1440x1080 or 1920x1080?

So I captured HDV material.

My source clip in my capture scratch says 1920x1080 as the dimensions.

When I check the format of the clip in FCP, it says the frame size is 1440x1080.

The format info applies to the source clip right?

My sequence is also 1440x1080.

HDV plays a lot of games to get what *appears* to be 16:9 HiDef, the pixel count being one of them. The raw signal isn't "real", but it's interpreted to be a higher count than it really is. This is one reason HDV production had to wait for Final Cut 5. Final Cut 4.5 didn't know how to play all the tricks.

This kills you when you try to export stills, too. The stills assume the original lower camera pixel count and the pictures look distorted.

HDV uses a very aggressive MPEG2 compression with all the problems that can cause. The compression damage is clearly visible if you ever stop the motion and display a freeze. It's only in motion that the damage seems to vanish--although if you're good, you can see it there, too.

HDV is probably the worst format in the world for Post Production since it falls apart so easily. It's like trying to sew a show together with spider webs.

Koz

Thanks.....I've experienced the most incredible degradation in quality when downconverting and moving my HDV sequence into a DV timeline. It's incongruous that this much quality would be lost and this many pixels and artifacts are visible. See my other post I made about it. I'm trying to figure out if the problem is my workflow or just a tempermental format I cannot wrap my head around.

I captured the 1080i60 footage correctly with the correct HDV 1080i settings.....sequence settings are right (except they're 1440x1080, but you answered that question) and the "quicktime video settings" compressor setting is on HDV 1080i60. The footage looks beautiful in my online HDV sequence. It's when I downconvert and bring it into the DV sequence that we see this loss. How do I avoid it?

thanks again

Did you try downconverting it straight from the camera? Looks pretty darn clean to me. After treating it with Magic Bullet Suite in After Effects, it looks just like letterboxed film.



Post Edited (06-29-06 07:37)

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

No camera anymore unfortunately.....

thanks for the suggestions.

Rent / borrow one.



When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

I can't unfortunately.....is there any alternative?

This was suggested to me:

"This is how I've done it so far... I export the HDV as a self contained
movie. Pull that into compressor and downconvert using NTSC 16:9
anamorphic, then use that in my regular dv timeline. The footage looks
fantastic. "

Hi Joe,
Along the lines of your comments, I know that you have worked with HDV.
Would it be your recommendation to keep actual HDV media OFF of the edit system and only use transcoded uncompressed media or perhaps DVCProHD? What in your experience produces nice results without going all the way to uncompressed 12bit 444?

Hiya, Bro,

I work on Broadcast projects everyday and I have never used 4:4:4 for anything. All my HDV ftg I have used to this point has been digitized into FCP through FW straight from the camera & edited in it's native form. The resizing / downconverting / rendering occurs (for me) when I bring it into After Effects 7 Pro (1920 x 1080i60 square pixels). I render all my projects out in 16-Bit colorspace and they are gorgeous.

My next experiment will be digitizing HDV ftg using different formats, like the DVCProHD Capture Preset (DVCPRoHD - 180i60 48 kHz). I haven't tried that yet.

I will let you know when I do

- Joey



When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

I have not used HDV yet and would prefer to have "whole frame" footage. I have an HVX200 and I think the Pany codec looks really good but of course not as good as uncompressed.

A side note: I recently talked with an assistant editor I have hired in the past. She is working on a new (yet to air) reality show for one of the cable networks. They are shooting HDV with the Z1. They digiitized from the Sony HDV deck.

The workflow of the show was to offline (on Avids) and then finish the shows at an online facility.

Most of the production crew is inexperienced and the producers are new.

They were bitten by the firewire frame inaccuracy issue big time.

The online facility gave them cost estimates based on what would be considered reasonable amounts of time to re-dig the source tapes. Then they ran into the problem that has been discussed so much in the past with firewire deck control frequently being 2-3 frames off. That of course is more than enough to lose lip sync.

The online facility want more money. ALOT MORE MONEY!

They are probably going to take the finishing in-house and just pay assistants for all the long hours to fix the problems.

You would think Sony would add 422 deck control back into the new decks just coming out but from the spec sheets it doesn't look like it.

Now why in the hell would anyone need to "offline" HDV? The files are so small natively...you can fit a huge project on a laptop / fat G-RAID combo and do an online rough cut right in FCP. I don't miss that Avid "offline resolution" at all. Mine is collecting dust.

I'll tell you...I vehemently dislike this new "Preditor" (Producer / Editor) position. Producers who don't have a creative lick in their bodies are sent to Final Cut Pro classes and are now calling themselves "editors" - editing rough cuts on the set and handing them off to Post with lousy logs, lousy edits, lousy choices, lousy timing, mislabeled tapes, etc...making double work for everybody.

In my world (Uncompressed 4:2:2 / HDV projects - short form), it's soooo much easier these days = "offline editing" is just about gone. I do rough cuts @ full rez.

Everything else is just an extra step.



When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

The producers were inexperienced and they deliberately hired inexperienced shooters to save money. Some of the shooters didn't know what timecode was. The editors are struggling with it. I think that at some level the producers realized that there might be problems and thought that a "finishing house" would just be able to fix everything. For some people out in LA the offline/online process just seems safe. Maybe someone at the network suggested it. I agree they should have just loaded the HDV footage with the intent of using it as is.

That said, Sony should fix the problem on the decks.

>>> I think that at some level the producers realized that there might be problems and thought that a "finishing house" would just be able to fix everything. <<<

...which is why I am in Post Production!

FIX IT? SURE!! $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$



BTW...I agree...RS422 should be standard.

- Joey



When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

I can honestly see how some misguided twerp might think that "this will make it look more like REALITY". Hell, just shoot it on a HI8 camera with on camera mike. That's reality! Then call it Family Video!

Joe,

RS-422 is there for deck control and if you use the original camera or some other media like P2 or direct to disc, 422 is not even necessary. Decks may not be going away this year but they are loosing market share in the HD world.

john,

I know there's no 422 on cameras (?) and it is not there for all decks (which is what I mean by making it the "standard". I was answering Sproketz's post above:

>>> You would think Sony would add 422 deck control back into the new decks just coming out <<<



When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.