HD For Indies

Well, durnit, I was hoping to be first online with this, but I gotta give props where props due. Although I do think I was first to post the possibility (and here, too) the other week at MWSF.

I was in the middle of doing my testing and taking notes and getting ready to write up this exciting news when I got an email scooping me on this one.

Frederic Haubrich from Lumiere HD sent me this link for a write-up he just did posted over at DVInfo.net. that documents how to get HDV into Final Cut HD using iMovie HD as an intermediate step. If I hadn't gone to the screening of the newly remastered three hour long version of The Big Red One last night (with Sam Fuller's wife in attendance), I might have been first on this one.

See his write-up for detailed step by step instructions. My version is below.

The basic gist of it is this iMovie HD installs a new codec called Apple Intermediate Codec, and HDV footage is transcoded to this. iMovie HD and Final Cut Express HD use it, Final Cut Pro HD 5 undoubtedly will too. You can use iMovie HD to import the footage, then import that footage into Final Cut Pro HD to edit with it's superior feature set, then use iMovie HD to put it back out to tape.

By the way, for all newcomers, please check out the main page of this website to keep up on all kinds of HD, HDV, DVCPRO HD editing news, tips, techniques, gear, etc. Or use the convenient RSS or Atom feeds if you use an RSS aggregator or browser.

In not-so-short, it works like this (this is my version):

1.) Use iMovie HD to import the footage from the HDV camera (or import .m2v files that LumiereHD has demuxed, but import them one at a time - if you import multiple files, it screws up the aspect ratio, and renders with black bars on the sides)

2.) Crack open the iMovie HD project file that you just made by right clicking (or control clicking) on the file and selecting Show Package Contents. Then you can see the Media Folder. Copy or move those files to the directory of your choice

3.) Make a new setting in Final Cut Pro HD for this new timeline. Email me and I'll send you a preset, or build your own as follows:

Name: (whatever you want, I call mine AIC 1080i60)
Frame Size: 1440x1080
Aspect Ratio: Custom (4:3) (select this before setting frame size)
Anamorphic 16:9 set to ON (checkbox)
Field Dominance: Upper (Odd)
Editing Timebase: 29.97
QuickTime Video Settings-
Compressor: Apple Intermediate Codec
Quality: 100%
click on the Advanced button underneath and select Preset: HDV 1080i, then type in 29.97 under Frames Per Second
Audio Settings/Rate: 48.000

4.) Import your clips from that iMovie HD project

5.) Drop them on the timeline

6.) Fix the Aspect Ratio on your clips: double click on a clip to open it up in the Viewer, go to the Motion tab, toggle open Distort, set Aspect Ratio to 0 (zero)

UPDATE: A reader wrote in with a slicker way to handle the Aspect Ratio Problem:

You can fix the aspect ratio just by selecting the clip in the bin, press Command-9, then check mark next to Anamorphic in the clip setup window.

Or you can do it right from the bin, without excessive clicking back and forth between the viewer window and the motion tab.


7.) in the timeline, with that same clip you just double clicked highlighted, press copy (command-c).

8.) Select All (command-a), then Paste Attributes (option-v). In the dialog that appears, click on Distort and press return

9.) Edit away! Now all your footage is ready to go

10.) When done, export a movie using File/Export/QuickTime Movie, using Current Settings, Include Audio & Video, and Make Movie Self-Contained (last is optional probably)

11.) Go back to iMovieHD, make a new HDV project, import this movie in, then select File/Share, and select Videocamera in the dialog that appears. Tell how much black you want at beginning and end, then sit back and wait - it has to re-encode to MPEG-2, it'll take a while. (Frederich clued me in on this non-obvious menu)

12.) DONE!

Mike's Notes on the process:

-the only HDV files I have sitting around are the downloaded ones I mentioned on the blog in the past, they are 1080i from a HDR-FX1

-because of this, I used LumiereHD to demux the files. iMovieHD WILL import the demuxed files (you can use some freeware to demux as well, I just had LumiereHD sitting around)

-iMovieHD does NOT import the source .m2t files, however. Doesn't recognize them.

-importing .m2v files is timeconsuming to transcode, even on a dual 2.5GHz G5.

-doing that import, processors ran 50-60% capacity, so the process isn't super efficient (could be faster with optimized code)

-importing .m2v files to transcode from built-in drive takes roughly 3.5-4 times realtime. 12 1/2 second clip took about 45 seconds to import.

-according to iMovieHD documentation, a 1.0 GHz G4 with 512 MB of RAM is required for HDV editing. Therefore a Mac mini IS sufficient to edit HDV or DVCPRO HD after upgrading the RAM. Obviously it's limited hard drive capacity and single FireWire cable will be an issue (can't capture DV/HDV to a drive on the same FireWire bus, doesn't work), but it will let something be done. NO, I don't recommend this as a primary editing machine unless it is your last option.

-Final Cut Express HD can open iMovie HD files, but Final Cut Pro HD can't. Expect version 5 of Final Cut Pro HD at NAB, and that it will import FCE HD and maybe iMovie HD files as well.

-Apple Intermediate Codec

-Playing back Apple Intermediate Codec on my dual 2.5 GHz G5, playing out through the BlackMagic HD card WORKS!

-file sizes vary with the AIC (Apple Intermediate Codec) - I've seen clips be anywhere from 6.9 to 13.8 MB/sec with 1080i60 footage. So it's MUCH larger than the 3.125 MB/sec source MPEG-2 data on tape.

-realtime effects WORK, I got the 3way color corrector to work with Playback Video quality set to High

-playing off of my internal drive, attempting a realtime cross dissolve dropped frames. Copying the media to a 5.6TB X-Serve RAID (very lovely to have sitting around but it's going back to Apple Monday) didn't help

-so SOME things are realtime, others are not.

-playing with it some more, short dissolves were realtime, longer ones weren't (RAM limitations or what? Dunno, this box has 1.5 GB RAM)

-realtime color correction worked realtime..sometimes. It's clearly taxing the processors very heavily, 85% or more on dual 2.5 GHz G5. Sometimes it played through without dropping a frame, sometimes it didn't. (I have mine set up to abort on dropped frames during playback so I can tell if it did or not).

-color correction with transition ALWAYS dropped frames promptly

-if I dropped the Playback Video Quality to Medium, however, it worked fine - several times in a row I played back a realtime cross dissolve between two clips that BOTH had RT color correction going, worked fine.

-one apparent glitch - Final Cut Pro HD THINKS it can render this stuff in realtime, but if it can't you have to "give it a kick" to get it to render things that aren't playing back right. Selecting Render All for a timeline that included selections that weren't playing back correctly did nothing. I had to go to Sequence=>Render=>Full to get it to render that selection. So it isn't perfect, but at least it works...

-rendering is pretty slow - even using a high speed RAID as a scratch disk (don't know if that helped, but it certainly wasn't slowing anything down), a 1 minute sequence with that consisted of two color corrected clips (using the 3 way color corrector) with a 2 second dissolve between them took 2 minutes and 10 seconds to render on a dual 2.5 GHz G4 with 1.5 GB of RAM.

SO: you can edit in HDV in realtime, sometimes at High quality Video Playback, but Medium works well for the stuff you're likely to want - a realtime cross dissolve between two clips that EACH have their own realtime color correction applied.

I'm recanting a little bit of my rant against HDV - maybe the AIC codec is doing some chroma filtering my other process wasn't, but HDV is holding up to some color correction fairly well.

More later as I learn more.

-mike