Trouble with capturing SD60P
 

I've looked back at posts for the last few months, and nobody else seems to be having the problem I am, so I must be doing something wrong. Can you folks help me troubleshoot it? JVC seems to have created a monster by classing SD60P as HDV.

I shot a project in SD60P inadvertantly (long story) and need to render it in widescreen. I am using Premiere Pro 1.5.1 and Aspect HD 4.1.2. For reasons I cannot understand, whenever I capture in Prem Pro using the Aspect preset for 720x480 60P it always captures it with a pixel aspect of .9 instead of the 1.2 that the preset specifies. The resulting image has horizontal distortion, and looks like a squeezed down widescreen image. On top of that, there is a timecode mismatch. That is, the capture clock runs twice as fast as the frame counter, so I can only capture the first half of a logged interval. That wreaks havoc in a serial batch capture.

When I use the Cineform capture utility HD Link, I cannot specify intervals or do an unattended batch capture. However, this utility will allow a 1.2 pixel aspect for the captured footage. When I test run an avi of an HD LInk capture in Windows Media Player, it comes up as a widescreen image with no distortion. A capture from within Premiere Pro of the same segment of tape will run as a distorted image in Media Player.

The operating environment is Windows XP Home Edition, and in Windows Explorer the avi files for each of the two methods of capture are "recognized" as 720x480. Yet the linear dimensions of the two are clearly not the same when I run them in Media Player.

I have a work around for the problem which involves stretching the squashed images in After Effects, but the image is degraded after that -- not as sharp.

I HAD a Matrox RT.X100 in the system at first, and was routing the captures through that. But even after I removed the card and its support software, and cleaned out the links in Premiere Pro to it, I am still getting the distorted captures. When the Matrox was still in place, the HD Link captures were so unstable that they would cause Media Player to crash the whole system. I had crashes that required the reinstallation of both the Adobe and Cineform software. Three times.

I have been working with Tim at Cineform on this for a couple of months, but he apparently is not able to replicate my problem enough to help me troubleshoot it. One point he did make was that the SD60P is not really High Def. Aspect supports it, kind of, but since Aspect HD is about HD, this SD format is not one of the mains. JVC on the other hand lumps it in the HDV category, and so the default aspect is 16:9. My hunch is that the Aspect codec used in the plug-in for the preset available to me treats this as SD footage only and will only put it out as 4:3. That would mean it sees the footage as 480/60i instead of the 480/60P JVC intended. However, Tim reports to me that he was able to get a 1.2 pixel aspect capture while in Premiere Pro. If so, the problem is in something I'm doing and not with limitations in the software at all. I'm stumped.

Anybody got any ideas? I will be happy to give more specifics, just tell me what more you might need to know.

In Prem, after capture, simply change the clips interpetation from .9 to 1.2 PAR

and you should be starting with a 16:9 project as well

Steve o

Yeeessss!!! Aspect ratio problem is now circumvented. I'm going to experiment with that a bit on other aspect ratio conversions as well, since I have output from two HDV cameras that shot at different native formats to merge. The HD100 (which was set for HDV SD60P, as noted) and a Sony HDR-FX1 (set for 1080i; 30/60 fps - anamorphic 1.33 pixel). Anyway, I have no idea why the capture is doing what it's doing, but this does indeed get around it. When I tried it, the change appeared immediately on the timeline, and it was preserved in the export. I will play with this a while to see if it holds up to close scrutiny, but for now it looks good. Thank you very much.

There is still the nasty little TC mismatch problem on the batch capture. If that can be cracked as well, I'm back in business on this project. But this is a big help.