Thanks for the correction Barry. I guess I was underestimating by quite a wide margin. I've worked with DVCproHD material on a BlackMagic/FCP setup, and the 1080i/24p material (HDCAM SDI conversion) was about 32 GB for 50 min. of material. In quoting 30 gigs per hour, I was mentally adding the 720p/24p stuff, which would probably be 1/3rd the material, but I was still off for sure.

250 GB FW drives are pretty dang cheap now. That's about 4 hrs of 720/60p. In addition, I think we'll see 1TB single drives in the not-too-distant future. HD archival seems pretty feasible now.

<<<-- Originally posted by Aaron Koolen : Can someone tell me what the actual pixel resolution is of the DVCProHD formats? Are they square pixels and so 1080 means it's 1920, or something else?

Aaron -->>>

Final Cut Pro tells me that 1080i DVCProHD is actually 1280x1080, but when I view the clip in QuickTime player, QT says it's 1920x1080. I'm pretty sure Panny uses a horizontal pixel stretch in order to achieve the HD spec resolution. A tradeoff for sure, but still looks wonderful for the data rate employed. HDCAM 24p converted to this format is amazingly good, considering the multiple gens of compression.

720p is allegedly 960x720, again, stretched horizontally.

Dude, he said HDV, not DV! Just because they have the same bit rate, it does not mean they have the same complexity. HDV is long GOP MPEG-2...

MPEG2 is hard to edit precisely because it is MPEG2. You should be able to edit a real frame per frame format with much more ease.

<<<-- Originally posted by Emre Safak : Dude, he said HDV, not DV! Just because they have the same bit rate, it does not mean they have the same complexity. HDV is long GOP MPEG-2... -->>>

My bad, I definately misread there. My understanding though is that you don't edit MPG2 native, most people convert using Cineform Intermediate or some such. Then you have no problems - apparently.

Aaron

<<<-- Originally posted by Aaron Koolen : <<<-- Originally posted by Carl Merritt : How can one edit this stuff on a PC or Mac?

If the HDV 25mb/s makes a dualie PC struggle, what kind of system would be required to edit 100mb/s HD!?!? -->>>

If your dualie PC is struggling with DV25, there's something wrong....Sure you're not editing off floppy disks? :)

I edit a couple of streams of DV25 in realtime without too much problem, and I'm usually doing something stupid like having all streams on the same drive which will definately kill it.

What software you using?

Getting stuff off the drive should be fine, I mean DVCProHD is 14megabytes a second - easy peasy for a drive these days.

Aaron -->>>

Oh, okay.
When I read some info from Adobe about editing HDV with PPro they said my system could struggle to edit and won't necessarily playback realtime - so I figured the DVCPROHD would kill it.

But there's a huge difference -- HDV, while having a lower data rate (25mbps vs. 100mbps), is grouped into groups of 15 frames. If you want to access any particular frame, you have to start at the beginning of the group and uncompress each frame until you get to the one you're looking for.

Whereas with an intraframe codec like DVCPRO-HD, you just seek to the frame you want, and uncompress it. It should be much, much, much more responsive to edit than HDV is.

With HDV, it seems like most editing programs are going with the "intermediate codec" approach, such as Lumiere, CineForm, or Apple's AIC. There they convert from the HDV codec into a more-suitable-for-editing codec. I believe CineForm's has a 2-frame GOP, meaning the most it would have to search for a particular frame would be through two frames, as opposed to the 15 frames of raw HDV data.

Awwwwwwww man,

Well, I guess it's a shame to hear the awful truth sometimes . . . which incidentally is . . .

. . . now I know the 28 Days Later director was doing nothing more than being stupid. People for years have had to set up clunky film cameras and shoot something inside of minutes for an infinite number of reasons; dawn or sunset shots, can only close the road so long, planes in the air, cranky kids, constant traffic, bad weather, money reasons, you name it. Hell, even I did it. I had to steal all sorts of shots with a 16mm camera to make my first feature on the streets of Dallas. We had entire scenes with the hero running around trying to catch this girl in a car. I had about a 15 k budget and I'm doing this. You say this director had OVER 3 mill?

Of course as you said, the situation may have gone far past stupid . . . to the ultimate level of doing "the IN thing". Ya, man, Spike Lee and Steven Sodenberg did it (Sodenberg with that EXCELLENT, EXCELLENT, INCREDIBLE film called FULL FRONTAL - Wow, what an achievement!) . . . so of course we should all do it and it would be really COOL.

Give me a break. If you make a movie, do it to satisfy yourself or your crowd, not the god awful status quo of the Hollywood elites. That status quo has been taking a severe toll on the quality of movies. Cinematographers trying to make every flick of ever genre look like a music video, or directors ordering to their editors to not have any shot in the film last over 4 seconds because it gets to boring for audiences? What the hell? (Oh, and p.s., I used to like Spike Lee, but now I think his films have transended into total self-absorbtion and instead of making deep meaningful films, he uses what's left of his talent to never stop screaming about what is politically correct).

By the way, I'm not shocked that it took the 28 Days guy 2 years to sell his film. Personally, I think if he shot it on 35, he would have sold it immediately. Even the money-grubbing distributors consider higher resolution/better image quality important. They know a film on mini DV could projected to a big screen could kill the picture.

Again, all just my opinions.

And I also started a new thread in the totum poll to talk further about this, because I figure this isn't the right place for it if you want to keep the conversation going. The thread is called "Whether or not 28 Days Later being shot on Mini DV was good or bad".

My .02 on 28 Days. I think he shot it the way he did not just because of closing streets.

I think he did it for the way he wanted to tell his story. He wanted to get into the idea that his guy is a lone in the world.

I think the film was good and bad as a movie.

Like I said just my .02, plus also he did sell it.

<<<-- Originally posted by Laurence Maher :

Again, all just my opinions.

And I also started a new thread in the totum poll to talk further about this, because I figure this isn't the right place for it if you want to keep the conversation going. The thread is called "Whether or not 28 Days Later being shot on Mini DV was good or bad". -->>>

Offcourse, no offence or something taken :-)

<<<-- Originally posted by Charles Papert : Methinks that a bad movie made on HD will not be more successful than a good one made on SD. It will just be a sharper bad movie. -->>>

LOL, yeah, it will maybe just call more attention to the bad cinematography, bad make up and cheaply built sets. All is sharper, good and bad things. hehehe. Good one Charles.