DVCPRO50 codec for vegas?

john-beale wrote on 11/19/2005, 1:25 PM
I am shooting long-form HDV projects and delivering SD DVD. My computer is way to slow to edit in native HDV and I don't have enough disk space to store HD intermediate files, so I would like to edit in 720x480, 4:2:2 colorspace because those look better than 4:1:1 files after compression to MPEG2 DVD (4:2:0) especially when you have a lot of highly saturated reds, which my latest project has plenty of.

The free HuffYUV codec (uses lossless compression) would be perfect for me except that it gives me garbage-filled frames at random intervals (maybe it is not "thread-safe"? I'm using P4 hyperthreading).

The DVCPRO50 codec from Main Concept seems good except that at $350 it's awfully pricey. http://www.mainconcept.com/codecs.shtml#dvcpro

The Sony YUV format takes up too much disk space. Is there any other option?

Comments

TheHappyFriar wrote on 11/19/2005, 3:35 PM
matrox gives away their DVCPro codecs for free. Just look in their support section.
Wolfgang S. wrote on 11/20/2005, 3:28 AM
But as far as I have seen, the free Matrox DVCPro50 codec seems to support only SD-resolution.

Or is there a DVCPro 50 HD version of the codec too, that is for free?

Desktop: PC AMD 3960X, 24x3,8 Mhz * RTX 3080 Ti (12 GB)* Blackmagic Extreme 4K 12G * QNAP Max8 10 Gb Lan * Resolve Studio 18 * Edius X* Blackmagic Pocket 6K/6K Pro, EVA1, FS7

Laptop: ProArt Studiobook 16 OLED * internal HDR preview * i9 12900H with i-GPU Iris XE * 32 GB Ram) * Geforce RTX 3070 TI 8GB * internal HDR preview on the laptop monitor * Blackmagic Ultrastudio 4K mini

HDR monitor: ProArt Monitor PA32 UCG-K 1600 nits, Atomos Sumo

Others: Edius NX (Canopus NX)-card in an old XP-System. Edius 4.6 and other systems

farss wrote on 11/20/2005, 3:54 AM
Wouldn't Gearshift be your logical answer?

Edit lowly DV proxies and then shift gears and render from your m2t files.

If you're worried about the diskspace of the YUV codec I don't think DVCPRO is going to save you that much, also you need to consider CPU overhead. All that said disk space is might cheap these days.

Bob.
BarryGreen wrote on 11/21/2005, 2:03 AM
DVCPRO50 is only SD-resolution. DVCPRO50 is a competing format to Digital Betacam.

DVCPRO-HD is the high-def version. There is no free video-for-windows or directx codec, although Avid does freely distribute an Avid Codecs LE package that includes a Quicktime DV100 codec. (DVCPRO50 a.k.a. DV50; DVCPRO-HD a.k.a. DV100).
farss wrote on 11/21/2005, 2:11 AM
That's indeed true but that's what he's after, a 4:2:2 SD codec!
Question is, how much space would be saved using DVCPRO 50 Vs 8 bit Sony YUV, I suspect not much.
My suggestion was instead of downscaling from HDV to 4:2:2 SD why not edit a proxy and then conform the HDV and encode directly to mpeg-2 SD.
Bob.
john-beale wrote on 11/21/2005, 10:57 AM
Just to check, I did a quick test. Here are the file sizes for a few codecs.

10 second (300 frame) HDV clip rendered to:

DV (SD)----------------37,279 KB
HuffYUV (SD)---------60,227 KB
DVCPRO50 (SD)----72,214 KB
HDV-Intermed--------83,687 KB
SonyYUV (SD)------204,667 KB
HD-YUV------------1,217,167 KB
------------------------------------------
Since SonyYUV is 3x larger than DVCPRO50, it's a significant difference when we are talking about many hours of footage. On the other hand, the HDV Intermediate (1080i) file is only 16% larger than DVCPRO50; both being approx. 2x the DV file size.

All that said, "Gearshift" may be what I really want. I hadn't realized this product existed before, so I'm reading up on that now.

farss wrote on 11/21/2005, 1:49 PM
Given that your PC is a bit slow that would seem by far the best solution.
Bob.