Re: DVCProHD to HDV by David Roth Weiss on Jun 13, 2008 at 4:48:31 pm
Rich,
I'll bet no one knows the answer to this one, primarily because the editor you're doing this for has come up with a completely hair-brained idea that no one has ever done before, because its such a bad idea.
Taking a highly compressed HD source and compressing it again when it gets laid down on HDV tape, which will happen, is not gonna be good. They would do far better to have you simply digitize it to whatever format they need via your Kona card and deliver the QT files to them on a firewire drive. Or, are they working on Premiere of something that?
David
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles
POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™
A forum host of Creative COW's Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.
Re: DVCProHD to HDV by Arnie Schlissel on Jun 13, 2008 at 5:07:28 pm
I'm not familiar with the Sony deck. If it has SDI, the simplest thing is to just connect the two decks that way & make a direct dub. I don't think you'll see any better quality by any other method.
Arnie
Post production is not an afterthought!
http://www.arniepix.com/
Here's How It's Done by Rich Rubasch on Jun 14, 2008 at 2:28:22 am
If you're keeping score, David suggested that it might not even be possible, nor would I want to.
Here's why he's wrong.
An editor owns a Sony HDV camcorder. Shoots and edits in HDV...hey it's his camera, his choice. he has a friend in another city who has a DVCProHD camera. He is available to shoot a once in a lifetime event, so the guy hires him. He approaches me to see if I can dub the DVCProHD to HDV tape.
I bite.
Here;s what I did.
Digitize two 30 minute DVCProHD tapes via 1200A deck and Kona 3 to 1080 60i DVCProHD.
Export Ref clips of the two tapes and import into compressor. Apply the HDV 1080i 60i preset and cook them. Each clip takes a little under an hour to transcode. (Quad Core Intel - 3.0 ghz)
Import those into FCP and set up an easy setup for HDV 1080i 60i. Hook the firewire from the MacPro to a Sony M25U deck.
Hit print to tape. Wait about 5 minutes while FCP analyzes the HDV stream to make sure it checks out...Print to tape begins.
Actually the transcoded HDV clips hold up very well to the source footage. No apparent gamma shifting and other than MPEG compression blocks, looks very good.
So, 30 minutes to upload each tape, 1 hour to transcode each clip and 30 minutes back out to tape. A straight dub would have taken 30 minutes per tape anyway, so if I figure about 4 times the running time of the footage I should be pretty close to calculating how much time it will take the next time.
Re: Here's How It's Done by Rich Rubasch on Jun 14, 2008 at 4:37:11 pm
Thanks Ken....this sort of confirms that HDV really only wants to travel over a firewire cable. Not too surprising, and in fact, Sony has probably repackaged the DSR 1500 DVCAM deck to allow it to playback HDV thru an HDSDI output, but is basically the same recorder.
I assume native RS422 control as well, component inputs and XLR?
Re: Here's How It's Done by David Roth Weiss on Jun 14, 2008 at 5:27:02 am
Rich,
I'm very happy that you and your client are both happy. Rather than being concerned with keeping scores such, let me tell you why I poo-pooed the idea.
First, DVCProHd as recorded to P2 from HVX200 cameras is, at least to my eye, soft right out the box. Then there's the compression that happens everytime a signal goes to HDV tape. Then there's the compression that happens when uncorking that bottle and redigitizing again back to QT. Etc, etc, etc...
So, I never doubted you or your ability to do the job, I doubted the wisdom of doing the job for the aforesaid reasons of quality. That being said, if no one can discern the difference, then perhaps that tree never fell in that forest after all.
Meanwhile, have a good weekend.
David
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles
POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™
A forum host of Creative COW's Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.
