desktop onto This Monitor” is CHECKED.
4. Click on the ‘Advanced’ button to view the nVidia Card
5. Click on the Tab with the nVidia Logo and the model name/number of the card.
6. In the side menu that pops out select ‘Full Screen Video’
7. In the ‘Full Screen Device’ drop down menu, select ‘Auto-Select’
8. Apply the settings

Also, if you are using AspecHD go in PPro to Project/Settings/General/Playback Settings and in the Cineform box that pops up, make sure that the "Enable overlay surface" box is checked.

Thanks
 

Thanks Graham I will try it.