What Format for B-Roll Pool?

[r]Evolution wrote on 3/25/2008, 10:54 PM
We are about to start shooting various Auto Collision Repair Facilities so that we can update our B-Roll Pool. We will be shooting in DV (Panasonic DVX100B).

- We use a PC w/Adobe Production Bundle and Sony Creative Software & a Mac w/ FCStudio.
- We have NAS which houses all of the B-Roll, Royalty Free Audio, and Video.

It has been suggested that we use H.264 for our Video where currently we had been keeping it all DV. Reason is File Size vs Quality. My concern is whether the H.264 CoDec will be more CPU, GPU, NLE intensive or just plain harder to edit vs the DV CoDec.

What are your thoughts on H.264 vs DV as the CoDec for B-Roll & Royalty Free Video?

Comments

rmack350 wrote on 3/25/2008, 11:10 PM
Sounds like a bad idea. DV is dead simple to work with and pretty much all three NLEs are very solid with DV.

The only problem I can imagine is interoperability. I've found that vegas doesn't see the timecode that ppro puts in the files, and vice versa. Maybe the solution to that is to use a third party capture utility like Scenalyzer. You'll need to do some of your own testing.

Rob Mack
farss wrote on 3/25/2008, 11:26 PM
HDDs are incredibly cheap, DV is utterly grief free.
I can edit DV from my NAS over GigE, if I needed it my Thecus 5200 could house 4TBs with RAID 5 so I've got redundancy as well.

Bob.
Chienworks wrote on 3/26/2008, 5:48 AM
Since your camera outputs DV, why switch it to anything else? Codec conversions are gonna cost you time and quality, no matter what other codec you go to.

And, as everyone else is telling you, hard drives are dirt cheap. I'm putting together a 3TB system for my church's media facility right now. I'm gutting an old 2GHz PC and putting in six 500GB drives. Total cost for the drives: about $490. Thats enough for about 220 hours of DV.
Former user wrote on 3/26/2008, 6:54 AM
Most of the b-roll footage I have accessed has been in Quicktime Animation codec. Smaller than DV but no quality loss.

Also, I have seen some in various JPEG video formats.

Dave T2
rmack350 wrote on 3/26/2008, 8:39 AM
That makes some sense for commercial libraries selling footage. There's a good chance they acquire from various sources over SDI, and they want it to be usable for all sorts of people.

This sounds like an in-house library with everything acquired over firewire as DV. If it was my project I'd take in some footage as DV and try it out in all three systems. It needs to play, the timecode needs to be readable, and it needs to be recapturable from tape in the event of a server failure.

I know from my limited experience with Vegas and PPro that footage isn't entirely interchangeable because of the way each writes timecode. I'm sure there are workarounds you could come up with, but if you transcode after capture I think you'll lose the Timecode entirely (along from the hours of your life spent transcoding).

If I couldn't resolve the timecode problem (assuming I'm right that there is such a problem) then I'd pick one capture application and stick with that. The process of recapturing would be a little cumbersome but not bad.

Heads-up on vidcap...it gets sluggish when the sfvicap file gets big. Plan to make many of these files.

The last point might be just an educational issue. DV is a great format for original SD camera footage because it's small and easy to edit. It's a LOUSY format to finish a project in. Encourage people to render upwards to a better format.

Rob Mack
Former user wrote on 3/26/2008, 8:59 AM
"This sounds like an in-house library with everything acquired over firewire as DV"

Maybe so, but he did mention Royalty Free.

Can you clarify the usage of the video?

Dave T2
[r]Evolution wrote on 3/26/2008, 9:22 PM
Everything we shoot is DV captured via Firewire in Vegas, FCP, or Premiere... depending on who's editing and what Workstation is open. A lot of our B-Roll is 'Scene Detect' clips that are Generic enough for us to use in other projects.

We also have some Royalty Free Motion Backgrounds... some of which are DV .avi & some are DV .mov but FCP doesn't like .avi's that much. It sometimes trips out when you get too many .avi layers. Both Premiere and Vegas seem to be OK with DV .mov's though.

I'll have to check the issue with TimeCodes if/when captured via another NLE.
I'll also look into the options of using the same Capture App on both PC and Mac.