HD For Indies

Notes on trouble working with HD in mixed Mac/PC environment

...so I get a call from a client of mine who I've consulted with on working with Varicam footage in the past. They want my advice on how to work with some HD footage.

They've shot some 24p Varicam footage (that's the DVCPRO HD based $60,000ish HD camcorder) and they need some help with workflow. I think they have Final Cut Pro HD on a G5, but they don't know how to use it. Hey, they want me to do it for them, I'll all in favor of that.

I assume they're going to cut it in Final Cut Pro.

And then, because the Spidey Sense tingles, I ask

"Whatcha gonna do with it?"

"Oh, we're going to do some After Effects with it." client says.

"On what platform?" I ask.

"On PC." they say.

Ding ding ding!

Turns out they have Premiere Pro 1.5 on a generic PC with no HD-SDI board, and they have 720p24 Varicam footage.

Suddenly, a simple FireWire capture gets a lot more complicated.

What they want me to do is capture HD on a Mac and deliver it to them for usage on a WinXP box for use in After Effects, and maintain highest possible quality.

Long story short, what I end up doing is capturing over HD-SDI into my BlackMagic Multibridge Extreme. As an interesting side note, I'd left my 9 pin deck control cable at somebody else's place I'd lent it to (wait, that isn't the interesting part, hang on), so I didn't have the cable handy.

What I ended up doing was changing the setup in the Log and Capture window to use HD-SDI for audio and video capture, but FireWire for deck control. Worked like a charm - not a problem.

Nothing is ever as easy as you think it'd be. After setting up the presets for 24p capture, I captured the whole 30 minutes worth of footage as one file (as per client request), but it kept coming out as 60p. After a bunch of testing including capturing snippets of video from various portions of the tape, I finally figured out that they'd recorded bars at the head of the tape at 60fps, but shot all their content at 24fps. Since my capture started in the section with bars, my settings were ignored and the footage captured at 60fps, since it started as 60fps on the tape (it is a bad, Bad, BAD thing to mix frame rates in a given capture, and in general it is Bad Working Practice to mix frame rates even on the same tape). After figuring it out, I started my capture after the bars and it worked fine.

Then on the second tape, there were a number of timecode breaks towards the end of the tape. Let me be clear - Time code breaks are the bane of an editor's existence. They are not the potholes but the flat tires on the highway of post. Everything has to come to a stop and you have to fix each one. (or perhaps the STDs, the Severe Tire Damage thingies that keep you from driving Out the In in a parking garage is a more apt metaphor - they CAUSE the flat tires). After it failed to capture as one big file a couple of times in a row, I had to go in and find out how many and where the time code breaks were and work around each and every one of them (or are time code breaks like land mines? I just don't like'em.) So it took longer to find and work around the time code breaks than it did to capture the other 25 minutes of footage (which worked fine and unattended up until that point).

After capturing the footage to the Apple 8 bit Uncompressed 4:2:2 codec (no point in using the 10 bit codec since the tape format is only 8 bit), I used Compressor to convert it to a good cross platform codec.

I used to use the BlackMagic codec for cross platform work, but it introduces a very noticeable shift in the luma (brightness) of the footage, so this time I tried the Sheer codec from Bitjazz. It is mathematically lossless QuickTime codec (exact match of the source material) that is usually around 40% smaller than the Apple or Blackmagic codec. Yeah, the files are smaller. Yeah, the video looks and is exactly the same. No, I don't know how it works, I just trust that it does.

(I tried to capture directly to Sheer, but ended up with half sized files (640x360). This is a known issue with BMD cards and Sheer, and Andreas Wittenstein, the developer of Sheer, is working on it.)

There is a free reader version of the codec downloadable for QuickTime (and an AVI version is under development) from the site at the link above for both Mac and Windows, thus it's cross platform.

But because they needed to read it on a PC, I used Cleaner to flatten the file (flattening gets rid of the resource forks - used to be a Mac QT file wouldn't read on a PC unless it was flattened. I haven't had to move footage cross platform in a while, so I went ahead and flattened it to be sure).

OK, so now it was time to get the file over to them. They'd sent me an MS-DOS formatted FireWire drive.

Again, I'm not sure if this is still the case, but it used to be that there was a 2GB file size limitation for MS-DOS volumes. At around 30 GB, obviously this wasn't going to work for the uncompressed Sheer files. So I reformatted the drive to be Mac OS Extended (Journalled) and told the client to use MacDrive, a PC utility that lets you mount, view, read and write files on a Mac formatted drive attached to a WinXP box. There's even a free time limited demo.

The client delivered the drive they had with a USB cable, even though the drive has FireWire 400 ports as well. Copying about 60GB of data over is time consuming, and USB 2.0 is about half or less of the speed of FireWire 400. So I used one of my own cables to speed up the process.

Got a call from the client just a little while ago - all is working well.

In the end, I spent several hours troubleshooting and doing this job. If all had gone smoothly, it should've taken about an hour and a half.

Lessons learned/observed:

1.) It's never going to be as easy as you think.
2.) Yes you CAN use FireWire for deck control for the Panasonic 1200A deck while capturing audio/video over HD-SDI
3.) Sheer works as a cross platform codec
4.) Never assume the client has done it right - EVERY job ALWAYS has a bunch of stuff go wrong. The only question is how many things go wrong on the average job - is it 3, 5, 9? (yes this is a repeat of #1, but it bears repeating)
5.) Never assume a post workflow is going to work as expected unless you personally have done it before, or someone you have good reason to TRUST has done EXACTLY the same thing before with the exact same software and gear and it has worked for them.
6.) Always ask a zillion questions when you have to integrate with somebody else's post process. Get incredibly specific and make no assumptions - you have Software X? What version? (people have amazingly out of date software all too often...I'm still on Photoshop CS #1, not CS 2). You have a BMD/AJA card? Which one? What drivers? (Lots of PC stuff has lagged getting 720p24 support - 720p60 might be supported initially, but 720p24 often came later). So forth and so on. You might have 9 steps in your post process (or more), so be sure that there are no breaks in your chain. It only takes on weak link to fail, or cause a major workaround that eats a lot of time and budget.
7.) ...thus I try to ALWAYS charge by the hour rather than flat rate.

: )

-mike