FX1 HDV->DV camera conv. always 16:9?

Spot|DSE wrote on 6/20/2006, 12:16 PM

not without a crop, squeeze, or letterbox. HD is *always* widescreen.
So, in the FX you have to crop, anamorphic, or letterbox. Or crop in Vegas.

johnmeyer wrote on 6/20/2006, 12:27 PM

I can crop in the FX? After I've shot?

Where's my manual ...

[Edit]
Hmmm ... Further research over at sonyhdvinfo.com provides this nugget:

"IF you have access to a Sony HVR-Z1 (the "pro" high end FX1), then it DOES have a mode that can "center cut" the 16:9 HDV from your tape and output over i.Link/Firewire 4:3 DV directly. But only the Z1 can do this with HDV. The FX1, HC1, HC3, and A1 all can downconvert HDV but only into 16:9 DV." -- Kerr Cook, Administrator

Thus, much of what I've read here that lead me to believe that the FX1 could do this may have come from people that have the Z1 and assume that the FX1 can do the same thing.

Boy, the various Z1/FX1 comparisons that focus mostly on the XLR audio as the main difference sure miss a lot. I have now cataloged several dozen differences, many of them important (such as this one).

I love my FX1 a ton, but next time, I'll get the Z1.

Laurence wrote on 6/20/2006, 1:03 PM

The A1 has all the SD downconvert options just like the Z1.

Spot|DSE wrote on 6/20/2006, 1:10 PM

Oops, I didn't realize the FX doesn't do this. I thought it did. My error.

winrockpost wrote on 6/20/2006, 2:51 PM

FX1 = I think we are close
z1 well we are getting closer

riredale wrote on 6/20/2006, 2:56 PM

Since I think the innards of both cameras are nearly identical, I suspect that eventually a firmware "hack" will be discovered to give the FX1 most, if not all, the attributes of the Z1. I would imagine Sony will not be happy about this, since the Z1 must be a Cash Cow for them.

johnmeyer wrote on 6/20/2006, 3:09 PM

suspect that eventually a firmware "hack" will be discovered to give the FX1 most, if not all, the attributes of the Z1.

I've looked at a lot of sites for firmware hacks to the FX1, not so much to get the features of the Z1, but to overcome some of the amazingly stupid decisions of how certain features are accessed. So far, I have not found one single claim of any firmware update or mechanism for updating either the FX1 or the Z1, much less a hacked version of the firmware.

Thus, I don't think either camera is designed for a field firmware update. Could be wrong though ...

Spot|DSE wrote on 6/20/2006, 3:15 PM

Look harder. Netherlands. There is one. I've only heard bad things about guys doing it, but it's there.

Wolfgang S. wrote on 6/20/2006, 3:23 PM

Well, I will not risk my FX1 by playing with the firmware. For sure not.
:)

In future most people will tend to like 16:9 more and more, anyway. Remember, you can produce true 16:9 with the fx1, what is great even if you convert it down to SD.

farss wrote on 6/20/2006, 3:41 PM

Indeed.
And John, you could simply ingest the footage as m2t and crop in Vegas. The result will be better than doing it in the camera anyway AND you get to pan the frame. Yes I know working with m2t is no fun but for a simple crop/downres turn OFF thumbnails and waveforms, this is what really slows down the process.
Bob.

Laurence wrote on 6/20/2006, 3:55 PM

Just don't stick too many m2t clips on the Vegas timeline at once or you'll crash Vegas.

johnmeyer wrote on 6/20/2006, 4:06 PM

And John, you could simply ingest the footage as m2t and crop in Vegas.

Bob,

Yeah, I know that and wrote about it here:

My workflow for HDV to SD projects

However, I was in a hurry, and didn't want to wait five hours for generating intermediates, and working with anything MPEG on the Vegas timeline (especially m2t files) is near-impossible (as I just saw Laurence post).

I'm trying to do something simple with SD MPEG-2 files right at this moment and am going to give up. Vegas and MPEG are oil and water. Too bad.

In this case, I just wanted to generate a simple DVD project of a graduation (some dad couldn't attend, so I offered to tape it). Since the in-camera downcovert wouldn't do what was needed, I ended up having to do the whole project entirely in the computer, including generating the intermediates (five hours for one hour of video) and then rendering (using best) from the HDV to the SD MPEG-2. With the cropping and the best rendering, this rendering took ten hours. By contrast, if I could have started with DV (by shooting in DV or doing the HDV to DV 4:3 in-camera), I would have only needed eighty minutes of rendering to MPEG (that's what an hour of DV takes on my computer) and I would have been done.

So, 10:1 increase in rendering time. Also, as it turned out, I made two stupid, but glaring, mistakes (forgot to crop the HDV B-roll I used on a sparsely-populated track) so I had to re-do the ten hour render. (Of course, if Vegas could assemble MPEG files and do lossless cuts-only editing, like Womble, I wouldn't have had to re-do this ten hour render ... I wonder how much collective Vegas users' time could be saved each year by such a feature ... ).

HDV can produce fantastic SD results, but the time penalty is extreme. I had always assumed that, when I was faced with a project like this, I could simply turn on the converter in the camera, and get something out in a hurry, which would still be top-notch quality. This assumption was based on the tests that Spot had posted (although I am NOT blaming Spot for any of this!).

I am very disappointed at the moment, but there is nothing I can do about it, I guess.

farss wrote on 6/20/2006, 4:17 PM

Why generate DIs, project I'm working on at the moment I started out doing this Ingest as m2t->CFDI->edit->encode to mpeg-2 for DVD.

However the RAID array in my monster died and I only had backups of the m2t files on another drive and not enough room to recreate the CFDIs.
So I rendered the m2t files to DV directly and edited that. Damned if I can see any major differences, then again I am working in PAL.

Ah, yes that's the gotcha. Going from m2t @ 4:2:0 to NTSC DV @ 4:1:1 and then to mpeg-2 @ 4:2:0.

Still you're going to suffer that doing it in the camera anyway so...

Ingest m2t, apply crop directly and render to NTSC DV and edit that should leave you no worse off. The m2t to DV conversion seems to be fairly quick even at Best.

Bob.

Serena wrote on 6/20/2006, 5:01 PM

>>Look harder. Netherlands

DSE, don't be coy -- looked some time ago but darned if I've been able to find the right search keywords. I talked to the local Sony techos about the differences and they said parts etc are specifically FX or Z1, so reckoned there is sufficient difference to prevent "improvements". But I always like reading about these things.

johnmeyer wrote on 6/20/2006, 5:09 PM

Ingest m2t, apply crop directly and render to NTSC DV and edit that should leave you no worse off.

My issue isn't about the generation loss, it is about the poor performance on my 2.8 GHz P4 when dealing with m2t files directly. I have done several short (3-5 minute) projects that were cuts-only using native m2t, and even those short projects were excruciatingly painful to edit. The delays are 10-25 seconds each time I move to a different point on the timeline. Once Vegas has caught up, it will play a low-res preview pretty smoothly, but the wait for it to catch up is just too long.

I also tried generating a proxy, but while that saves some time compared to generating the Cineform intermediates, quite frankly if you've got the disk space, the time saving is not worth it IMHO. This is especially true since there are all sorts of issues I have found when dealing with a proxy. Thus, given that Vegas is too slow to deal with m2t, and basically seems to give the middle finger to anything related to MPEG, the Cineform is the only viable approach I have found so far, once I have to deal with HDV on the timeline.

Thus, I got snookered on the in-camera down-convert. It was always going to be my "ace in the hole" (whatever that is -- I still haven't found time to watch any of the dozens of poker shows that have magically materialized from nowhere in the past eighteen months).

Sooner or later, I'll figure out something else to get around this problem.

Spot|DSE wrote on 6/20/2006, 5:10 PM

I made an agreement to not pass the info along. If you dig deeply enough on DVInfo.net, you'll find it, I believe. There is a kid in Finland or Norway that says/has pix, of him modifying an FX 1 and upgrading some of the firmware via Firewire port. I've not tried it, not interested in trying it. It's in the same thread as a discussion about pulling the lens off the FX1 and putting on a different lens.

farss wrote on 6/20/2006, 5:52 PM

John,
well yes, trying to EDIT m2t on the Vegas T/L even on my pretty tricked up dual Xeon PC is PAINFUL and yes rendering to the CF DI takes a lot of time and uses up a lot of disk space.

My suggestion is to do neither of these.

Render (NOT EDIT) the captured m2t files to DV, in your case doing the 16:9->4:3 crop in the process. Then edit the DV files and encode from them just as if you'd shot native DV. This isn't editing a proxy, this is doing what you might have done in the camera / VCR with Vegas.

Bob.

johnmeyer wrote on 6/21/2006, 9:11 AM

Render (NOT EDIT) the captured m2t files to DV, in your case doing the 16:9->4:3 crop in the process. Then edit the DV files and encode from them just as if you'd shot native DV.

Good idea. I definitely should have done it that way. That would get the first render from five hours down to half that, and the second ten hour render would be about 1.5 hours. Yes, next time I'll do that. Thanks!