Bill, with the Aspect codec, editing HDV is no different at all from editing DV. Charlie points that out in the article, he was there as I merrily edited along.
Editing NATIVE HDV, that's another story, but only a fool would do that anyway. Talk about significant loss in addition to bringing the CPU to it's knees.
I've been editing HDV in Cineform on a 2.4 gig laptop, and getting 29.97 on non-filtered frames, and depending on the filter, as slow as 15fps. PIP gets down to around 6 fps. I run in draft mode and can get that back up to around 12-15 fps.

Does the Aspect codec use only key frames? That is, are there any I-frames?

No, there are no i frames, because it's an avi file.

Guess I'm working under some wrong assumptions. Cineform Aspect is a variant of MPEG2 compression technology. I thought all MPEG2 compression used I,P,B frames to one degree or another. The problems, as I'm sure you know, come from rendering effects (transitions, SFX, PIP, etc) with P and B frames in the source material. By minimizing P and B frames, renders get easier, which is what I thought Aspect did. Perhaps, what Aspect does is de-convolve the mpeg2 recorded format into AVI. Then there is a loss associated with the de-convolving, yes? Then there is a re-compression in DV format, followed by a final conversion back to MPEG2 for recording on DVD. I wonder what the artifacts are for that entire process? How does the final output compare to going from straight DV acquire to MPEG2 output?

The Cineform codec converts the MPEG2 file to avi for editing then Vegas renders it back to MPEG2 again so that the Cineform codec can PPT to tape. It does an outstanding job as my old eyes can't tell the difference.

JJK

AVI is merely a format wrapper as far as compression is concerned. It is entirely possible to have I, P, and B frames in AVI files.

I didn't know that.

JJK

I guess I left that open to interpretation. Of course avi is just a wrapper, and can contain any number of codecs.
If I understand what is happening with the Cineform, they are decompressing the Long GOP to a raw format, and compressing it to an intraframe format, so the information is contained on frame by frame basis rather than predictive frames. Therefore, you're working with complete frames in the Cineform file.

According to CineForm's publicly released literature, they make use of a temporal wavelet transform. This method is still storing inter-frame data, but in a very scalable and efficient way. This approach to compression relies heavily on inter-frame coherence in video to achieve reasonable results.

Much of the work to make this technique symmetric (encode and decode effort of the same order of magnitude) with arbitrary motion has been presented as research in only the last ten years.

Basically, interframe coherence means that very little or very slow motion occurs between frames. This would include pans and zooms. So, this makes me ask once again about encoding/decoding artifacts, especially where motion is concerned. I would fantasize that Sony would make a system competitive, at least, with DV, else why go to the bother. I guess no one will know the answer until the camera's are released.

Just had a phone call with Cineform to better understand what they're doing.
It's an 8 bit raw decode/encode to Cineform's wavelet GOP 2 format which is what provides for better bitrate management and faster editing.

i'm with ya on this one, bill... but it's all kinda deja-vu.

back in the day when pc's were real pigs, you had to have an mpeg1 decoding card with it's own output to play back that puny datastream... now here we are again with 1080i.

wavelet codecs are extremely efficient, so it does sound attractive on the surface to shoot wiith it, but there were probably licencing issues.

canopus has a true hardware hdv solution for premeire, so will avid for it's software, and others as well... sony was just ahead of the bell curve on this one, heck, how many people have real hd monitors to edit this stuff on anyway? you gotta start somewhere, even if it means compromising quality by having to totally re-encode raw footage just so you can edit it.

maybe the way to approach it is to use the wavelet codec in an offline mode, then re-capture natively, and render that out.

Was it Dylan that said, "the more times change, the more they stay the same?...LOL

Nobody directly addressed Bill's question on movement artifacts. I believe this has been an issue with the FX1/Z1 and if I am not mistaken even Spot said the Sony demo tapes avoided direct across screen movement and suggested not to use the Z1 for such shots. Isn't this so?

I am not mistaken even Spot said the Sony demo tapes avoided direct across screen movement and suggested not to use the Z1 for such shots

Spot said no such thing at any point. The footage I worked with had SEVERAL across screen pan shots. And zooms. And a few dutch tilt pans. Runners, motorcycles, wheelchairs, lots of horizontal movement. then there is the Bali footage that simply jams. Lots of fast movement from dancers, birds, pans of forests and markets, etc.
It was all good. To date, the only negative word I've had to offer about the camera is that it has a price tag. Wish they'd just give me a couple. I'm fortunate to have the access I've had.

OK Sorry Spot - must have had too much claret tonight - maybe it was the mushrooms.

I'll stick my neck out and say this, I've seen all the footage in question and very little of it would actually stress the encoder that much. A single fast moving object such as a dancer in a locked off shot doesn't amount to a lot of pixels changing value, as the encoding is done in blocks many of them will have the same values and hence the difference data can be accomodated within the bandwidth. Same goes for pans accross green jungle, within the GOP not many blocks will have siginificant value changes.
Now the street scene with lots of moving vehicles and heat haze doesn't look that complex, not much motion so why does it fall apart? Because almost every pixel is changing value between each frame, a big issue for the encoder and the result isn't that pretty.
The limitations are perhaps most obvious in 'that' marathon footage.
None of this detracts from the excellent effort that Sony have put into this camera, I've said this before, I doubt anyone will build a much better HDV format camera at any price. Most of the issues that do exist are not the fault of the camera, every recording system has it' s limitations, with DV25 it's chroma sampling and spatial resolution, once you understand them excellent results are obtainable, same goes for this camera, at the pricepoint the format is shown to be capable of stunning results.
You could spend a LOT more money and get into HDCAM but even that isn't goof proof, sure the envelope is much larger but it's still there and there's plenty who've made dumb criticisms of it as well I'd bet.
Seems to me we are all too ready to criticise without realising what engineering is about, finding the best solution within a set of constraints. If you stop and consider what they are to build a HiDef consummer camera they're bloody tight, maybe the encoder chips could have been made a bit smarter but up goes power consumption, they couldn't use a higher bitrate because they only had DV25 to work with, if they went for a higher bitrate that means a more expensive tape format / heads / problems with capture etc.
If you want a video camera with almost no limitations take a look at the Viper or the Genesis. Even if someone gave you one for free you'd still need very deep pockets to actually use the thing, just the amount of disk space would buy you a good car.
Bob.

It's funny that as soon as HD becomes more of a reality for people at large, the film world just moves the goal posts. While George Lucas may have started a trend of using Cinealta to shoot movies, my money on the future of filmmaking is the new Arri. Fully digital with an absolutely incredible resolution that needs decoding at a lab! Pretty much digital 'developing'. This camera will please the film world because it pretty much keeps not only the quality of film, but also the work flow (and hence keeps people in jobs!)

Now for normal people. We are at a stage of transition. The UK is not likely to have HD any time soon. But if we assume that in 10 years time or so everybody is shooting high def, there will be exactly the same hiearchy there is now.

I predict it will be HDV -> HDCAM or Varicam -> Cinealta (if it still exists)-> Arri digital.

Because the goal posts will have been moved, normal guys will still be as far away from making 'real' movies as they are now because although HDV will hold up better on a bigger screen, the difference between HDV and the Arri digital camera will be similar to that of a DVX100 compared with 35mm.

One of HDV's biggest problems is that as I have said in other forums, the USA is not the world. HD-TV may well be a reality in the US, Australia and Japan. But there are many more countries in the world than that, many of which may not see HD-TV for a very long time indeed. Anyone buying an FX1 for it's HDV capabilities in the UK for example is simply stark raving bonkers! A bit like buying an MX5 sports car when your intention is to have a car that you can drive your family around in and to do the shopping.

Now, here's a suggestion. How about an HDV camera that has a certain amount of on chip memory so that it could take a set of raw HD frames and then process them via multi pass processing before laying down the MPEG onto the tape?

Yes but Simon Im from the UK AND would like to make Films ect and using this Camera I could have a chance to make a Commercial Film that could be rendered out into another pro Format So even having to wait ten years for HDV is Immaterial which would then have the Picture quality of a much more expensive camera... OK My one reservation is Depth of Field... I would like to have seen bigger chips but some people have pointed out this camera achieves A good DOF... Although how this is done I Dont know and I really hope that its not just zooming in from a distance and there really is A Good dof going on here please someone Assure me this is the case ...

I don't know when you're going to see HDTV in the UK, you'll be seeing a lot of HD in cinemas, the govt is funding the conversion of over 100 cinemas to digital projection in the UK. THe countries that you mentioned though would be a big slice of where content sales are made, effectively requiring the rest of the world to shoot HD.
Bob.

Bob we have a satellite channel here called BskyB Who will be showing HD Starting in 2006 Already the BBC Film a lot of stuff in HD

What a sexy looking camera.

Way outta my price range but 5 years ago, I woulda laughed if ya said I would be editing videos on my home computer.

Can't wait to see some real world examples of this format.