The BOX, an idea for having real HD at a low price

macgregor

macgregor

Veteran
HDV is ok but not enough for many people.
THe new XDcam HD is more expensive and yet not good enough for some people.

The Canon XL H1 has HDsdi 4.2.2 output.
We can take a HDCAM deck to record that signal, but the deck itself cost a LOT more than the whole camera+lenses. Besides it is heavy and needs electric power.


Imagine we bring with us a black box of the size of another small monitor.
Imagine that this box is equipped with a raid HDDs, a decklink HD card and a configurated mainboard.
We could record 1 or 2 hours of HD footage at uncompressed or compressed with cineform codec without messing with heavy computers, decks and lots of cables at a reasonable price (aprox €6,000).

This is only usuable for shotfilms and very small productions but can deliver very good quality if you allready have the H1.

What do you think?
 
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=62589

While this is a more expensive solution -
I think you could achieve the same with a Kona or Decklink card (600$) into a Pc -(or Mac in my case) and then have 2 500g (500$) Raid Hard drives daisy chained.
= a 1500$ Raw HD solution (assuming you have the computer)

I would even switch to a small PC if one could serve this purpose

I am hoping that NAB may bring something as well...?

Levan is also working with a Mini 35, but also to note, though I don't know how it will handle the High Def is the Letus 35 relay lens:
http://letus35.com/35XL1.JPG
...may be of interest until the G35 and H1 relay appears,
Cheers,
J
 
I would consider the Cineform Wafian, or build a shuttle PC with an external SATA RAID and go Prospect HD (not sure, you need a powerful PC for the RT encoding), but that gets you back up there in cost.

If I were committed to the PC side of the equation I wouldn't hesitate to find a way to go Cineform. The quality is practically indistinguishable from uncompressed, but much more manageable.
 
Let's hope the Cineform guys will take advantage of the new Intel Macs. The owner said that their codecs take advantage of the Intel chipsets. Now that Macs are slowly going Intel (PowerMacs should be released this summer), I'm hoping we can finally have access to Cineform on this side of the fence.

The folks at Birns & Saywer were also talking about a company that's producing a Firestore type device that will accept HD-SDI input and will convert it to your codec of choice.

The question is how big will that box be?
 
At what point does it even matter ?

Content is King (the Horse continues his beating). If you can't make it work with todays available tools then you probably never well.

-

Anyone remember 28 Days Later ? Pieces of April ?

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Our tools are here and now. Let's stop waiting for next years NAb and start making nookie.

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I have spoken.
 
John is absolutely right. For most purposes HDV is plenty fine to create some call ass stuff. HDV is here to stay, guys. Time to embrace it and move on.

Lighting. Framing. Shot composition. Blocking. Performance. Editing.

None of these things involve codecs.
 
macgregor said:
The new XDcam HD is more expensive and yet not good enough for some people.
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Dear Macgregor :)
Xdcam's HDsdi 4:2:2 it's a fake., despite 25000 eur price without a lens...!
It's resampled and *uprezzed* to 4:2:2...sony chips captures only at 4:2:0.:crybaby:
Only Xl H1 can do the trick.
I have not still undertood if you need a deck to transfer Xdcam Hdv to computer, maybe Barry knows something, I've noticed Xdcam has an iLink cable that coverts all to dv.
Anyone knows somethin' about it?
 
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John_Hudson said:
At what point does it even matter ?

Content is King (the Horse continues his beating). If you can't make it work with todays available tools then you probably never well.
Click to expand...

While I would almost totally agree with you...it does matter when it comes to compositing and chroma key. That's where HDV can be just ok at best, but to have a strong alternative like uncompressed SDI tap is amazingly important to the believability of the content. I imagine an ultra-low budget Sin City type of film using the H1 because of SDI, despite the other cameras' qualities.

Anyone remember 28 Days Later ?
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Yup. Loved it in the theater and even in "hd" at home. (DishHD DVR) Still looked like *** either way and I'm almost annoyed that it came out before these "affordable hd's'. I actually watched it the other day and couldn't stop thinking about how cool it would've been if it were shot with the H1. I hate fighting the mush of the DV image.
Same with Open Water.

To me, what is very important about these new cameras is that they cross a quality threshold where it was easy to dismiss DV. IMHO, anything beyond HDV/HVX is diminishing returns as far as what really matters to the person watching your film. The mush is what sucked, but it's gone now...so yes, all that really matters is the content. I had mixed feelings previously about DV. 24p or not.

Our tools are here and now. Let's stop waiting for next years NAb and start making nookie.
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God's honest truth.


I have spoken.
Click to expand...

We're not worthy!! Jk
 
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starway2001@mac.com said:
Let's hope the Cineform guys will take advantage of the new Intel Macs. The owner said that their codecs take advantage of the Intel chipsets. Now that Macs are slowly going Intel (PowerMacs should be released this summer), I'm hoping we can finally have access to Cineform on this side of the fence.
Click to expand...

I'm holding out hope for Cineform or a better AIC. DVCproHD works but it's a stopgap.
I'd like to work online in a codec that keys, composites and recompresses extremely well. 10 bits of precision would be very nice, but with a manageable data rate. Cineform is the one on the market that really fills the bill for this stuff.


The folks at Birns & Saywer were also talking about a company that's producing a Firestore type device that will accept HD-SDI input and will convert it to your codec of choice.

The question is how big will that box be?
Click to expand...

I think for that box to really take off, it has to be Firestore sized, or not too much bigger. I want to be able to mount it on the back of the camera.
 
I have used connect HD by Cineform with HDV footage and i could see with my eyes that quality loss had taken place from the original m2t file.

In their website they show samples and say that almost no quality is lost. So i dont know what to think.
 
Surprising. Do they have variable quality settings? Maybe the default settings weren't as high bit rate as they needed to be. I've seen Cineform stuff that looked indistinguishable from the .m2t originals.

I can tell you that H1 SDI transfers from HDV tape to DVCproHD hold up amazingly well. I still would like a better option but it works for now on the Mac.
 
starway2001@mac.com said:
HDV is here to stay, guys. Time to embrace it and move on.
Click to expand...

I'm not sure how "here to stay" HDV actually is. As a first-generation HDV adopter (whoo! FX1) I know that this camera will last me until they get all the kinks in production worked out. I think HDV will continue to be around for a while, but it will be only like DV is to the HVX - a useful tape-based system for quick and dirty shooting.

The Cineform Wafian has already been mentioned - so let's consider this for a moment. We're talking about a ~$15k solution that produces TRUE 1920x1080 4:2:2 10-bit HD (no stupid pixel aspect ratios), and burst uncompressed modes, and image quality that's much higher than DVCPRO-HD via the Cineform codec. All of which can be edited in real time on a suitable PC.

I hope that low-cost HD cameras will move towards being HDV heads with uncompressed HD outputs, with 2nd party vendors contributing the codecs and black boxes to record on.

-Spiff
 
Good points Spiff. I forgot to mention the true pixel raster of Cineform. That's a very important feature...and one that the H1 can really exploit.
 
It seemed to me that a lot of folks waved their hand and easily dismissed the H1's true raster HD-SDI 4:2:2 port (maybe because the horse they were backing didn't have this feature *wink*).

But for me it was one of the main things that turned me on. I will shoot both HDV and externally on my projects. I love knowing that I can actually own an F900 quality camera (within reason) that I can run and gun with, but also have the option to record to higher end formats if the budget permits.

And from my own experience with the H1, HDV is not that big an issue. It's by no means perfect. But it's not the big ugly monster everyone's made it out to be (which is direct result of the massive negative PR campaign by Panasonic).
 
John_Hudson said:
At what point does it even matter ? Content is King (the Horse continues his beating). If you can't make it work with todays available tools then you probably never well.
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There are plenty of places in this forum where "content" is the focus of the discussion, but this is the camera section. In the cinematography section, I suppose someone could interject regularly, "hey, stop obsessing about getting that light just perfect, content is king", or in the HVX200 section "hey, stop worrying about which master ped setting looks best, content is king", etc. My point is, although "content is king" is a totally true statement and something I completely agree with, it's relevance to a technical discussion is somewhat limited.

I myself am just starting down the path of trying to create professional quality movies, and believe that it's the sum of many details that "add up" to that feel. On my stuff, I want each department to obsess about getting their part as good as they can. In the camera section of the forum it seems pretty appropriate to talk about how, if possible, to capture the best video signal coming out of the camera.

Especially since there's a doohickey jutting out of my camera that has 50x more bits than what is laid down on the tape! Show me a geek that wouldn't want to tap into that bad boy!
 
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