HD For Indies

I've posted pictures from the shoot the other day on my .Mac page. This was the video shoot we did with 5 cameras: Sony F900 (HDCAM 1080p/1080i format), Panasonic Varicam (DVCPRO HD 720p format), Sony HVR-Z1U (HDV 1080i50 format for conversion to 24p), Canon XL2 (16:9 24p DV format), and Panasonic DVX100A (16:9 24p DV format). The cameras were lined up side by side, so all cameras were rolling on the same performances at the same time so they could be sync'd up in post for split screen review.

After carefully typing in descriptions, names, etc. in iPhoto, it DOESN'T carry those text descriptions over to the web page. What a pain. So you get abbreviated descriptions, sorry. So a brief description of what you're seeing: the choice of props looks odd at first until you know why:

- an ugly shiny red leather chair chosen for it's saturated color and reflective surface
- an ugly brown matte chair for shadow detail
- the white backdrop has the black curtain pulled halfway into frame, so we could see how much highlight/shadow detail was held by the various cameras
- a bunch of colored plates & Fiestaware, chosen for still life purposes - color, detail, saturation, highlights, etc.
- a bunch of ugly blankets chosen for their annoying patterns, to see how DV vs HD held detail, and to see how well codecs handled the patterns/textures
- a couple of nice attractive actors who improvised hilariously, so we could see human interaction, motion, and skin tone

As I said the other day, we shot in studio with regular and low lighting, hand held and on sticks, stills and motion, panning and locked off, indoors and out, 24p and 60i and 60p and 50i, everything I could think of that would be realistic for a relatively low budget indie production wanting to use these cameras to "make a movie." Not a commercial, a movie, with the possibility of going out to film.

Pictures include how we set up the stage area, what we shot, what we shot with, and some shots of my ugly, ugly Test Mule for my HD uncompressed rig (it's going to be much, much tidier than that in production trim, don't worry).

The interesting part was that besides shooting HDCAM, DVCPRO HD, HDV, and two DV cameras, the F900 (HDCAM) and Varicam (DVCPRO HD) were also recorded uncompressed to disk.

The advantage of this is as follows:

HDCAM on F900 records 1440x1080 pixels, at 8 bits/channel, compressed down to 22.5 MB/sec (I think that number is right). The uncompressed rig records 1920x1080 pixels, at 10 bits/channel, with NO compression whatsoever, at about 130 MB/sec, to hotswap disks you can load/attach to your G5.

DVCPRO HD on Varicam records 960x720 pixels, at 8 bits/channel, compressed to about 5.4 MB/sec (for 24p). I recorded 1280x720 pixels, at 10 bits/channel, uncompressed at about 55 MB/sec to disk.

You get to log your shots as you shoot'em, so everything is very very organized. Even your media clips are logically named this way, and feeds straight into an FCP HD bin.

When we shot low light shots, or went back to our regular lighting setup, the prior footage was instantaneously findable BY NAME and available and viewable on a 23" monitor, so we were able to verify exposure levels and framing. Very very handy, didn't have to load in other tapes or roll back or any of that nonsense. And it was one click flippable between live and pre-recorded to check framing (or actually, we could have done side by side, but not full screen).

Most of yesterday and today were a day off, I've had Hard Things going on in my personal life, needed a break. Tomorrow I get back into all this.

I'm working on organizing all the footage, getting it all carefully logged, labelled, organized from what was recorded straight to disk, and next is to digitize all the footage from tape (oy, lots - we had about 25-30 shots per camera, 5 cameras). After that, I'll be messing with various uprez tools and 50i to 24p tools to get everything up to 1080p 10 bit uncompressed resolution.

Some of the software and processes I'll be messing with: DVFilmaker for de-interlacing, Film Effects 2.0 for the same, Magic Bullet 2.0 for the same, Cleaner's ability to de-interlace and scale and codec flip (I've seen some issues with gama shifts in YUV, have to nail down exactly what's going on), Compression Master (I just read a review that said it has trouble with HD footage, have to check that out), After Effects for de-interlace and scaling, and possibly the Algolith plug-ins if I can get them to donate a set as well (hint hint! Everyone else has....), but I haven't contacted them yet.

This will be a great test of reality performance rather than just lab/demo performance for all these products.

This will be a very good test of real world SATA array performance as well. I've done tons of testing and short work on SATA arrays, and started seeing some odd behavior that could potentially be a serious problem when working on long form or lots of data, beyond just the "inner tracks are slower" issues I've been writing about in the past.

I had hoped to get all this footage processed and compared and hold some kind of a screening during the SXSW Film Conference, but alas, that is not to be. This all came together too late to schedule it in, and I'd have to kill myself to prep all the footage in time anyway. I'm thinking of trying to find a venue to do at least one if not a series of seminars on the various things learnable from this: differences between cameras & formats, how the various de-interlacing and uprez software solutions work, how does tape compare to uncompressed to disk, etc. etc. etc.

All in time.

So take a look at the pictures, that's all that's ready now.

-mike