Lumiere HD HDV to HD non compressed Cinewave RT Pro -FCP HD
by nate
on
Jun 23, 2005 at 2:05:06 am
I posted this on the HDV forum and would be interested in any Real HD editing experience..
I have a client currently shooting HDV. I have read that HDV looks the best and edits the best in a true HD uncompressed timeline. My question is> I have the Mac Dual gig Quicksilver with a Cinewave RT Pro card and FCP 4.5 supported with a Medea RTRX terrabyte drive.. If I purchase Lumier HD (www.lumierhd.com) pluggin> import the HDV via firewire into FCP transcode it up to HD uncompressed with Lumier plugin will it work? I could upgrade to FCP5, but it is iffy with the Cinwave card. Has anyone worked with the Lumier HD plugin? Has anyone tried to edit HDV in an uncompressed timeline with FCP? With the Cinewave RT Pro card?
Re: Lumiere HD HDV to HD non compressed Cinewave RT Pro -FCP HD by Paul Mogg on Jun 27, 2005 at 10:54:37 am
HI Nate,
There's no problem as far as FCP being able to edit uncompressed HD, the only question would be if your RAID array is fast enough to handle the amount of data, and if you have sufficient storage space for your project, which you'd need to test for. I have edited uncompressed HD (derived from HDV and DVCPRO HD footage) on my duak 2 Ghz G5 with a four drive SATA raid array, and it worked fine with one stream of HD 720/24p, but you might want to try one of the lossless codecs like SheerVideo which are mildly compressed to save on space. Lumiere did a fine job for me in transcoding HDV clips to any Quicktime codec, including uncompressed. I do think this is the best way to edit HDV to preserve the maximum amount quality that's left after the camera has compressed it to within an inch of it's life, but for real-time editing I far prefer the DVCPRO HD codec, which edits as easily as DV, if not better.
If you don't like editing native HDV in FCP (which I haven't tried yet), you might think about editing in DVCPRO HD as an offline codec, then onlining uncompressed. I've been editing a feature in DVCPRO HD for about 6 months and I have to say it works like a dream. FCP 5.0 also improved the render quality quite dramatically, so you'll definitely want to upgrade to that.
Re: Lumiere HD HDV to HD non compressed Cinewave RT Pro -FCP HD by Paul Mogg on Jun 27, 2005 at 11:06:11 am
Sorry Nate, I didn't read your system config correctly. I pretty sure a dual 1gig G4 won't be fast enough for uncompressed HD, though I'm not famiar with what the Cinewave card adds to the equation, But for DVCPRO HD it may well do the trick. I've been editing DVCPRO HD 720/24p with my data on 3 * external Lacie D2 firewire 800 500Gb drives chained together, and it never drops a frame or hickups, but as I say, that's with a dual 2 Ghz G5.
Re: Lumiere HD HDV to HD non compressed Cinewave RT Pro -FCP HD by Nuddellon on Jul 17, 2005 at 3:55:05 am
Nate,
the dual 1Gig G4 is fast enough for uncompressed HD. We are running this for 3 years now, with CineWave Pro RT SD+HD BoBs
Important is your RAID (SCSI LVD SCSI160): 10 LVD SCSI drives as dual channel (atto UL3D) stripeset is fine for playout without dropped frames.
But we changed it to an G5 Dual 2Gig and it cutted the rendertimes by 50%.
The more complex thing is the way how to conform an HDV project on a CineWave Card. The CineWave HD BoB plays out a picture from HDV native sequences, the SD BoB does it not, but the HD to SD downconvertion on the cineWave is awfull. We take the HDW-M2000 VTR from Sony (with DC mode in crop) to do that and the result is a good 16:9 anamorphic SD picture. It's terrible with the 4:3 HDV Format in nonsquare mode. We thought that is gone with HD.....
Another way is cross convert with the media manager function in FCP, fine with converting to CineWave HD 1920x1080, but the scaling to SD results are terrible blocky. Not to recommend. AND it blows up your amount of data's. (You will have your source and final clips in HD full resolution.
The third option is an ONLINE with an CINEWAVE HD Sequence, but there are timesucking software scaling while rendering.
Funny to say, you can playout with Edit-To-Tape to an HDCAM with CineWave if you tell FCP to use CineWave as Playout device with Serial Deck Control. But the aspect ratio is wrong...
After these possibilties we decided to finish the project in native HDV, while the CineWave HD is a framebuffer and live output (good while color correct), but then we render the final clip to the CineWave HD quicktime file and playout with FCP 4.5 und Panther... tested and stable...
