OT: Ingesting HC7 footage uncompressed

Cliff Etzel wrote on 12/31/2007, 3:18 PM

I've been corresponding with a shooter who is using the HC7 for shooting u/w footage for broadcast. He raves about the quality of footage he is getting from the HC7 and his advice is a big reason why I went with HC7's.

He tole me he is working with FCS and is dumping his HDV footage to XDCAM disc using a Miranda HDBridgedec, then bringing the footage onto his scratch drives as uncompressed 8 bit 1080i using Kona 3 capture cards. (His exact words for how he's doing this)

Now this could be due to my not having any experience in this area, but this appears to me a convoluted way of doing this and was wondering if there was a simpler solution to attain the same results.

I'm still curious about the Blackmagic Intensity cards - do they actually allow for ingest of footage via HDMI as uncompressed? If not - what options are there that work with Vegas Pro? I'm confused on this aspect of post work and could use some clarification on this.

Would Gearshift provide a means of ingesting and then converting m2t footage into a 4:2:2 file for editing? Does it require more horsepower? I imagine it requires huge amounts of hard drive space.

Sorry for the n00bness of these questions - This is confusing territory for me.

Happy New Year to all!

Cliff Etzel - Solo Video Journalist
bluprojekt

Comments

farss wrote on 12/31/2007, 3:34 PM

The camera records to HDV so what it records is highly compressed. That's it, damage done. The only way to avoid this would be to take the HDMI output LIVE from the camera and record from that to a less lossy codec. As you've rightly noted that requires either a lot of CPU power and/or a lot of disk space. Hardly the thing you want to wrangle with underwater, in a studio for keying and compositing maybe although personally I'd be looking at a much better camera as well, hooking a HC7 upto seriously expensive hardware is kind of a wierd thing to do.

Having 'done the damage' and recorded to HDV, then yes there's some merit to using a less lossy codec in post, you can't get much better than the Cineform codecs and detailed tests show they perform better than HDCAM SR.

BTW, we have a HC7 in a underwater housing.

Bob.

Cliff Etzel wrote on 12/31/2007, 4:02 PM

Thanks Bob for clarifying this for me - things seemed pretty cut and dry when I was shooting standard def - the world of HDV seems alot more complex.

So the damage is done once the footage is shot to tape - and Cineform is the only solution for this?

Cliff Etzel - Solo Video Journalist
bluprojekt

Spot|DSE wrote on 12/31/2007, 5:22 PM

Cineform isn't the only solution, but its one of the most reasonable ones, and yes, Gearshift can convert to Cineform, or you can buy Neo and convert directly on capture.
As far as "Damage being done," bear in mind that this is somewhat negligible. Although HDV is highly compressed, it performs very well until it's pranked with in editing. There are situations where you can confuse the encoder of any HDV camcorder, just know the tricks and techniques for working with the format, you'll be golden in most instances.

farss wrote on 12/31/2007, 5:35 PM

"Cineform is the only solution for this?"

Good grief no! There's uncompressed HD, you can kiss an awesome amount of HDD space goodbye using that.
There's the SonyYUV codec, kiss less HDD space goodbye but still a lot to wrangle at HD resolution.
Probably Cineform's wavelet codecs offer the best CPU/HDD/Quality compromise there is though.

None of these are a solution to the damage done when you record to tape, you simply cannot get back what isn't there but you can take steps to do no more harm and to get back as much useful data as possible depending on what you're delivering as your final format.

You can also do some things that hide the nasties that you might have incurred recording to HDV. You can also spend a lot of time and money futzing around for very little gain in my opinion, effort that might have been better spent on recording a better image in the first place and it's not just the camera. I regularly watch Blue Planet as one of our test tapes. The underwater footage blows me away but it wasn't just the cameras, a lot of it was shot in tanks, I hazard a guess your HC7 would get some pretty damn fine footage under the same conditions.

The advantage of working with better codecs than what you recorded with in post is sort of to avoid errors that accumulate. Think of it as doing your accounting where every receipt you got was rounded to the nearest dollar. Quite a bit of information has been lost. Now if everytime you do further calculations you keep rounding to the nearest dollar the errors rapidly mount up. Much better to do all the calculations with as much precision as possible and if needed round up the answer. Of course you'll never get the answers as accurate as if the receipts weren't rounded up in the first place.

Bob.