FCP5: native HDV?
 

Word out there seems to be native HDV (ie MPEG2) for FCP5 - can anyone at NAB confirm or deny?

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=43105

That should help.

heath

Yup, native HDV, quite remarquable, Let's see if it can be monitored...

I watched the video tour for FCP 5 and DVDSP 4--Native HDV editing (!), looks like timecode in there, too and more! And HD-DVDs! (Probably need Tiger for all of this.) You can make native HDV DVDs, multiple-format DVDs and more! WOW!

heath

Yup, here it is:

http://www.apple.com/finalcutstudio/...pro/specs.html

"Native long GOP MPEG-2 editing for HDV" well I have to say I didn't see that coming.

Heath, when you say "make native HDV DVDs" - does that mean now??

I'm trying to find the info on that topic...can't find it. Does that mean your standard DVD burner on Macs with DVD SP 4 can burn HD-DVD in blu-ray? if that is true I think I'm going to poop my pants.

EDIT:

I just found this quote on the new DVD Studio Pro 4 site -- "HD content on DVDs using existing drives and existing media".

Whoa! This is AWESOME - mix and match formats and uprez to HD NOW!
http://www.apple.com/finalcutstudio/...ro/quicktours/

Apple is redeeming themselves!! It took forever to get HDV editing in FCP, but now they're giving us a great amount of tools. Thank you Apple, thank you Sony...Panny and JVC. All you guys are doing some great things...I think I'm going to cry.

Apple - those crazy fellas!
 

They're adding stuff as we speak!

This is brand new:
http://www.apple.com/finalcutstudio/...ative_HDV.html

The above video solves the editing in FCP problem. We can now wake up from this long nightmare!

That HDV video tour is awesome. Wish they had that up right away. :D

I still can't tell if timecode is supported.

HD DVD Support (requires G5)
 

http://www.apple.com/finalcutstudio/...eoverview.html
"Go from native HDV to HD on DVD with no recompression from Final Cut Pro."

http://www.apple.com/finalcutstudio/...pro/specs.html
For Authoring HD DVDs
* Macintosh computer with PowerPC G5 (dual processor recommended)
* 1GB of RAM (2GB recommended)
For Playing Back HD DVDs
* Macintosh computer with PowerPC G5
* Apple DVD Player v4.6
* Mac OS X v10.4 or later

http://www.apple.com/finalcutstudio/...radeguide.html
H.264 HD DVD support
The ultra-efficient, next-generation video compression technology, H.264 provides outstanding HD quality at lower SD bit rates. DVD Studio Pro 4 integrates scalable H.264 encoding, so you can burn feature-length HD titles using existing drives with existing media and play them back using the Apple DVD player.

Anyone know any dvd players that currently support H.264 HD?

HD DVD playback only on mac OSX tiger for now
 

http://www.macworld.com/news/2005/04...exec/index.php
"Finally, DVD Studio Pro 4, Final Cut Studio’s DVD authoring program, is the first commercially available DVD authoring software that lets users burn their HD projects to high definition DVDs based on the latest HD DVD specification, according to Apple.

Schoeben said that, for now, HD DVDs could only be play on a Macintosh using the new movie player application included with Mac OS X Tiger.

DVD Studio Pro 4 will be demonstrated at NAB with a prototype consumer HD DVD player from Toshiba set to debut later this year."

I believe, and I may be wrong, you need Tiger to help burn those DVDs.

heath

Got FCP5
 

Brothers,

I had faith on Apple and i order G5 system a week ago before NAB. Its fruitful!! I'm happy. Also i ordered FCP4.5 Apple sent me FCP5.0 with Tiger with no extra cost. Way to go Apple!!! My next step is on Panny or Sony or JVC.

Please recommend. I'm not getting sleep!!

Hari

I suppose this is all good news to some extent, but note that it doesn't make much sense to edit HDV in its native format because that's a slow and lossy solution compared to using an editing codec like AIC. Also note that the ability to burn HD content to standard DVDs has existed on the PC platform for at least several months, and unlike H.264 you can buy and distribute players today which support the Windows Media and DivX formats. So the important news here is that we're all moving rapidly toward effective HD editing, authoring and distribution, which is going to cause a huge shake-up in the videography industry.

Well, that was before FCP 5. I just sat through the demo and watched him edit native HDV with t/c showing. And he was 'scrubbing' the video forward and backward frame by frame. You can go straight from FCP5 to DVDSP4 without ever transcoding your HDV footage and so there is no generation loss from transcoding. Trust me, this is awesome stuff and I don't know the magic behind Apple's curtain, but magic it is!!

-gb-

Even if the performance is there, HDV is an inherently lossy format which will suffer noticeable artifacts if you make multi-generational changes. And since HDV isn't currently a practical distribution solution, there's no reason to maintain that format at any point in the production chain. It's nice to have the straight-through workflow for simple edits and output back to camera, but that's about it.

Did you miss the part about DVDSP?

When will anyone ever have a multi-generation issue? If you need to change something later and your media went offline, just use Media Manager to reconnect the camera-original clips from your source tape(s).

There's plenty of reason to maintain the format in the production chain. It saves time and maintains quality. Transcoding to DVCProHD, DC30+, ConnectHD or whatever else takes too much time.

I figure that Apple has engineered FCP 5 to actively process HDV so that all frames become I frames on the fly.

The above quoted sentiment sounds like a reincarnation of the bitrate misgivings ("19mbps? Oh no"). We'll all judge by our eyes soon enough. :)

Good points, Murad. I suspect once we actually see it, we'll be able to make judgment calls.

heath

Regarding HDV editing artifacts, this is a potentially significant issue which is discussed and demonstrated at the following URL:

http://www.cineform.com/technology/H...tyAnalysis.htm

If Apple has found some clever way to deal with this while using the native HDV format that's noteworthy, but it sure seems like an inherent problem with editing HDV directly.

Regarding DVDSP and HDV distribution, that doesn't sound very realistic at the moment. If you put the video on a standard DVD it's going to have to be pretty short, and your options for playing it back are limited. Seems like H.264 is going to be a much more useful option, but there aren't any consumer-level players for it yet.

All in all good news, but still not a complete solution...

Personally I'm hoping that we'll be able to go from HDV to H.264 without much loss.

Uh, that page makes no sense to me at all. Who's going to keep recompressing their HDV footage in MPEG-2? The point of 'native HDV' editing is that you capture it as MPEG-2, edit from the raw MPEG-2 files, and then recompress only to do the final output to the camera... until then you're working with the original source footage, and it's impossible to get a better image quality than that.

Now, I'd agree that editing MPEG-2 and then recompressing for output is going to introduce artifacts: but 'what format do I master to?' is one of the biggest unanswered questions about HDV so far. I guess for a consumer product you don't care about the quality loss, for a professional edit you'd online it on a high-end HD system and go to HDCAM or similar for the master.

As far as disc distribution goes, that's simple: you output to a compliant h.264 or WMV9 as both are required for High Definition DVD players (whether Blu Ray or HD-DVD), which means all players will play both formats (in the way now that all players have to play both PCM and ac3 audio, and in Europe, also MPEG layer 2 audio).

With broadcast bit's trickier, but h.264 will also be a DVB HD standard.

"Uh, that page makes no sense to me at all. Who's going to keep recompressing their HDV footage in MPEG-2? The point of 'native HDV' editing is that you capture it as MPEG-2, edit from the raw MPEG-2 files, and then recompress only to do the final output to the camera... until then you're working with the original source footage, and it's impossible to get a better image quality than that."

You're missing the point here. MPEG2 (on which HDV is based) is an inherently lossy editing format, such that if you make a change to something, save it in HDV and then re-edit it again, your first set of changes can get degraded in obvious ways during the second revision. That's exactly what Cineform demonstrates on the web page I referenced, but you have to scroll down a ways to see the examples. For professional purposes, this is potentially a very serious drawback to editing HDV directly. By partially decompressing HDV source material to a higher-bandwidth intermediate codec, it is in fact possible to maintain higher quality during the editing process than when working on HDV directly. Of course this assumes that you have a properly designed intermediate codec, and I'll leave it up to others to comment on whether AIC does a good job in this regard.

HDV is also a "non-symmetrical" codec, meaning that it takes a lot of processing power to recompress changes back to HDV after decompressing for internal calculations by the editing software. Hence any "native" HDV solution will be slower (with fewer real-time capabilities) than an HDV editing solution based on an intermediate codec running on the same computer. On the PC side we see this demonstrated by the fact that people can do a lot more with HDV without rendering when the footage is converted to an intermediate format, like the Cineform solution mentioned above or Canopus HQ. It sounds like Apple has done a decent job of enabling native HDV editing on today's high-end Macs, but I'm already hearing that the preview quality has to be degraded to even play back a simple transition in real time. That's not what I would call an efficient, DV-like workflow.

If Mac users find that the native HDV solution in FCP5 is adequate for their needs then that's great, but I wouldn't be too quick to assume it's necessarily better than using AIC. Try both and decide for yourself.

Kevin,

I'm sorry, but I believe you are grounding your viewpoint in yesterday's version of dealing with HDV format. Apple(and a few others) have now come up with a method of dealing with HDV without the pitfalls of yesterday's workflows. Keep in mind that the forthcoming release of Tiger(64bit OS) and the new production suite that can take advantage of that power are part of the 'enabling' process. I really wish you were able to be here and watch the live demonstration so that your jaw would fall open as far as ours has. The new FCP has 'dynamic' RT processing whereby it will adjust framerate and quality as you view more streams. As soon as your timeline goes back to a single stream, the quality goes back to 100%. They also show a slow dissolve of two HDV streams in realtime and it looks fantastic.

Seeing is believing in this case.

-gb-

The native HDV editing will do everything behind the scenes. While editing, realtime performance is done on the fly in buffers and shown on the preview monitor. The only true recompression is on final output.

This is the same for any intermediate compression, such as AIC or cineform, in that, you are already losing a generation just on capture, because you have already recompressed to an entirely new codec, which then in turn has to be recompressed AGAIN to get back out to camera. So Kevins point of the lossy format isnt really all that valid considering, if you just capture to AIC, then output immedialtely to tape, you have lost 2 generations (due to twice recompression).

The Cineform codec is very good at this, in that, very little issues seem to come up, but the AIC codec is downright horrible, and unusable for anyone doing any type of serious work.

From the sounds of Kevins post, I dont think he has done any real world tests using AIC, because to make it fail, its takes all of about 5 minutes of testing to see the major downfalls.

I have a huge investment in Apple and a FCP workflow, but unfortunately, for my company to offer HDV, we had to once again bring PC's into the mix, in that I tried EVERY possible solution for editing HDV, and right now, Cineform Aspect HD was the only viable solution. Every other solution has some major downfall that made it an unreliable product.

The only question I have about the native HDV editing on FCP 5 is the speed. What speed computer will it take not to make the system painful to use. (I have a Dual 2.0). native HDV editing is stressful on todays computers (My 3.2 ghz PC has trouble doing it), so unless they have some really good code behind the new FCP, I'm a bit concerned, but I do have some faith. (Although AIC was a failure, and anyone who doesnt realize this yet, I beg you to run more tests, because its AWFUL)

I agree about the AIC, but it's nice for small projects, like a short I did that won't go to fests.

heath

AIC is fine for my kids birthday parties and such, but for that matter, so is Imovie. I cant deliver corporate videos to clients with large "Boxing" patterns from AIC compression though.

Or how would a wedding client like paying for an HD video, only to have the brides face hidden behind AIC interference during the vows? Not good.

Greg: I'm willing to believe that Apple is doing what they can to make HDV editing effective, but I stand by my previous statements as being inherently true about HDV based on what I know about it. If someone who is thoroughly familiar with the inner workings of FCP5 can explain to me how it can get around the technical limitations of editing MPEG2/HDV directly, I'd be happy to hear about it. Sounds like marketing hype to me.

Regarding your other comments, "dynamic RT" sounds like a clever marketing term for "degraded previews." There's a similar feature in Sony Vegas and I'm not particularly impressed by that either, compared to the option of having true real-time HD/HDV editing with full-resolution, full frame rate output. The latter is what you can get today with the best PC-based HDV editing solution, which uses an intermediate codec to sustain 3-4 layers of 1080i in real time at full quality on today's fastest computers. (Using Canopus Edius NX.) Please don't take that as simply a cross-platform comparison statement, but if the best Apple can do at full quality for HDV is one layer then they're running well behind other currently shipping alternatives. I still say using the Apple Intermediate Codec should yield better performance than editing HDV directly, but I'll have to leave it up to Mac users to test that theory.

Either way, I'm happy to see all sorts of developments coming along to make affordable high-definition video production a reality. Bring on the HD DVDs!!!

Kevin,

Yes AIC yields better performance. But if the image degrades, whats the point?

I'll give up a realtime layer or so, if I get the correct output.

What good is nice new HDV cameras, if we degrade the image coming out of them, just so we can get nice performance out of our editing machines?

"The Cineform codec is very good at this, in that, very little issues seem to come up, but the AIC codec is downright horrible, and unusable for anyone doing any type of serious work...From the sounds of Kevin's post, I dont think he has done any real world tests using AIC, because to make it fail, its takes all of about 5 minutes of testing to see the major downfalls."

I intentionally refrained from commenting on the reported quality issues with AIC because I didn't want to make my comments sound like just a cross-platform comparison rant. If native HDV editing in FCP5 is the best solution for working with HDV on the Mac platform then I'd certainly expect Mac users to act accordingly--but I'd say we're seeing from the posts here that FCP5 won't measure up to PC-based editing solutions in terms of support for the HDV format. I've seen posts elsewhere from people I trust stating that PC-based intermediate HDV codecs are visually indistinguisable from the HDV source files, so if Apple wasn't able to do likewise that's a miss on their part.

Based on what I've been hearing, I'd expect a lot of Mac-based videographers to opt for the Panasonic P2 camera over HDV and skip all the hassle with HDV on the Mac platform. Just be prepared to spend at least $5000 for P2 memory cards for each P2 camera you buy, or to buy a stack of Firestore-like P2 hard drives. If you really want to work effectively with the HDV format, come on over to the "dark side" and have a look around. We've got all kinds of effective HDV options including solutions which work well on $1000 laptops. As a former Mac user, I can tell you that things really aren't all that bad over here... :-)

If you don't want to sound like a Mac basher, why don't you just wait to see how FCP 5.0 handles HDV editing before you declare its software and hardware inferior? patience...

FCP 5 is perfect for pro-level work.

heath

Until we have FCP 5 on our systems it is all just theory. AIC is not great at the moment, but I'm sure it will be improved and its not going to take much it's almost there. We did a side by side comparison with the same footage from PPro 1.51 with the Cineform Codec and FCP Express, We edited the same sequence on both systems and sent it back to HDV Tape, we then viewed the final results on a CRT HD component monitor

Cineform was much more reliable quality, AIC matched the quality in some shots but not in others, where the "box" pattern was observed, but it was much closer than I imagined it would be.

As a PS to this test, a large HDV project we have been working on in PPro has now started to corrupt itself after 3 weeks work, with no means of recovery, so we are now re-editing in FCE!

Can't wait for FCP 5

And, as I said, THE WHOLE POINT of native HDV editing is that you _don't_ do that. Only an idiot would keep recompressing their footage in MPEG-2 for precisely that reason... and I very much doubt that the developers for FCP are idiots.

It's impossible to produce a less degraded result than by editing in HDV and only re-compressing to MPEG-2 for final output. Any intermediate codec you use will give you _more_ degradation, not less.

The one thing you don't want to do is then recapture that edited HDV footage and re-edit it. But that comes back to the whole question of what format you master to if you shot HDV: HDV is a decent shooting format, but a crappy mastering format.

Okay, let's walk through the logic and tell me if you see a problem with it:

Let's say you capture some HDV footage, drop it in a native HDV timeline and put a transition between two clips. If everything is maintained in HDV than the transition has to be calculated as a combination of the two HDV source files, and then the transition itself is also saved as HDV. Since MPEG2 is a lossy editing format this process will introduce some degradation to the finished transition, which is now stored accordingly in your project files. For a single-pass change this shouldn't be too noticeable, but what happens if you make further modifications to the same section of the timeline? Now you're making another lossy change to your first lossy change, which could start to become a problem depending on what you're doing. Take a look at the examples on the Cineform web page and it's apparent that if you run into this problem it's potentially quite noticeable. Maybe this will only happen under certain specific conditions, but it's something you'd at least want to keep in mind when editing HDV directly.

To put this in perspective, ask yourself why anyone would ever bother to edit any video footage in "uncompressed" format if there's no possible benefit to doing so? And yet some high-end edits are done uncompressed precisely because it removes the risk of running into these sorts of compression issues. It's also part of why several current HDV editing solutions use partially decompressed editing codecs, because this allows less lossy editing calculations (if the codec is properly designed) than editing HDV directly.

And equally important, such codecs can significantly improve performance on a given computer compared to editing native HDV, consistent with the results we're seeing reported here for HDV editing in FCP5. Apple deserves credit for coming up with a functional way to edit HDV directly in FCP, but this is apparently not as efficient as solutions based on intermediate codecs. If Apple improves the quality of AIC to rival that of other intermediate HDV codecs and that yields better performance in FCP5 than native HDV, then this will all make sense for HDV work on the Mac platform. Until then, use native HDV if that's the best solution for your needs.

On the PC platform, hardly anyone is editing HDV directly because that offers no meaningful quality or workflow advantage over converting to the available intermediate codecs, which are dramatically more efficient with no visible loss of quality.

If you were editing in HDV and rendered a rough cut, disposed of your original footage, edited your rought cut to render a fine cut, disposed of your rought cut, edited your fine cut to render a final cut, you would certainly suffer the lossy effects of HDV.

YOU ALSO WOULD NOT KNOW HOW TO USE A NLE SYSTEM.

What people are trying to say is that with FCP and direct HDV editing you will go straight from your footage to your final product. One render, one generation. Quality wise, that beats going back and forth to an intermediate codec. Speed and quality during the edit process is another question. One neither of us know the answer yet as far as FCP is concerned.

Well,

Kevin seems convinced about native HDV being a bad thing. I personnaly cannot tell since I have not seen any results yet. I will evaluate when I see it and there is nothing else than speculation here. DV is also a lossy codec but NLE have evolved in taking advantage of this with no visible degradation but I remember working with premiere 5 and how much quality loss was included in every single render. Now, even multi generational compression is not that destructive. I suppose we will see soon enough if it works well or not.

"What people are trying to say is that with FCP and direct HDV editing you will go straight from your footage to your final product. One render, one generation. Quality wise, that beats going back and forth to an intermediate codec. "

You're not addressing the scenario I described or my comments about uncompressed editing, but assuming you can avoid any MPEG2 compression issues then direct HDV editing should work well enough. It definitely won't compete with intermediate codecs in terms of real-time performance, as is already being demonstrated by early reports for working with HDV in FCP5. But practically speaking, if FCP5 does what you need it to do with HDV on the equipment you have, then that's good. And if Apple does a good job of integrating HDV support throughout their production tools, that that'll be good too. 'Nuff said.

Mpeg 2 is already a problem to begin with, but as long as you avoid too many re-encodes, you will be ok. Right now the biggest issues with Native HDV editing is speed, and I'm not sure how Apple is dealing with this. My Hyperthreaded 3.2 ghz PC trying to edit HDV natively runs like a dog, so I'm a little concerned about performance on my dual 2.0 MAC. This is one of the fastest Macs available, so if that cant handle it, what is Apple recommending as a minimum spec to handle Native HDV.

At that point you go to Tools - Render Manager and delete all render files, then re-render so that you're back to a first-pass render. To save yourself some time, delete all render files and re-render transitions and filters as a final step.