JVC GYHM100U with older FCP

I work in an office with one FCP 5, two FCP 6, one FCP 7, several FCE and one FCP X machines. I am still doing a lot of my editing on the FCP 5 machine and since we are not working in HD it is pretty adequate. We recently purchased 3 JVC cameras with a gyhm100u being the first. The newer ones can be switched to SD mode and the files import into FCP 5 without problem. The older camera, the gyhm100u seems to only shoot in SD mode and I can't import the files into FCP 5. I will have audio, but no video. I realise that FCP 5 is way out of date, but I need to continue using it as long as possible, since we are an educational institution. What is the technical difference between the .mov files that this camera uses, and the .mov files that normally work in FCP 5? Is there a way to switch this camera over to SD mode? Thanks, Dale

That camera can shoot to XDCam, .mov, or AVI. Which option did you choose at the shooting stage?

Audio without video strongly suggests that you don't have the adequate codec to play these files back.

This research -- and testing -- should have been done before the cameras were purchased. Didn't somebody consult post-production before investing in equipment?


www.derekmok.com

They can use one of their later systems to ingest the camera footage and to transcode it to a form their FCP5 system will accept.

Dennis Couzin
Berlin, Germany

FCP5 can read ProRes (needs a QuickTime 6 plugin, I think) but can't output it. For your educational purposes, that may not be a relevant issue; you can also use an online-offline workflow: Two years ago I edited a music video on my old PowerPC G5 with Final Cut Pro 5.1.2, where the media was ProRes but I offlined it in an Apple Intermediate Codec timeline, then sent the project file to New York where they onlined it in ProRes.


www.derekmok.com

According to http://manuals.info.apple.com/en/FCP5_HD_and_Broadcast_Formats.pdf FCP5 can itself ingest XDCam after installing some Sony software (if you can find it). But supposing FCP7 ingests it and transcodes it for FCP5, to what shall the trancoding be? I understand from derekmok that before ProRes there weren't good codecs for the online editing. If dmings' camera outputs 50 Mb/s MPEG-2 HD, this is quite high quality image that would want ProRes HQ transcode. How should it be transcoded for FCP5, assuming dmings wants to edit online? AIC? Uncompressed 8-bit 422?

Dennis Couzin
Berlin, Germany

> I understand from derekmok that before ProRes there weren't good codecs for the online editing.

No, that's not what I was saying. FCP 5 can handle Uncompressed 8-bit and 10-bit HD, for example. (FCP 4.5, on the other hand, only had DVCPro HD available as an HD codec, if I remember correctly) However, I would argue that during FCP 5's time, there wasn't a single catch-all intermediate codec for all formats that yielded the combination of efficiency, small file sizes, versatility and quality of the ProRes codecs. Apple Intermediate Codec was a stepping stone towards that direction, and AIC itself was not there yet -- also didn't last particularly long. I only ever used it for that single project long after AIC had become practically obsolete for professionals. The Uncompressed HD codecs, obviously, yielded high-quality results, but just weren't every efficient, and I doubt that a facility like what Dale is describing would want to mess with that.

A lot of us would be unfamiliar with FCP 5's HD capabilities since most of us moved on from that version to Crossgrade and Intel versions of FCP 6, which had far more options for HD material. I just so happened to keep a PowerPC G5 at home that was still doing active work. It's retired now as well.

For student use, even DVCPro HD can work just fine. Small file sizes, as well, and students can get a chance to learn what anamorphic HD (vs. full-raster HD) is.


www.derekmok.com

It is set to make .mov files, but they are evidently different in some way from the other .mov files that we work with. As with many agencies, we have a director who looks at catalogs, talks to sales people and then buys without really consulting anybody else. We then have to try and figure out how to make the equipment work within our work flow. The newer camera we have is a JVC gyhm150u. It is set to shoot in SD mode, and the .mov files that it creates are compatible with FCP 5. Part of the problem is that we really don't have time to do much conversion or transcoding. It's also hard to find time to learn about the different technologies such as the different flavors of Quick Time.

Pardon my ignorance, but is ProRes a variant of Quick Time? I know that the Quick Time standard is a container that can include various codecs, but I'm still unsure of what I'm really dealing with here.

Yes, ProRes is a good efficient codec that can live 'inside' a quicktime movie. AIC (Apple Intermediate Codec) is also a codec that can work as a Quicktime - it's sort of the forerunner of ProRes.

OK, thanks for the info. I went in and did some more checking. The clips are showing up as "XDCAM EX 1080i60 (35Mb/s VBR) Integer (Big Endian) Timecode". It sounds like the camera is not set to shoot in regular .mov or Quick Time. I will have to get a fresh disc and go through the format process and see if I can choose the other option at that point. I didn't use this camera initially and I know the other staff have talked about some issues with sharing discs with the other JVCs (gyhm150u).

Uncompressed is a codec for editing good HD but it's not a good codec for editing HD. This simply because of the filesizes and resulting datarates. 1920x1080 60i 4:2:2 8-bit comes at 995 Mb/s requiring RAIDed hard drives for even a single realtime stream.

My question was which codec, in the absence of ProRes, dmings should chose: Uncompressed 8-bit or AIC? derekmok added DVCPro HD to the choices.

dmings' camera is prosumer, not a toy, so it would be good to chose a transcode that preserves its image quality. DVCPro HD, being 100 Mb/s intraframe compression, probably does. What's the appraisal of AIC? Which flavor of ProRes was it most like?

Dennis Couzin
Berlin, Germany

Quote
dmings
It sounds like the camera is not set to shoot in regular .mov or Quick Time.

This is not your problem. Your problem is that the camera shoots with a kind of interframe image compression (like a DVD's but with much higher detail) unsuitable for FCP editing. In FCP7 you would transform the camera's recording to ProRes intraframe image compression for editing. But you will edit in FCP5 that can't handle ProRes.

Ingest your camera's XDCAM recording using your FCP7 system where you also transform (transcode) it to a new image compression (codec) suitable for editing in FCP5. FCP5 will take it from there.

Other posts in this strand are ponderings whither that new codec should be. Stay tuned.

Dennis Couzin
Berlin, Germany

> Uncompressed is a codec for editing good HD but it's not a good codec for editing HD.

I don't disagree; I just feel it's important to distinguish between an "online codec" and an "intermediate codec" for editing. The lines are blurring, but it's not fair to say FCP 5 didn't have a viable online codec.

> Uncompressed 8-bit or AIC?

I'd say definitely not Uncompressed 8-bit for Dale, who is working with students. They won't have the resources to buy enough drive space (and they'd need to be RAIDed).

However, it'd be instructive to let the students deal with Uncompressed HD clips just for funsies. It will put them straight in terms of "lossless" vs. "good-looking" codecs. One peek at 10 seconds of Uncompressed 8-bit vs. 10 seconds of ProRes 422 will give them an idea of what "uncompressed" really means.

I never used AIC except as a way to edit ProRes on FCP 5, so I can't speak knowledgeably about whether it was adequate for online purposes. But in the short period of time when AIC was in play, I don't remember it being touted as a viable alternative for online, not the way ProRes has. AIC went obsolete so quickly that I'm guessing it had more to do with facilities not having time to switch over (still using Uncompressed HD, DVCPro HD, etc.) than the virtues/shortcomings of AIC itself. I think AIC was also more associated with HDV, which is a real love/hate thing, and I seem to remember AIC being iMovies intermediate codec of choice. Don't know if that's the case now, since I don't use iMovie, but as late as last year a photographer friend was importing Sony and Canon AVCHD material and AIC was the codec used by iMovie for the ingest.


www.derekmok.com

[FCP5 can itself ingest XDCam after installing some Sony software (if you can find it).]

This is where I get it:

Sony XDCAM Microsite

Plugin works fine in FCP7

Best, as always,
Loren S. Miller
www.neotrondesign.com
Home of KeyGuide Central

A typo has been fixed in dmings' original posting and I think dmings' plan is to edit SD, not HD, on the FCP5 system. The HD camera footage would yield the SD. Whether it would be 16:9 SD or 4:3 SD is unhinted. For SD, 8-bit uncompressed is a viable editing codec at 166 megabits/sec.

The XDCAM transfer software Loren Miller located is version 1.2 for FCP7. Let dmings determine if it works for FCP5.

Dennis Couzin
Berlin, Germany

Quote
derekmok
...it'd be instructive to let the students deal with Uncompressed HD clips just for funsies. It will put them straight in terms of "lossless" vs. "good-looking" codecs. One peek at 10 seconds of Uncompressed 8-bit vs. 10 seconds of ProRes 422 will give them an idea of what "uncompressed" really means.

In image quality, I for one find ProRes 422 just as much below ProRes HQ as I find ProRes 422 below Uncompressed 8-bit. So for me Derek's comparison doesn't show what "uncompressed" is, only what ProRes 422 isn't. Furthermore the step down from either ProRes HQ or Uncompressed 8-bit to ProRes 422 is very slight.

Is this because I've never worked with footage shot on the best cameras with the best lenses and captured uncompressed? Can Derek, or someone, please send me 10 seconds of such uncompressed so I can learn the lesson? I've transformed the sharpest images I can find, photographic as well as graphical, to uncompressed 8-bit, and can hardly see an image quality difference between that uncompressed 8-bit and a ProRes 422 transcode from it. For most examples I can see no difference at all between the uncompressed 8-bit and a ProRes HQ transcode from it.

I suspect that the 50% increase in bitrate between ProRes 422 and ProRes HQ actually gets us from "good-looking" to "visually lossless". ProRes HQ is certainly not lossless. An uncompressed 8-bit test pattern consisting of random Y',Cb,Cr values is visibly changed when transcoded to ProRes HQ. You can download this test pattern here. But this is image fidelity, not image quality, since the test pattern has no image which could have a quality. Interestingly, the perceived difference between the original test pattern and a ProRes HQ transcode is less than the difference between the two ProRes transcodes.

The advantage of uncompressed 8-bit 4:2:2 (and shouldn't we be talking instead about uncompressed 10-bit in all these comparisons with ProRes) is that it can be decoded and recoded with absolutely no change. I found that this doesn't always happen. There are some processes which apparently decode it to RGB which requires that the subsampled chroma values be interpolated, and then the recoding to Y'CbCr disagrees with the original. But sometimes I got uncompressed 8-bit 4:2:2 to copy veridically. One must be very careful with Apple video software.

ProRes codecs always entail some generation-to-generation loss, though it's extremely slight for ProRes HQ. strypes and I experimented with this three years ago. When ProRes HQ (or even ProRes 422) is used as an acquisition format, or when any acquired video is transcoded to ProRes HQ (or even ProRes 422) rather than to uncompressed 8-bit 4:2:2, I question whether the loss from that one step can really (or readily) be seen. This question presumes that the acquisition or transcode be done right. The pitfalls in transcoding are worse than the codecs.

I've used "ProRes HQ" in place of the official term "ProRes 422 (HQ)" in the above.

Dennis Couzin
Berlin, Germany