HD For Indies

I'm speaking in the morning at the Austin Film Festival (Driskill Crystal Room 1), and wanted to give a quick outlay of some baseline editing setups for indies. This represent the minimal, baseline, just-enough approach.

Any terms you find that are not defined or linked in this article, use the Blogger search tool at the top of this page to find more information about them in this blog. If this is your first time to HD For Indies, welcome. I've ben writing this since March of this year, and now have about 320 articles, and something like 150,000 words in here. There's a lot of stuff. At the top of this page are some handy tools: a search bar (for content within the blog), links to archives of articles from past months, and a list of useful links on HD related topics.

For a variety of reasons you can find described in other articles, I find Final Cut Pro HD to be a good editing solution, therefore these solutions are based on Macintosh based editing systems. Since AJA and Aurora are still not shipping their latest HD cards, and I've had success to date with BlackMagic's products, I'm recommending BlackMagic's HD stuff.

HDV edit station:

Something better than a 1 GHz G4. Preferably a dual G5 ($2500-$3000). At least 1GB of RAM ($120), preferably 2 ($200) or more. Final Cut Pro HD ($1000) or Production Suite ($1300), at least a 19 inch computer monitor ($350-$700), preferably a second monitor, at least 17" ($250-$400). LumiereHD ($200). Can use DVCPRO HD codec for offline and online codec. DVCPRO HD 1080i60 is about 50 GB/hour. Start by adding ATA (for G4) or SATA (for G5) internal drives for storage, if you need more, consider FireWire 800. If you want to do uncompressed color correction and effects, add a disk array as described below.

If you want to monitor your HD video, either a DeckLink HD ($600, no analog outputs) or DeckLink HD Pro 4:2:2 ($1500, has analog HD component hookups). Either rent an HD monitor during final color correction ($100-$500/day, depending on size & resolution), or buy an HDLink ($700) and a 23" LCD monitor (HP is $1600, Apple is $2000). Otherwise you're going to be hopelessly lost trying to color correct your video on a computer screen.

Compressed HD with DVCPRO HD

Conveniently, the exact same thing as above, but without Lumiere HD. Beware trying to capture DVCPRO HD via FireWire with the deck and FireWire drives on the same bus. BAD. Keep the deck connected to a FireWire 400 port, your hard drives on FireWire 800. I don't recall reading that this setup works OK absolutley positively. SATA storage would definitely work, even external SATA storage. Seritek 1SE2 card with the MacGurus external SATA port card gives you external SATA ports, buy external SATA drives from Granite Digital, Cooldrive.com, or MacGurus.

Uncompressed HD for HDCAM

Start with what's above, add the new SyncRAID XL 5 port SATA card ($250). Add 5 250, 300, or 400 GB drives ($160, $230, or $400 each from zipzoomfly.com) and configure as RAID XL, for 4 drives worth of capacity, and will give you just enough throughput for 8 bit, 1920x1080, 24fps, 4:2:2 color - this is what you'd get off of a Sony F900 in 24p mode. The SyncRAID will not, not, NOT handle 1080i60. These will ONLY work for 24p projects in 8 bit. You'll need external cases, such as the 5 bay Burly Box from MacGurus. (somewhere around $380 with drive coolers, around $250 without)

If you want to do 4:4:4, or 10 bit, or 1080i60, you need something faster. For now, that's a RAID 10 or RAID 0 with a Highpoint RocketRAID 1820a 8 port SATA card ($200). This will change as new hardware becomes available between now and January.

For HD monitoring, again you're looking at the HDLink with LCD monitor. Until I can put the HDLink/Apple 23" LCD combo side by side with a nice Sony BVM-24 HD calibrated monitor, I'd suggest using the HDLink for "pretty close" calibration, but be ready to rent a good calibrated HD monitor for your critical color correction work.

These are just single user, single station solutions. If you'd like some assitance in setting up multi-station editing setups, contact me.

Some camera solutions for HD, moving up in price/quality:

starting at the bottom rung of what might be considered HD and working up in rough order:

JVC JY-HD10 camera, approx $4000 (may drop soon with Sony's entry into HDV): This is a 720p HDV camera. It shoots 1280x720, 30 progressive frames per second at 8 bit 4:2:0 HDV format, a highly compressed MPEG-2 transport stream based format recorded onto mini-DV cameras. I've written about the format extensively, just use the Blogger Search bar at the top of this screen to search for HDV. The data rate is about 2 1/2 MB/sec - even less data than DV. It's heavily compressed, which creates problems in post when trying to color correct or extract a color key. There is no 24p mode.

Sony HDR-FX1 ($3500), due in November, and the approximately $7000 version (with XLR connections and other goodies) due by January or so. It's a 1080i camera, recording 1440x1080 to tape at 3.125 MB/sec. It has a pseudo-24p mode that will have some timing artifacts most likely that will be less than ideal. This is the most interesting camera under $10,000 by far, perhaps the most interesting camera under $20,000. It is a three chip 960x1080 resolution camera. The green chips are offset halfway between the blue and red sensors, helping it get a higher effective resolution.

Both of the above cameras record to miniDV tapes, even though it isn't DV on the tapes. It's HDV, which Final Cut Pro HD doesn't support yet. Therefore you need something to help you work with this footage, I recommend LumiereHD.

Panasonic Varicam (approx $65,000) - 1280x720 progressive framerate camera that records standard modes of 23.976, 24, 25, 30, 59.94, and 60 fps. It will also record any framerate from 4 to 60 fps in one frame even increments. While at first glance one might think the HDR-FX1 would look better, this in not true once you see the quality of the footage through the better chips, the better lenses, etc. It records at a datarate of up to 14 MB/sec for 720p60. 720p24 is only 5.7 MB/sec. Final Cut Pro HD supports this format for realtime effects, transitions, and color corrections. This is a GREAT intermediate solution. Pretty good quality, extremely low system requirements (1 GHz G4 or better, 1GB RAM, 20-50 GB/hr storage, 6-14 MB/sec throughput required).

Sony F900 (uses HDCAM in it's camcorder). It's an 8 bit, 4:2:2, 1920x1080 output (even though the tape format stores it as 1440x1080, so you lose some resolution, and it's also compressed with JPEG like compression). The camera is capable of 10 bit 4:2:2 1920x1080 at 23.976, 24, 25, 29.97, and 30 progressive frames per second, or 50 or 59.94 fields per second. Very versatile.

(Sony HDCAM SR (recommended for Sony F900, F950, Thomson Viper, and similar high end cameras) tape format can capture all 1920x1080 pixels output by the Sony F900 and F950 cameras, as well as the Thomson Viper 1920x1080 10 bit 4:2:2 and 4:4:4 output.)

Sony F950 is an updated version of the F900, with no built in tape recorder, but it can do dual link HD-SDI, which allows for true RGB, 4:4:4 output.

Beyond this level, I'm not sure which camera is truly "better" in terms of image quality, so I'm leaving it open.

Thomson makes the Viper camera, which can do either 4:2:2 linear, 4:2:2 log, or 4:4:4 log (I think I've got that right, don't hold me to it on the 4:2:2 log). Shooting log allows for another stop or two of exposure if I recall my conversation with Geoff correctly.

Panavison has their new Genesis camera, rental only, it's built from ground up as a film shooter's camera that outputs HD. Read the blog entry (do a search) for more info. Nice, nice camera from what I've read so far.

The Dalsa Origin can shoot 4K resolution (4096x3072) at 10 bit (or better? gotta check notes, sorry, is late on Friday now). It can shoot 4K and downsamle to 2K (possibly HD 1920x1080 as well). But I here it's a pain to shoot with, not shooter friendly, has to capture to a big heavy hard drive array.

Kinetta is working on camera that should be very cool.

ARRI is working on their version of an HD (and higher) resolution digital camera.

So that's a quicky rundown. Hope to see you at the panel, or at least hope you were there and got something useful out of it.

-mike