HD For Indies

UPDATED with Windows product info, see bottom

Similar to Geoff Frost's post on HVX200 production tips, my other intern, Andy Nelson, has been doodling around with a Canon HV20, and I asked him to post his notes on his experiences with the HV20. Below is his article on dealing with 24p. BTW - if looking to figure out how to get optimal results out of the HV20, FreshDV's interview with Bruce Allen (he of recent Cinegear report) has some EXCELLENT specific details on hands on usage and testing on how to get the most out of the HV20.

This is thematically similar to Steve Mullen's recent piece on dealing with the V1's 24p in Final Cut Pro

More coverage to follow on that, but here's Andy's report on the HV20 and 24p, my comments in italics:

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For a thousand bucks the Canon HV20 isn’t a bad little camera, especially after putting some work into getting 24P from it. The HV20 uses HDV, so it only records 60i to tape and adds 3:2 pulldown for its 24fps mode. You can, however, acheive some pretty good results with a reverse telecine to remove the pulldown for full-on progressive beauty. To do this I began by capturing with the Apple Intermediate Codec, as to bypass the temporal compression of MPEG2 that comes with native HDV, and then went two routes for the reverse telecine…(Mike comment - the MPEG-2 compression is from the source HDV, by transcoding to AIC, FCP can process that footage faster, and your recompression/generational losses will be less. This was with FCP 6 not 5.x, BTW)

The Hard Way:
The first way I did this was using Cinema Tools (After Effects or something like JES Deinterlacer will also work ...but using After Effects, with its RGB processing, can clip superwhite and sub-black values - mike). After opening my clip in Cinema Tools, I used the Reverse Telecine button at the bottom of the window. Cinema Tools does not do a “smart” reverse telecine, you have to tell it where to start and what to do. 3:2 pulldown puts the 24P footage down as 60i on tape in a pppii cadence, p for progressive frames and i for interlaced (three progressive and two interlaced, hence 3:2). Essentially, you must tell Cinema Tools what frame of this cadence you are starting with.  The button brings up a window with options for Capture Mode, Fields, File, and Frames. It is quite a process to determine the Capture Mode and Fields options, while File and Frames are rather straightforward.  This diagram from the Cinema Tools manual was helpful...


Capture Mode has to do with the repeating frame sequence of the clip. I used “Field 1 – Field 2,” which means that my footage contains both fields with Field 1 Dominance, as opposed to the other options: Field 2 Dominance, Field 1 Only, or Field 2 Only. 
Mike's continuation of that - ...and then export that in some high quality codec, preferably 10 bit, such as Apple Uncompressed 10 bit 4:2:2 or ProResHQ - THEN process via Compressor, THEN bring the levels back in FCP when you color correct (or maybe in Color - I need to check that round trip workflow to see if superwhites and sub-blacks are maintained).

-andy & mike

Labels: Apple, hdv, NLE, workflow