Which HDV editing program do you use?

[George Loch]

Originally Posted by Michael Liebergot

George, I use Sony Vegas7 for editing and transcoding. I didn't see the intesity acrd listed on Sony's site for supported hardware, but only the much more expensive Decklink cards shown.

Do you happen to know if Vegas supports teh Intensity card as well?

The rumor is that it does indeed work. If anything, you *can* use the included capture utility from BMD and then bring the clips into Vegas. It should work as normal however.

The Intensity would also provides a great monitoring ability so you could go directly from the card to a monitor with an HDMI input.

-gl

[George Loch]

Originally Posted by George Loch

The rumor is that it does indeed work. If anything, you *can* use the included capture utility from BMD and then bring the clips into Vegas. It should work as normal however.

The Intensity would also provides a great monitoring ability so you could go directly from the card to a monitor with an HDMI input.

-gl

Ok, follow up. Apparently, BMD has not moved it's support into Vegas 7 so, you may want to wait until NAB to see if they update their support policy.

-gl

[William Boehm]

i need help understanding the basics of this discussion. i have 6 years of high quality SD family, nature and wildlife footage from a GL! and now have a HD canon xha1 that i want to begin editing. i own adobe PP1 that i purchased for $75 from a friend...and wanted to know should i upgrade to PP2 and stick with that program. I have never attempted to edit...so this is a first.

I read all the stuff out there..vegas 7, cineform, and quite frankly it overwhelms me as to the first step to take. i would rather not pay for the PP2 upgrade if there is a better system that could meet both my SD stuff and new HD. Want to reproduce and edit these tapes with the highest degree of accuracy and no loss of detail, yet have it work simply. i am just a biologist, not inclined to be a computer tech, although i am computer savy. thanks ahead for helping a newbie. bill

[Jacob Carter]

Originally Posted by Jacob Carter

Is there such a thing as a HDMI hard drive recorder?

I have seen some portable HD recorders, but they all use firewire as input.

I wonder if they make one that uses HDMI as an input.

I guess a better question is, does capturing from firewire to an HD recorder save the video in true 1920X1080?

If I want to record directly to 1920X1080, is HDMI to a computer my only option when using the HV20?

[George Loch]

Originally Posted by William Boehm

i need help understanding the basics of this discussion. i have 6 years of high quality SD family, nature and wildlife footage from a GL! and now have a HD canon xha1 that i want to begin editing. i own adobe PP1 that i purchased for $75 from a friend...and wanted to know should i upgrade to PP2 and stick with that program. I have never attempted to edit...so this is a first.

I read all the stuff out there..vegas 7, cineform, and quite frankly it overwhelms me as to the first step to take. i would rather not pay for the PP2 upgrade if there is a better system that could meet both my SD stuff and new HD. Want to reproduce and edit these tapes with the highest degree of accuracy and no loss of detail, yet have it work simply. i am just a biologist, not inclined to be a computer tech, although i am computer savy. thanks ahead for helping a newbie. bill

William,

I'll take a stab at your question at the risk of being accosted with sarcasm again :)

The discussion seems to have turned to the reality of what the blessings and curses are with this thing called HDV. What HDV has enabled is a cheap way of capturing HD footage that produces very good results. It utilizes cheap media and inexpensive (relatively speaking) mechanisms to achieve this result. The cameras are also very compact. The downside is the compromises that had to be made in order to reach this place. HDV is highly compressed, the cameras have relatively small imagers compared to the output size, and the resulting data format is tedious to work with from a software pov.

The main problem however is the amount and TYPE of compression used. IT is derived from Mpeg2 and was initially not intended as an editing format but simply a delivery format. Now the engineers behind HDV have tried to make it more general user friendly and have done a fine job but, there are still some problems. The fact that we have a GOP based codec makes frame accurate editing difficult (Thanks to the NLE developers they are finding ways to work around it but not perfectly). Another issue with HDV is the compression algorithm does not handle multiple challenges well simultaneously ie. details and fast action do not coincide in the HDV world so details get lost. The other area of weakness is the colorspace it operates in, 4:2:0. This means you are capturing less color detail AND if you continue down that path in post, you will also have less color bandwidth to work with in your processing like color correction.

So, to overcome these challenges we need to somehow provide a solution that will prevent the limitations from expanding while that many work under limited budgets. The solution is to get the source into a more friendly (less hostile?) post production codec so that you will not lose any more information/detail/fidelity from your original source. This can be done by either transcoding into an intermediate codec like Cineform after you capture or just taking the footage directly into a good post codec like uncompressed, DVCProHD or an MJpeg-based codec all of which are in a better colorspace, 4:2:2, and will suffer less from their compression algorithms as they were designed for post work where as HDV was designed to get as much footage as possible onto a little tape while keeping as much integrity as possible.

For low budgets, HDV makes a lot of sense for acquisition: It's cheap, produces good images and is very portable. For post production it really is the least ideal in the current options and it really doesn't take a whole lot to get it into a better place. So the main idea here is to use HDV where it has strengths and recognize where we should let go of it.

-gl

[George Loch]

Originally Posted by Jacob Carter

I guess a better question is, does capturing from firewire to an HD recorder save the video in true 1920X1080?

Nothing on the market does at the moment other than setting up a computer-based solution - a little awkward in my mind for anything other than set-based shoots.

Originally Posted by Jacob Carter

If I want to record directly to 1920X1080, is HDMI to a computer my only option when using the HV20?

Thanks to the Intensity, HDMI is the cheapest way to do this. This is why it makes a lot of sense for the PPro-wielding editor.

-gl

[Michael Liebergot]

Originally Posted by George Loch

Ok, follow up. Apparently, BMD has not moved it's support into Vegas 7 so, you may want to wait until NAB to see if they update their support policy.

-gl

Thanks George, that's what I was affraid of.

I'm looking at having an Intel Quad Core2DUO system built for me in the next couple of months, and should be able to work with the raw M2t file directly in Vegas, but liked the ieda of the HDMI for output preview. Maybe DSE kows something.

[William Boehm]

thanks so much for clarifying, simplifying the problem to a novice. Then of course my question on which platform to use for a PC that gives the best product would be PP2 coupled with cineform?, Vegas or what? Or should i give the editing a pause and wait until the software catches up.

Thanks again for your help. this is such and incredibly giving forum of experts who help each other along. bill

[Jacob Carter]

Originally Posted by George Loch

Nothing on the market does at the moment other than setting up a computer-based solution - a little awkward in my mind for anything other than set-based shoots.



Thanks to the Intensity, HDMI is the cheapest way to do this. This is why it makes a lot of sense for the PPro-wielding editor.

-gl

Thanks for all the help.

I think I am going to have to get me one of these Intensity cards. =D

[George Loch]

Originally Posted by William Boehm

thanks so much for clarifying, simplifying the problem to a novice. Then of course my question on which platform to use for a PC that gives the best product would be PP2 coupled with cineform?, Vegas or what? Or should i give the editing a pause and wait until the software catches up.

Thanks again for your help. this is such and incredibly giving forum of experts who help each other along. bill

It may be wise to wait at least until NAB (Mid April). You should get a good feel for where everyone is at in their direction. Sony released Vegas 7 last fall so I am not positive we will see what they are up to next. However, I have had a conversation with BMD and they are not planning anything with Vegas in the forseeable future so that may weigh into your decision there.

-gl

[Daniel Browning]

Originally Posted by Daniel Browning

Oh, I see what you're saying now. I didn't realize that today's hardware/software wasn't powerful enough to decode HDV while encoding to a decent codec in real time.

I spoke too soon; you are, in fact, wrong.

It's been possible for quite some time to capture HDV and transcode to a decent codec (such as Cineform) in realtime, even on modest new computers. So, again, there's no point to the Intensity card unless you're going to bypass HDV.

[Harm Millaard]

There still is a lot of confusion about the value of HDMI. Look at the following figure to help you understand this. Double click it to get a readable size.

[Herman Van Deventer]

PPRO 2 / PROSPECT HD / QUAD CORE .....HERE

YUMMY ! YUMMY ! - Very Happy !

The 24f project template setting can be downloaded from Adobe's site.

Herman.

[Jacob Carter]

Thanks for the 24f template.

Can the intensity card output HDMI to a HDTV from a PC?

[George Loch]

Originally Posted by Harm Millaard

There still is a lot of confusion about the value of HDMI. Look at the following figure to help you understand this. Double click it to get a readable size.

Harm,

Interesting chart.

It appears that the lower part of the chart assumes one would import via HDMI back into HDV. This is not the concept we are discussing and would certainly show no benefit. The idea is to take the HDV footage and get it out of HDV into a more usable codec for post work. The HDMI interface facilitates this objective rather easily. Of course, it does not change the quality of the original footage rather it prevents any more damage being done to it. That is the advantage of using the HDMI interface provided by BMD. Otherwise, you could do a separate transcode after you captured via HDV, which some still do with Cineform. That adds an extra step that I prefer to avoid.

-gl