Editing in HD - Expensive Codecs Required?

J

JohnMcGary

New member
So I've looked through the forums and I'm still confused. I unpacked my little HVX and shot some stuff in 720. Now I want to edit in in either Vegas or Premiere. I've dumped the MXF files over to my drive. So how do I edit them?! From what I've been reading I'm going to have to drop $200 bucks for either Raylight or Serious Magic??? This makes no sense to me. I can shoot in HD but Panasonic doesn't provide the drivers to even use the files?! Thats just frustrating. Am I missing something here? Is there any way to edit the footage without dropping some bucks on more software?

If not, does anyone have any recommendations on raylight v. serious magic?

Thanks!
 
It's not Panasonic's responsibility to support Premiere-- it's Adobe's. It's Sony's responsibility to support Vegas. You can edit in Avid or Edius on the PC and FCP on the Mac right out of the box.

Ned Soltz
 
That's nothing!

That's nothing!

Wait till you have to buy a $1000 bluray dvd burner and $25 discs.
 
yep... with vegas or premiere you will need raylight, cineform, or serious magic dvrack I believe

Avid supports most hvx formats natively. Edius does all of them, and FCP will now do all of them I believe (with 5.1.2 update) but converts the files to mov first. Which is what the above plugins do (except avi instead of mov for pc) so you can work with them in those nle's that don't support dvcpro.

Jason
 
I use Raylight, and its great.

No offense, but isn't it a bit silly to complain about having to buy a $200 piece of software to fully realize the potential of your $5500 camera?
 
I am trying to make the right decision as well. I was just about to get the Serious Magic when I saw this post on thier site:

"Currently, there is a known issue with MXF files recorded using the 30PN and
24PN format. The video works fine, but the audio will not play back correctly. This is a timing issue associated with the native frame rate, and we hope to have it corrected shortly.

I was shooting in 24pn mode to view the "undercranked/overcranked" files but this post will cause me to shoot use Scene file 5 for 24p work, and reset the Scene 4 to shoot Film Cam with 24pn set at 48fps. Then there is no issue with sound.
 
Raylight

Raylight

So, I want to get this correct, Raylight will allow me to introduce"avi proxies" into the Adobe workflow and the processing in done on high res proxies for final output.

Does this really work? It seems like such an inexpensive way to work, rather than getting an AVID HD or Canopus Broadcast hardware and software setup.

Curious.
 
WhiteMonkey said:
So, I want to get this correct, Raylight will allow me to introduce"avi proxies" into the Adobe workflow and the processing in done on high res proxies for final output.

Does this really work? It seems like such an inexpensive way to work, rather than getting an AVID HD or Canopus Broadcast hardware and software setup.

Curious.
Click to expand...
Yes, it works. I have Raylight and I was using the same workflow you mentioned. Then I tried Cineform. I realized I was getting almost the exact same performance out of Cineform at full-res, that I was with Raylight with the mid-level proxies. Plus, when converting to Cineform you can delete your old MXF files. With Raylight you must keep them, and not move them to another folder (this might have changed in a newer release).

I don't know why Cineform doesn't get as much love as the other two solutions on here. It is by far the best workflow I've used thus far for Premiere.

The best thing to do is try them out. Each of these products has a free demo that you can use to try it our for yourself. So you can decide.
 
Which Cineform product are you using? I've been to their website, and it looks like there are three products. I use AfterEffects and would there be any benefit to using Prospect HD and it's 10bit files?

Also, would a Intel 6700 Duo Core 2 system with a TB RAID 0 array be enough to work with DVCProHD or DVCPRo50? I'm getting the computer upgrade before the camera and want to know it will be usefull 6-12 months down the road when I pop for the camera.
 
I've got another question, what about using a laptop and DV Rack HD? It claims to record DVCProHD and DVCPro50. I've only got film and Videotape experience, is there anyone using a laptop to record to in this manner? The Firestore is $1800, and I would still need a laptop to dump to when I'm on the road.

???
 
I've been playing with various versions of CineForm trials- Aspect HD and Connect HD- for a few weeks now, with Premiere Pro 1.5.1. The performance is great- I have an Athlon 64 3500+ and all my media is on my single 7200rpm system drive, and it plays smoothly at full resolution- even without the performance increase of Aspect HD!
Connect HD will let you convert all HVX footage for $200.
Aspect HD will let you convert all HVX footage, and includes some magical plugins and effects for Premiere that let you add color correction, transitions, titles and more - in REALTIME. HD. REALTIME. WHOA. For $500.
I think I heard that you can buy Connect HD and later upgrade to Aspect HD for the difference in price.
 
Yeah I have whichever Cineform product is the $200 one. I tried out the more expensive package that gives you "real-time" effects built into Premiere. It worked great, BUT the $200 version created clips that were so fast, that I could still use the default Premiere plugins and get great results, mostly in real-time.

I am running Production Studio on an Athlon X2, with a Quadro FX 3400 card.

I haven't sat around and tested every single format, but with the ones that I do work with, the only time I have EVER noticed something not playing back in real-time is when I am playing a 720/60p clip in Media Player. I guess outputting 60 HD frames a second is a bit much. I wouldn't know that it wasn't real-time though, except for the fact that the audio gets out of sync.
 
Thanks

Thanks

I have been looking at the Cineform products now and like the ProspectHD product for the color work I intend to do. I've been researching the various color spaces and it will change your HDV footage to 4:2:2 10-bit HD and play in real-time. AfterEffects uses 8,16,and 32bit floating point and the images in this review,

http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/review_color_finesse.html, show me to some real benefits of color correcting and working in higher bit color spaces. Just take a look at what happens to the gradient and how smooth and consistent the changes are in 32 bit color processing. The other spaces seem to bloom and have hot spots.

The After Effects Studio book also goes into this and I've been reading abotu eLin a little bit too. Yes, I'm one of those geeks who read all of Ansel Adams books when he started photography. If you haven't, they're outstanding and go into great depth into the materials and the process.

Any ideas?
 
My one question about 32-but color, etc, is if you are outputting to DVD (or eventually HD-DVD or BluRay), won't the final output compression crush the colors anyway, therefore making the whole process useless? I haven't worked outside of 8-bit, so I was just curious about this.
 
I'm using Aspect HD (thats the mid level version) with PPro 1.5 and am quite happy with it. On my slow, old 3ghz P4 w/ 1gb of ram I get MUCH better performance than I ever did with Raylight.

I wish that Adobe could build the Cineform codec and render engine into Premiere Pro, but for now I just had to cough up the dough, and I haven't regretted it.

Can't wait to get a faster PC and really get my moneys worth.
 
TwistedLincoln said:
No offense, but isn't it a bit silly to complain about having to buy a $200 piece of software to fully realize the potential of your $5500 camera?
Click to expand...

I don't think it's silly. Maybe a bit misinformed...

The HVX is a $5500 camera, but the migration to HD (P2 cards, editing stations, storage, etc.) costs a lot more than that. When people purchase the HVX they often don't realize all of the associated costs -- like codecs and Premiere.
 
I think the cheapest solution to edit hd is edius broadcast. isnt it coming at 900?
I was on raylight at the beginning and later migrated to prospect for the 10 bit.
The 10 bit uprezzing is holding better color corrections and gives a better output when compressed, but, frankly, i still see banding.
 
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