Recording uncompressed from HDMI output on HV30...
 

Quick question:

Can I record uncompressed from the HV30 with a video card that has HDMI in? Or will I need component in?

How much of a pain is this and is there any (cheap) product in particular anyone recommends? Anything that works with a laptop or desktop only?

Thanks,

-Matt

The Blackmagic Intensity... It's only $200.

http://www.blackmagic-design.com/products/intensity/

And might I add that the results are spectacular. You don't realize how badly HDV mangles the image until you compare the two.

Does anybody know how I can capture the HDMi signal with my Macbook Pro??

Not easily. You'd have to buy an expresscard to pci adapter cage and mount the Intensity in that.

http://www.magma.com/

Only if you record live material and have at least a 4 disk striped array for storage. If it has been recorded to tape, you only transfer HDV quality, that has already undergone MPEG compression and along the way you lose timecode, date and time stamp and all other metadata, making it unsuitable for editing. Despite the hype, HDMI is not suitable for editors, only for display purposes.

There's very little reason to go completely "uncompressed" in this day and age. You can use a decently fast hard drive (even just Firewire) and a modern codec and beat the crap out of HDV. Apple's ProRes, Cineform, and Avid's DNxHD are all good choices depending on your system. In practice, for almost any normal use, they are effectively lossless.

Thanks everyone for all the help. I'll definitely pick up the black magic intensity. $250 is an awesome price.

I'm editing in pro res, so I don't really need full uncompressed quality, but I need the best I can get since I'm doing a ton of effects work and hdv is awful, useless for this particular project. I'm editing on a macbook pro so unfortunately I can't input directly to it. I have an old PC (athlon64) with a free PCI slot I plan to use, but it doen't have a raid array. Could I import cineform or something else in real time and then later convert to prores? Are there cheap near lossless codecs that support real-time import and are cross platform?

I'm shooting everything on set (well, in a mini-set in my garage) so portability is no issue.

Thank again.

Going from PC to Mac is going to be your headache. ;-) Cineform runs on both, but is pretty darn pricy. In fact, to get it for both Mac and PC is more expensive than a Magma expansion box for your MacBook Pro.

If I was going to capture on a PC, I would capture to Black Magic's JPEG codec (a high quality "native" format for the Intensity on both Mac and Windows.) Then depending on your workflow, you would either convert everything to ProRes before editing, or you would just edit the JPEG files and only use ProRes for renders.

Well, by virtue of price alone I think the answer is the jpeg codec... Thanks for the help. I kind of hate jpeg but I figure it's way better than HDV and will respond well to keying, motion tracking etc., which is all I really need. I'm intercutting with red footage, but thankfully almost everything I have left to shoot is in close up or will look okay a little softer. Thanks again.

JPEG at the highest quality setting should do pretty well. No matter what you do it's 4:2:2 out of HDMI, so it's hard to compare with a 4k RAW file, but you'll be very surprised how close you can match the two.

Thanks for the advice. I'm sure the footage won't look as good as the red, but enough of my red footage is slightly out of focus or underexposed (first time using the camera) that it won't all be perfectly consistent anyhow. The hv30 is impressive enough in hdv; I'm looking forward to seeing what it can do in a non-horrible format.

Insane price for an enclosure though! Any affordable alternatives???

I don't know of an alternative, though there might be one. I do know that the Magma does work with the MacBook Pro and the Intensity, though.

Remember, it's still a whole h*** of a lot cheaper than an AJA IOHD.

I've started using an intensity and it's pretty awesome, but I'm having trouble importing footage...

The MJPEG looks pretty bad to me, and my hard drive isn't even fast enough to work with it. Are there any other codecs that are relatively cheap and okay for import? I may set up a two-disk raid array, but I can't afford to do much more than that.