DVCPRO-HD: AJA Xena, Blackmagic or none?

Sidecar wrote on 5/19/2007, 12:10 PM
We are going to buy Panasonic HDX900 DVCPRO-HD cameras and decks to work primarily with Media 100 HD NLE.

What's the card to get to ingest this format into Vegas? AJA LH or LHe (PCI express)? Other?

How does Vegas ingest SDI? What's the workflow?

Pardon my ignorance, but I have no idea how Panasonic works with a Sony product or if it even can.

Talking with the AJA folks at the recent HD Expo at the Beverly Hills Hilton, they said the problem with integrating capture cards with Vegas is that the drivers have to be written by Sony, not by the card makers, because Vegas is not "open source" or some such. That means driver support is somewhat lacking. Apparently Blackmagic was good for Vegas 6, but died with 7. This also explains why other apps appear to get a lot more third party support.

Comments

rmack350 wrote on 5/19/2007, 1:03 PM
None of the NLEs are "open source". Maybe what he was trying to say is that Sony Creative doesn't give card makers enough information to write drivers, and so in his opinion Sony should be writing the drivers.

Looking at a panasonic press release for the HDX900, it says that the camera has firewire output, so I have to assume that you can capture data straight out of a camera or deck in HDCPro HD format, no transcode. Unfortunately, Vegas doesn't have any means of working with that footage directly, probably meaning you'd need to use Raylight or Cineform to translate it, and some sort of Panasonic Application to do the capture.

People do use AJA Xena cards with Vegas and Vegas has an internal capture app that will interface with the card and control the deck. The data from the deck comes in over SDI and then gets written into a specific codec, which wouldn't have to be HDCProHD. Just because it comes off of the HDCProHD hardware doesn't mean the media on the computer needs to stay in that format.

The main issue for you is to ensure some compatibility between the Media100 systems and Vegas systems. The first thing I'd do is get some sample footage that was acquired by a m100 system from an HDCProHD deck and saved as HDCPro HD on that system. Then figure out what you need to do to open it in Vegas (probably using Raylight). And then figure out what you need to do to go back to M100.

Another issue is integrating the Xena into your PC. I wouldn't expect to just buy one and throw it into the PC, so make sure you do your homework.

I'm just making conjecture. Our shop used Media100 for years and years, our infrastructure is SDI, and we currently take in DV25 over SDI (to Axio/ppro. The shop isn't using Vegas-that's just me). As soon as it hits the DVCam deck's SDI output it's no longer DV25. The same would be true of HDCPro HD - if you take it in over SDI it's no longer HDCPro HD unless your computer rewrites it in that codec. That rewrite itself can be a problem.

Anyway, some here have said that the Xena cards are very solid with Vegas. The BMD driver was good for just one rev with Vegas and then BMD changed it and it broke for Vegas. And Vegas has no way to directly control HDCam HD over firewire, nor does Vegas have direct support for the codec.

Make any sense?

Rob Mack
farss wrote on 5/19/2007, 2:30 PM
Sorry to spoil the party but my BMD Decklink card is working way better with V7 than it did with V6. V6 didn't work with the latest BMD drivers and V7 needs a different rev of the dirvers to V6, again not the latest one.
I suspect there's some truth to what AJA are saying about Vegas, this is exactly what BMD have to say as well. I'm not privy to any real details on exactly what the problem is but something about Vegas not supporting Directshow comes up. Certainly Vegas has never supported all the BMD functionality, don't know if it does eveyrthing that AJA say their cards can do either.

Bob.
rmack350 wrote on 5/19/2007, 3:56 PM
You would certainly know better than I since you're speaking from experience.

Maybe another way of looking at it is that, since Vegas doesn't directly support DVCPro-HD, an SDI capture card is the way to go.

Rob
Sidecar wrote on 5/19/2007, 5:29 PM
Good puts, all.

It sounds like I won't have a capture utility that will see the DVCPRO-HD deck, even if the deck has firewire out, correct? Vegas already has two: one for SD and one for the
Sony HDV Z1 (etc) cameras.

AJA Xena comes with a capture utility called Machina. Could what that captured footage be edited by Vegas?

But I still need to know how to import footage from DVCPRO-HD source.

What's the best (highest quality/most efficient, etc) way to bring DVCPRO-HD footage into Vegas?
Sidecar wrote on 5/19/2007, 5:34 PM
Rob,

I believe Media 100 converts imported footage into a Media 100 proprietary format.

As our Media 100 HD does not have a firewire input, when we import Sony HDV 1080i x 1440 footage from the Z1, we bring it in via the YRB component outputs of the camera or deck and let Media 100 digitize it to uncompressed Media 100 codec. Looks pretty darn good, too, even though it's an analog step.

Once into the M100, I'm pretty sure it's a M100 format codec file.

How M100 will import the Panasonic DVCPRO-HD is a guess at this point.
rmack350 wrote on 5/19/2007, 10:11 PM
Vegas should be able to control the Panasonic deck though an AJA or BMD card. It makes most sense to acquire footage via SDI from the Panasonic deck but I'm assuming you'd have to add the SDI capability to the deck in addition to building a PC and storage array to go with the capture card.

The other option is to do the same thing using an AJA or BMD card as you are doing with your Media100 systems - Capture component-in and save files in a codec that Vegas can read.

Either of these options really make the fact that the camera records in DVCPro-HD codec irrelevant.

It might be that Machina is a much more capable application than Vegas' built-in capture tool, but you could choose either one.

Rob Mack
farss wrote on 5/19/2007, 10:44 PM
One not so cheap box (<$10K) that offers a lot of interesting possibilities is this:
http://www.edirol.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=222&Itemid=424

Being able to go HD SDI to HDV might seem a step backwards but from my experieces with DB->DV the rseults might be better than we think.

Bob.

Sidecar wrote on 5/20/2007, 2:44 AM
I saw the Edirol box at the HD Expo as well. Looked like it would be a very welcomed addition to anyone's bag of tricks if he had the budget.
farss wrote on 5/20/2007, 5:08 AM
It costs a fair slab of cash but compared to the alternatives in certain situations it's very cheap.

For 'OB' stype shoots today you can buy relatively affordable HD cameras from Canon or add a little box to some very cheap Sony HDV cams to get you HD-SDI. Datavideo and others do reasonably priced HD-SDI switchers, around the $10K mark. But then what do you record to?
HDCAM or DVCPro HD VCRs cost huge sums of money. With that Edirol box you can record to afforable Sony HDV VCRs.

Bob.
rmack350 wrote on 5/20/2007, 12:12 PM
This seems to be off the point if your group has already decided to buy "Panasonic HDX900 DVCPRO-HD cameras and decks (plural) to work primarily with Media 100 HD NLE"

It depends on what decks you've decided to buy but if you're going for the aj1400 ($25k/deck) these have SDI output and it's what you should be using for all the edit systems, including Media100.

Maybe at that price it makes more sense to have centralized storage and just one deck. This is what we do now, and each edit system can control the deck. We're not on the same edit systems as you but the workflow would be the same. An option, anyway.

If you're getting some other sort of deck without SDI then maybe the thing to do is spring for another program that can control the deck over firewire. For instance, PPro can probably do it. This puts you back in the position of having to use Raylight to use the footage in Vegas, and it may be a bear to reacquire footage down the road. But it gets another NLE in the house to become familiar with

I'm guessing that the Media100 systems drive the purchasing decisions. Why you're digitizing via component inputs is beyond me. I'm not assuming that you need to economize. I'm advocation the Xena or Decklink card and SDI because it seems like the most straightforward route and eliminates any dvcpro-hd incompatibilities. But if you go that route you might expect to rebuild your system around the card.

Rob Mack
Sidecar wrote on 7/14/2007, 5:15 AM
Rob,

Sorry for the very late reply, but to answer your question concerning why we digitize via component, our initial foray into HD was to buy a couple of Sony Z1 HDV cameras and the small Sony playback decks. The decks do not have SDI out and our HD Media100 systems don't have firewire in. The only connection was via component out of the HD decks to the component in on the M100 breakout box. And like I said, the quality is pretty good.

When the Panasonic gear arrives, it will be SDI all the way...at least into and out of Media 100.

It's the Vegas I/O part I'm worried about. I don't have an AJA or Blackmagic Design card on my Vegas PC...just firewire. I'm afraid I won't be able to get Panasonic footage into Vegas directly.

This week we installed the Raylight software onto my PC. It does indeed allow me to play back the DVCPROHD file we rendered out of Media 100. That's really good news and for a mere $100 I'm compatible.

I just wish I could ingest Panasonic footage as easily and reliably as I can ingest Sony HDV or MiniDV/DVCAM.

Thanks for your input. It was valuable.
rmack350 wrote on 7/14/2007, 12:48 PM
It seems like you're making progress.

As I understand it, once you're ingesting via SDI, the footage doesn't *have* to be DVCPROHD any more. Getting it via SDI gives you something more like a raw stream that you can then re-encode as you like. So, for example, we brought DV25 into our media100 systems and media100 would encode it in it's native mjpeg format. We now do the same thing with our Axio systems and the DV25 gets encoded in a Matrox codec.

You're right that you can't get the Panasonic footage into Vegas via firewire using Vegas, which is too bad. You'd need a third party capture application to capture and then Raylight or perhaps the free Avid codec to play it in Vegas.

Aside from just finding a third party capture application (it'd be nice if the Panasonic hardware included a standalone tool. Does it?) you also need to find a way for Vegas to interact with it. You can specify the capture application for Vegas to use in its preferences but I have no idea if that actually does anything useful.

One thing I think is essential is for Vegas to be able to read the source timecode of the DVCPROHD files. Without this, it'll be that much harder to recapture footage.

So let's assume some things go your way:
--you have a capture application that can control a DVCPROHD source over firewire
--The capture application can import log files or batch capture lists
--Vegas can read the timecode in the captured files

Media100 has a facility to export a log that you should be able to import into the capture application.
Vegas can also export a log if you use Veggie Toolkit. This also needs to be importable to the imaginary capture application. If you can do all of this then you'd have a way to capture and re-capture DVCPROHD for use in Vegas, and you can also use log information from the Media100, which might very well save a little time, depending on how your group works.

Rob Mack