HD For Indies

Woops, this was a mess, I published a draft not a final. Cleaned this up a little bit below and added some new stuff

Some readers have had some interesting questions lately that I thought would be of benefit for the community, so here goes:

Reader Douglas Smith asked:

I've been googling like crazy to find a straight answer to how much
data this thing (The Sony HDR-FX1, or FX1E puts out, and how much drive
space (thinking Lacie Firewire 800) I will need.

I've read the figure of 25 Mbps (which I'm fairly sure means BITS per
second), but I also read a reference to that being the RAW data rate,
so I'm not sure if the actual compressed output will be less (hoping
so!).

Presuming I needed, let's say, 300 minutes of raw storage space for
video, any idea how much space this would take?

(Also, I'll likely be looking at the PAL, or whatever you want to call
it, 25fps model, but whatever. Just need a rough idea here in any
case.)

If 25Mbps is the actual rate, my back of envelope calculations put it
at about 2.5 TB, which is certainly a shitload of hard drives.


I figure I'll need 3 firewire drives, a big one for video, a small one
for audio, plus a third big one for back-ups and swapping out for
off-site storage.

And while I'm at it, any particular opinions on the viability of
fluorescent light kits (kino-flo, etc.) for studio and blue-screen
work? Shooting in Thailand, heat is as much a concern as is kicking
out the circuit breakers.

OK, one more stupid question: Is there any chance in hell I'll be able
to cut this thing on my G4 powerbook, once FCP 5 comes out? Or will I
be losing my mind waiting for every effect to render? That would save
a pile of money because I'd only really need to buy one HD monitor
(thinking the 23" Apple Cinema) to complete my set-up. I suppose I
could start on the G4, and if it just isn't working out shell-out for a
nice dual G5 and a second monitor.


Mike's Response:

Check out my links to the HVR-Z1 article on Cinema Minima, I may have been overly harsh on the FX1 footage because

a.) It was unprofessionally shot
b.) some of my analysis I now realize was based on zoomed in footage
c.) I was just being overly harsh, tired of people trying to compare the two cameras based purely on the pixel math-I wanted to beat them up a bit on the reality of the deal.
d.) I'm having overly harsh memories of DV, and I've been working with a lot of 1920x1080 uncompressed HD lately, which might skew my eye towards the flows of HDV

Yeah, the HDV footage is about 3.2 MB/sec. But transcoded to the working codec on Macs (Apple Intermediate Codec) kicks it into the 7-14 MB/sec range.

300 minutes is only abut 55 GB of raw HDV, and anywhere from 110ish to 220ish GB of Apple Intermediate Codec.

No opinion on lights, not my area. Check out DV Magazine's website, I know they've written about low cost lighting in the past.

On a PowerBook, FireWire is your only storage option, so multiple drives with backups, yeah.

Viability of editing on PowerBook - you can do it but it's time consuming. Read the "yes you can" article on HDV in FCP I wrote over the weekend, and notice the render times on a dual 2.5 GHz G5. Not much will be realtime in high quality if anything, based on what I saw on a dual 2.5 GHz G5. So you might have to drop to Medium (or Low) quality just to get playback on your PowerBook. I'll test on mine in the near future.

The one area that's a "come to complete stop" is monitoring - the only way to monitor HDV on a video screen right now is using a PCI-X HD card, which has to go in a G5, unless you convert to DVCPRO HD, and then you lose some resolution. Then you could FireWire out to a $350/day Panasonic AJ-HD1200A deck attached to a broadcast monitor. But in my experience that deck is picky about being the ONLY thing attached to a FireWire bus (or maybe that was a BlackMagic card issue, not sure), so your external storage might be a no-go.

PowerBook is great for scratch editing, but not for trying to color correct, in short.

Reader Gidon Mead asked:

Mike,

Thanks again for your advice on workflow. One supplementary question: you've recommended the lacie electron blue monitor several times on the blog - would this at a pinch be usable as a primary viewing monitor for colour correction etc? Even the 19-inch version can in theory show a full 1080P image and the price has now dropped to about $350. Also, (OK that makes 2 questions!) do you know whether the Digital Cinema Preview function in FCP will work with this kind of display? All the marketing hype is about DVI monitors but I'm guessing that is just marketing hype.

Incidentally, film festivals in Europe are still ridiculouly snobbish about film vs digital even for shorts - of the top 3, Berlin and Venice insist on film and Cannes is suspiciously silent on the issue. Guess that keeps down the number of entries for them. Thankfully, at least you only need to worry about projection format ONCE the film has been accepted...

Cheers,


Mike's Response:

It's not a video monitor, display characteristics are different. For film work maybe, for video work...challenged. Typical brightness, contrast, gamma, and white point. Some of these things are calibratable, some are not. Digital Cinema Preview is great for showing clients, not great for finicky work. Also, won't show 1080i signal in High Quality, even on a DP 2.5 GHz G5, which in another reason to use HDP or HDLink with an LCD.

DCP will technically function on those displays, but will it deliver what you want is the other question (as described above)

Filmout is still $30K-$60K last I checked depending on length, quality, vendor, and work needed on the footage (uprez, color correction, etc.)


On Jan 24, 2005, at 6:17 PM, Andrae Palmer wrote:

Mike,

I was under the impression that I could monitor HD with the video card that came with the G5 and dual monitors with one or both being HD displays? Is this a big negative. Theirs no way to output HD in Final Cut Pro through the video card to an HD display?

Thanks,
Andrae

Mike's Response:

In some ways yes in some ways no.

Without an HD card, just using the video card, you can put the Final Cut Pro output on an external display using Digital Desktop thingy (like my technical terms? : ) ).

BUT - 1080p24 won't play back realtime full size (pixel for pixel) on a 23" LCD in High Quality, and if you drop to medium quality it might, but you're working at 1/2 res. AND on top of that, it has temporal anomalies - smooth pans are slightly irregular in speed, etc.

It's not video gamut - the image looks different. The HDLink has a different gamma and some stuff. You can adjust the display somewhat around this, but doesn't help for the

If medium res suits your needs, go for it.

All depends on what you want to be monitoring for. If you just want to see what you're doing, set to medium res on a fast box and go for it.

If you want to color correct and have anything close to an HDTV's output, or you want to see every pixel of the signal in motion, and you want to it play back at a smooth full speed (and not 21 fps for 3 frames, 24 fps for 5 frames, 22 fps for 2 frames, etc.), it's not sufficient for that.

But for editorial process (not including color correction other than general scene to scene matching), it's adequate. For client review, it's adequate (for most clients)

By HD display I presume you mean some kind of an HD monitor.

I just received in the mail an adaptor from ATI that works with some of their cards that will supposedly let it drive an HDTV. Haven't tested it yet. Essentially you could then use an HDTV hooked up to that. My concerns would then be gamma, white point, etc., because a graphics card that thinks it's driving a computer display may behave differently than an HD signal output to an HD monitor.

Even if you got the white point and gamma working, you'd still have the temporal anomalies, you'd still have the not-full-resolution problems, and I think it might have trouble with interlaced footage but I'm not sure since I haven't tested yet.


Reader Jim asked:

why can't I get FireWire out?

Mike's Response:

FireWire out for HDV? Is that your question?

I would expect FireWire out to/through HDV cameras (like DV into a camcorder, then video to TV) to NOT work, since the HDV gets transcoded to Apple Intermediate Codec, and to play out during realtime would require delivering an MPEG-2 transport stream to the FireWire port, which is very much not a realtime, on-the-fly kind of a thing.

The benefit of the BlackMagic card (perhaps Kona2 as well, haven't received a test unit yet (hint hint AJA)) is that it will play out most stuff you feed it if formatted correctly.

-mike