Originally Posted by David Allen Smith (Post 834315)

I'm still using MT2 files and converting via SQUARED 5 is this a mistake? The way I look at it I have the ability to convert in any format needed and review the footage at the same time much like using a deck. It seems time consuming but I have had a lot of problems with the Dr-100s in QT mode and chose to continue shooting in MT2 converting to quick time or whatever needed. Am I making a mistake here? I have seen no loss of quality and aside from the time involved with conversion which incidentally gives me a chance to really review the footage, does anybody see this as a mistake in the process..

Originally Posted by Robert Castiglione (Post 834334)

I am interested in this question too. Is there any loss of quality using this workflow as opposed to capturing in other methods. I asked this question of my son who is a total computer software guru type person and he says that it depends upon the implementation of the codec and that if it is pretty good there should only be minimal loss of quality.

Rob

Originally Posted by David Knaggs (Post 834380)

I don't think you could go far wrong, as a workflow these days, to capture in .m2t and convert to ProRes HQ Quicktime movies (external hard drives are getting cheaper and cheaper these days).

Originally Posted by David Knaggs (Post 834380)

Mind you, if my final destination is DVD and there's no reason to leave the NLE (FCP), I'll always capture and edit natively. But these days if I find the need to capture as an .m2t and convert, I'll only use ProRes HQ.

ProRes HQ is only available with FCP 6. On the PC platform, I believe there are excellent codecs you can buy such as Cineform, Bitjazz, Avid's codec, etc.

Originally Posted by David Scattergood (Post 834622)

Paulo - does the PNG encoded QT reference relate to a previous post of yours (going back a couple of weeks) mentioning that this is a good idea if you want to edit a bare minimum of frames (e.g. adjusting text on a frame)?

Originally Posted by Paolo Ciccone (Post 834675)

No, that post was about outputting the master as a series of TIFFs, PNGs would be good too, a practice that will save you a lot of time and worries when you get in post-production. The PNG encoding that I mentioned here is a QT codec. If you look in the list of conversions available from QT you'll see that it's available. It's not nearly as small as others but it preserves the quality of the image 100% because it's lossless. The downside is a bit of sluggish performance. As it's quite well known now I'm a big fan of SheerVideo. Sheer is small enough to be manageable and fasters than many other codecs. It's not free but if you convert footage a lot it's well worth the investment. PNG is included in every version of QuickTime

Originally Posted by David Scattergood (Post 834730)

Thanks Paulo - I'll definitely look into Sheer (and I think there's a free demo knocking about?),

Originally Posted by Paolo Ciccone (Post 834869)

Yes, they provide a 20-day fully functional, no watermark, demo and the reader is free so you can distribute the clips to other people as well.


It could because with Sheer you avoid the transcoding and data loss caused by convert HDV clips to ProRes. At the same time it's faster than PNG so, it's really a matter of workflow and convenience.


Actually that was just a parallel. They use a different algorithm and they have an additional routine that checks the color values from the original and they guarantee faithful conversion between the RGB and YCrCb color spaces.
I was just drawing parallels between lossless codecs.

Thanks for credit, I appreciate it.

Originally Posted by David Scattergood (Post 834622)

Eh up David!
I now use the workflow you posted many moons ago on this board (very detailed and very helpful). Works well and it's only a slight workaround over natively importing into FCP.

Originally Posted by David Scattergood (Post 834622)

I was going to ask about ProRes in FCP5, but you've answered that already (soon time to upgrade perhaps) - I guess I'm stuck with m2t and AIC for the time being (absolutely no way of using component out either).

Originally Posted by David Scattergood (Post 834622)

I was away from this forum for a bit so not sure whether the age old missing footage problem with HDV and FCP was ever fixed?
My camera is actually away with JVC at the moment - performing an upgrade to 'A' and the the next generation of firmware - hopefully I'll notice one or two niggles eliminated on return.

Originally Posted by David Scattergood (Post 834622)

Currently working on my first short (5 min dark comedy) - it's a fast turnaround but I reckon I can handle all that's thrown my way (should my camera return!!).
Wish me luck on that :( !

Originally Posted by David Knaggs (Post 835342)

Hi David!

Yes, AIC gives excellent results (when Tim Dashwood first pioneered the AIC workflow, he mentioned that it is supposed to be visually lossless even though, as Paolo points out, it's not the same thing as theoretically lossless).

ProResHQ, being a broadcast-quality format (with 4:2:2 color sampling), should give an even better result.



Yes, every time I upgrade FCP, I tend to forget about the fact that not everyone else has. So, sorry about that! My simple thought was, when you are scrolling through the list of codecs to convert to in HDVxDV or MPEG Streamclip, why not go with the (superior) ProResHQ over AIC? (But this assumes that both already exist on your computer!)

Mike Curtis has made a thoughtful post just today about ProResHQ (which he calls a great codec and considers it better than Panasonic's D5 format) and is campaigning for Apple to make it available to people who DON'T own FCS 2. It's called "Let ProRes roam free!" and can be found on this link:

http://www.hdforindies.com/2008/02/y...roam-free.html

Personally, "in the future" I can see ProResHQ becoming the broadly adopted standard for people editing HD on the Mac platform. Why? Because it's a broadcast-quality HD codec and everybody has it (or will "in the future" upgrade to it).

But Paolo is right to campaign for the SheerVideo codec. It's not very broadly known about and, if as they claim on their web page, "SheerVideo is the fastest and most versatile codec in the world," then it definitely should be promoted and mentioned a lot more.

The one question (and reservation) I have about SheerVideo is the file sizes. For these ProResHQ conversions I've just done, the ratio is about 4.3:1, i.e. for a 1GB .m2t file you get a 4.3GB Quicktime movie file in ProResHQ.

What is the conversion ratio for an .m2t file to a SheerVideo Quicktime?



Let us know how that goes. Because, if your final output is to DVD or web (and you do your color correction, etc. within FCP), then capturing and editing natively is the way to go. And export directly from the timeline to Compressor to encode your DVD assets or web movie. It completely eliminates the transcoding step (to AIC or ProResHQ or SheerVideo, etc.).

And, supposedly, FCP will internally process your effects in uncompressed space. I made a post quite a while back giving a link to an Apple spokesman talking about it. And I think Steve Mullen made some recent posts in this forum talking about the same thing.

But a lot of people don't want to capture natively because of frustration with mid-clip breaks. Very understandable! So I'm very interested to hear of your results with native capture after the upgrade.




Absolutely! Sounds like fun. Perhaps we'll see some excerpts or stills in the "Finished ProHD Projects" sticky?

Originally Posted by David Knaggs (Post 835342)

The one question (and reservation) I have about SheerVideo is the file sizes.