DJP,

Vegas struggles with decoding the highly compressed MPEG-2 stream, not the data rate. Uncompressed SD AVI bitrates are more than ten times the bitrate of HDV and Vegas handles that fine. The same can be said for DV which runs at the same bitrate as HD2 (HDV2), but is less compressed. So while DVCPRO HD runs around 100Mbps, it is much less compressed than HDV.

Now I can't say for certain, but I'm guessing that DVCPRO HD Decoder works by transcoding the "wrapper" on DVCPRO HD and not transcoding the entire file. There are programs that will change AVI's to Quicktime, and vice-versa, whithout having to transcode the entire program. Granted, you are correct that this interrupts the workflow more than being able to edit the footage natively, but on the bright side you shouldn't lose any quality or go through any colorspace changes. That is, if it works the way I suspect it works.

Corey

or...
If you use DV Rack to record Straight to Disk... you will Capture Native .avi files.
No transcoding or slowdowns. You can get straight to editing what you've captured.

Naturally, if you like having an archival format... you can still (also) capture to Tape or Card if you'd like.

-The whole Capturing to Card thing really turns me off. You have to have some type of archival step in there anyways. Unless you have tons of money to just keep your footage on the P2 Cards.

-Personally I don't care about being able to edit in the native P2 Card format but I can see where it would be beneficial to others.

I think that the P2 cards will do better as rental items for a while. They'd pay for themselves much more easily in a rental package.

And yes, you're going to need a way to archive it all.

Rob Mack

i hear you fellas, but i think the whole flow here is "recpord to card, insert card to laptop, and either copy across to HD or edit direct from card.
For corporate work where time is of the essence this flow would be very appealing, as i can edit with the client over my shoulder. Its efficient and and rather effective for futureproofing work with that company when they can see how efficient YOU are to save THEM money.

taking all these steps (if they take as long as i think theyd take) all defeat the purpose of this type of workflow.
They are effective, but it seems raylight is the only real solution at this time... the others work to, but lets face it, i cant carry a laptop when im running and gunning a vox pop in the streets of sydney...

Raylight is slower than Serious Magic or CineForm's workflow...but it's very, nice to the media on conversion, and was also the first conversion software.

You really think a client wants to see you pop a card in to edit every 4/8 minutes, so they can watch you edit from that card? I don't think so.
Maybe they want to watch you edit after you've gotten 2-4 cards worth of data dumped...
either way, the SM and CineForm workflows are nearly as fast, and work very, very well, if you need to use DVCProHD footage from a P2 card.

[edit]to comply with moderator's request...I have written reviews on, and personally used CineForm, Raylight, and Serious Magic software products, receiving review copies of all three brands of software at no compensation. I have received no remuneration from any of those three companies for my reviews nor expressed use of their products in my daily workflow that might occasionally include the HVX/P2 products. I have not done tradeshow demos, do not work for, and am not specifically affiliated with any of the three products mentioned in this thread.
I just happen to have written about all of them, and enjoy working with all three of them in terms of having support for Sony Vegas software.
(That clear things up, Forum Admin? )
now if only others would drop their drawers as well, after all, that's only fair.
And I did stay in a Holiday Inn Express last night. ;-)

Raylight is slower than Serious Magic or CineForm's workflow...

((So ive heard. especially when it comes to previewing and rendering... .. :(

You really think a client wants to see you pop a card in to edit every 4/8 minutes, so they can watch you edit from that card? I don't think so.

Maybe they want to watch you edit after you've gotten 2-4 cards worth of data dumped...

((Thats the ultimate goal..... actaulyl its what id prefer, but sometimes before we go ahead with a shooting "style" they like to eswe the results on afew test shots before going for it.
I was consideirng th Serious Magic 2 solution... who knows... i mean Vegas is good with alot of things, but maybe with this i might jsut stick with edius.. even though i really REALLY dont want to...
Im yet to try all options, but i was jsut consideirng what might be the best solution so far.. and hoping that anyone already using any of these could pipe in with their 2c worth... I still dont kI might jsut stick with the Z1's... and stick with tape.. but the tape workflow is something im tryin to move away from... and firestores dnt like me... ive tried them with the Z1 and the dvx100... too many issues to deal with on those things.. at least with tap ei know i have my footag there and it wont nuke itslef.. lol ))

either way, the SM and CineForm workflows are nearly as fast, and work very, very well, if you need to use DVCProHD footage from a P2 card.

((Ill keep that in mind... thank for the input :) ))

The P2 dump-to-laptop solution is also not quite all it seems to be.

If you need to dump more than 15 P2 card loads to disk, you need to bring a second laptop.

This is because each P2 card needs to be transferred to its own partition (for speed), and either Win XP or Mac OS X can only have 16 partitions including the system partition.

So after doing that for while, you spend $2,500 on a P2 "deck" to solve this problem once and for all.

Hmmm, same problem. Actually worse, because if you're using 8GB cards, you can only read in 7 of them before the "deck" is full. Seems to be a self-contained mini PC with a card reader and a reinforced price tag.

Makes XDCAM-HD look flat out incredibly good: large capacity, fractional media cost, archival media, no laptops on set, works at Iditarod and in Death Valley.

One of the joys of leaving tape behind is not having to capture video in realtime.

Well, P2 cards are near realtime, even with the partition kludge. Capturing the video on the card and formatting it to prepare for the next recording session seems to take about 4 minutes for a 4 minute card.

And of course after that, the Video Assistant has to go collect the P2 card snippets from the various partitions and transfer them to a regular project folder.

>>If you need to dump more than 15 P2 card loads to disk, you need to bring a second laptop. This is because each P2 card needs to be transferred to its own partition (for speed), and either Win XP or Mac OS X can only have 16 partitions including the system partition.<<

Not true at all. The P2 Store works that way, but laptops don't. You can transfer hundreds of cards to a single drive (depending on how big that drive is). I've filled several 300gb drives from 4gb cards no problem.


>>One of the joys of leaving tape behind is not having to capture video in realtime.<<
Er... if that's your goal, then when praising XDCAM-HD you might want to re-examine the rest of the XDCAM-HD workflow. When shooting to an "archival" media, the very first step you have to take is to "restore your footage from archive", and with XDCAM-HD that means real time, 1:1. It'll never be faster because the media is limited to the 36mbps transfer speed.

>>Well, P2 cards are near realtime, even with the partition kludge.<<
There is no "partition kludge" when working with a laptop. And "realtime" depends on several factors, not the least of which is which format you shot in. If you shot DV, your transfer is 4x faster than realtime. If you shot 720/24pN, your transfer is about 2.5x faster than realtime. In 1080, it's about realtime. But then again it depends on what you're transferring from and to; the transfer is limited by the hard disk speed. The cards are capable of 80 megabyte per second transfers, but the hard drives are typically limited to no more than about 30 megabytes per second. In an ideal world if you were to transfer directly to an 80mB/sec SATA RAID, you could transfer 1080 at 6x faster than realtime, 720/24pN at 15x faster than realtime, and DV at 24x faster than realtime.

But this ignores the main point which may come out with larger cards, which is: you don't *have* to transfer at all, in a properly-integrated tapeless system. Why transfer? Just edit directly from the card. So far only EDIUS and Avid support that though. With EDIUS it's really simple, plug the card in, drag the files to the timeline and edit.

It's great that people are coming up with patches to try to make things work, but I think they're all missing the boat. FCP's implementation is better than nothing, but it's not "there" yet. Raylight and SM's decoder and CineForm are all nice intermediary steps, but they're not "there" yet. Avid is close but it's still a "patch", it doesn't support the files the way they should be. Only EDIUS has the tapeless thing really figured out. Shoot to the card -- plug the card in -- drag to the timeline -- edit -- render out to the card. Never touch a "hard disk", never "transfer footage", never "capture". No logging, no timecode, no in/out, no batch capture, none of that, it's all done away with; instead just immediately edit the footage from the card. Of course this is a limited workflow with today's tiny cards but once we get 32gb or 64gb or 128gb cards, all those intermediary steps can just disappear. And this is the kind of workflow that could never happen from a system like XDCAM-HD.

DV Rack 2.0 gets close there with the direct-to-disk capturing, for those who don't mind being cabled (and on any studio-style production, when aren't you cabled to at least a monitor and to the audio equipment anyway, so what's one more cable?) With DV Rack 2.0 you capture to disk, drop on the timeline, edit. No transferring, no transcoding, no hassles.

Glad to hear there is better software for laptop download now.

Question: Why are people concerned about skipping the verification pass (to save time) when copying video from P2 cards to harddisk? Is there really any higher risk of data corruption here than when copying from any other flash memory?

Reading XDCAM-HD disks from a deck via Ethernet runs at 72 Mbps, i.e. 2x realtime, and alternatively one could also offline-edit the Proxy A/V that is near-instantly available, and then online-replace that at 72 Mbps.

I agree that it's way cool to just edit right on the card, which should be a treat for newsrooms.

Still, even newsrooms have a strong need to archive their footage for future sales and even legal reasons.

So what do they do if they shoot on P2 cards? Archive to an XDCAM-HD deck? A wall of harddisks? Data tape drives?

As far as 720 vs. 1080, it is generally going to end up in living rooms and there everybody is really wanting 1080p, and they are increasingly getting it.

True 1080p LCD TVs are now down to $700-900 (monitor with component, S-video, DVI, etc. inputs), and the picture is significantly better than the still common 1366x768 LCDs and plasma TVs (even a good 1680x1050 LCD is preferable to a 1366x768 imho).

For picky home viewers getting their content from cable/satellite/BD/HD DVD it is also nice to get as close to the final 1920x1080 resolution as possible without excessive scaling. Also in this respect, the current standard media formats for XDCAM-HD seem to be more suited than the more hardware-gentle P2 formats.

Let's remember that XDCAM-HD camcorders start at about 3 times the cost of an HVX200 though, plus a lens (although these seem to be relative bargains already).

>>Question: Why are people concerned about skipping the verification pass (to save time) when copying video from P2 cards to harddisk? Is there really any higher risk of data corruption here than when copying from any other flash memory?<<

People are, IMHO, paranoid because it's a new workflow. Having now done a few terabytes worth of card transfers I don't bother with verify, it just works, and I haven't lost a single bit.

>>Still, even newsrooms have a strong need to archive their footage for future sales and even legal reasons. So what do they do if they shoot on P2 cards? Archive to an XDCAM-HD deck? A wall of harddisks? Data tape drives?<<
You wouldn't use an XDCAM-HD deck because it'd be way too slow; it'd take an hour and a half to archive an hour's footage of 1080 from P2. But yes, hard disks and data tape are the way it's done right now. An LTO3 drive costs 1/6 as much as a DVCPRO-HD tape deck, the tapes are like $60 for 400gb, and you can archive an hour's worth of footage in 10 minutes (presuming you have the ability to feed data to the drive at that rate). And that's at 1080; at 720/24p you're going to be able to put an hour up there in about 4 minutes (in an ideal world with ideal throughput, etc).

But for most of us, we're currently just using hard disks, for three main reasons: cost, ease, and instant restorability. Cost, because hard disks are way cheaper than DVCPRO-HD tape or blu-ray discs; ease, because you just plug in a drive and copy files over, no need to worry about running archival software or anything like that; and restorability because your "archive" is all instantly accessible. No need to "restore" anything. Just plug in the drive and it works.

As far as "A wall of harddisks", hard disks are more space efficient than tapes. A single external 500gb hard disk holds as much 1080 footage as 10 DVCPRO-HD tapes, yet takes up a lot less room. It holds as much 720/24 footage as 25 DVCPRO-HD tapes yet takes up way, way less room. So if you had the room to archive tapes, you've got more than enough room to archive hard disks. And the drives cost way less per minute than tapes do. And you don't need a deck either.

Someday we look forward to Toshiba/Maxell/InPhase's 1.6-terabyte Holographic storage with its 1gbps data transfer rate, so as a temporary/interim solution, hard disks and/or LTO3 seem to be the preferred methods.

I'm totally with you on the data tapes, have always been pushing for those.

50,000 hours head life instead of 1,500 hours, 1 dropout per 100 years instead of you-know-what, etc.....

For now I'd say just get the cheapest of LTO3 or SDLT600, they are both extremely reliable, and I think they will be useful for many years while the holographic storage proves itself in real use (or not).

Hmm, it seems in video that no matter what tapeless digital camera technology appears, the manufacturers think that there must always be a "deck". Because that's how they make their money; first feeding their factory workers, and then their maintenance staff.

So even if a new video camera comes out with onboard holographic storage, they must still sell a $15,000 deck to go with it, I guess it'll be called a "Holodeck (TM)" :O).

You know how many famous pro audio boxes from the past are now not only emulated on computers, they are also depicted onscreen, and the knobs work?

Someday we'll see this with "decks" too, but perhaps not before the last video engineer has died...

I got curious about the mentioned 36 Mbps data rate, and found that consumer Blu-Ray gear reads and writes at 36 Mbps, but the professional XDCAM-HD standard is twice as fast, i.e. 72 Mbps.

XDCAM-HD also uses two heads for read/write, so it can do 144 Mbps if there are no other bottlenecks.

>>Someday we'll see this with "decks" too, but perhaps not before the last video engineer has died...<<

Already there... ;)
http://seriousmagic.com/products/dvRack/dvrInterface.cfm

>>XDCAM-HD also uses two heads for read/write, so it can do 144 Mbps if there are no other bottlenecks.<<

Where did you see this? I'm looking at the specs for the $16,000 deck and the only high-speed transfer it mentions is that it can send the 2mbps proxies out through its network interface at 18-20x realtime (which is of course 36-40 mbps). No mention of it in the XDCAM HD Family Brochure on Sony's website either.

Is there some other reference that talks about getting data off the disk at 72 or 144mbps?

I found this on p. 5 of the April 2006 issue of Film & Digital Times, a supplement to American Cinematographer, written by Jon Fauer, ASC.

I’ll take a wild stab at the question of 35 vs. 72 – just hope I don’t stab someone’s eye.

Possibly it could be the compression/decompression would be to too taxing.

So it could be cranked up to 50 or 72 but be too much for a NLE system to handle.
Or maybe Sony will down road come out with the new XDCAM HD50 camera.

maybe Sony will down road come out with the new XDCAM HD50 camera

Not likely. You are probably thinking of intraframe compression formats.

XDCAM-HD uses interframe compression, so it can contain much more picture information at 35 Mbps than an intraframe compression format like DVCPRO-HD can deliver at 100Mbps.

Just think about how much similarity there is from frame to frame overall in a typical scene. In intraframe compression, this is not taken into account at all.

The cost is in CPU clock cycles for processing. In that area, the DVCPRO-HD codec really shines, as even older asthmatic Macs were able to crunch multiple tracks, which made it quickly popular (besides the Varicam producing outstanding quality footage of course).

Many Sony codecs use interframe compression at very high bitrates, over 100Mb/sec and that's for SD. However they use very short GOPs, online editing with long GOPs I think would be a nightmare although maybe not these days. The new Sony HDV decks will do deck to deck edits using nothing more than two decks and a controller, I'm not very likely to try this anytime soon but would be 'interesting'.
Bob.

Many Sony codecs use interframe compression at very high bitrates, over 100Mb/sec and that's for SD.

At those bit rates, you are close to uncompressed, so what is the benefit here?

Are you sure you're not thinking HD?

Curious...
Would Recording Direct To Disc with DVRack HD solve these issues?

(Naturally, you could still record to tape, P2 or whatever)