hmm... Raylight and DV Rack Decoders

S

srfjm

Active member
Sheesh... one question keeps leading me to 20 more. Soon I'll actually be able to contribute more than questions to this forum :)

I edit with Premiere Pro2... I started with Raylight and had that mostly working well. I recently aquired DV Rack HD2, which includes the DVC Pro decoders... so my question is, what's the impact of having both installed? Which codecs am I using with both installed? Raylight or DV Rack decoders? Raylight and DV Rack both suggest different Premiere Pro project settings... different resolutions and different pixel aspect ratios.
 
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srfjm said:
Sheesh... one question keeps leading me to 20 more. Soon I'll actually be able to contribute more than questions to this forum :)

I edit with Premiere Pro2... I started with Raylight and had that mostly working well. I recently aquired DV Rack HD2, which includes the DVC Pro decoders... so my question is, what's the impact of having both installed? Which codecs am I using with both installed? Raylight or DV Rack decoders? Raylight and DV Rack both suggest different Premiere Pro project settings... different resolutions and different pixel aspect ratios.
Click to expand...

The codec flags are different, "dvh1" for the one system and "rayl" for the other, so AVI's from both can be used side by side as well as MXF files. If Raylight is used with the native frame size then they have similar project settings, eg. 960 x 720 PAR = 1.333. If you use MXF files in the timeline they are always decoded with Raylight.
 
Thanks for explaining that. How does the raylight green/yellow/red control play into this? I guess it'll still work for the mxf files on the timeline and of course Raylight avi's, but not the DV Rack converted files?

I just did a side by side comparison in the timeline, and the DV Rack avi's looked significantly better than the mxf files and Raylight avi's! Do I have something funky going on, or is this true? I had raylight high quality set, and I tried it rendered and unrendered...
 
srfjm said:
Thanks for explaining that. How does the raylight green/yellow/red control play into this? I guess it'll still work for the mxf files on the timeline and of course Raylight avi's, but not the DV Rack converted files?

I just did a side by side comparison in the timeline, and the DV Rack avi's looked significantly better than the mxf files and Raylight avi's! Do I have something funky going on, or is this true? I had raylight high quality set, and I tried it rendered and unrendered...
Click to expand...
Use the raylight red/yellow marker feature to make sure you are really in raylight blue. Remember that Ppro has a frame cache tha sometimes does not purge itself unless you restart Premiere. The best possible quality is Raylight square pixel format (e.g 1280x 720) in Raylight Blue. It will do the SMPTE-specified enlargement and post-filtering to full raster format that DVRack and Premiere by themselves will not do.
 
yeah I'm definitely in Raylight blue, and I rebooted Premiere. The mxf and raylight files are 1920x1080 with square pixels. The Dv Rack avi is 1280x1080 with hd anamorphic pixels. So different ways of getting to the same size, but the mxf files and the Raylight files have a greenish hue and poor contrast compared to the DV Rack avi which is gorgeous. What's going on here? I haven't read anywhere that the Raylight codec is anything less than top quality?
 
Here's a comparison between the mxf (using raylight codec) and the DV Rack avi side by side in a PP2 timeline. The difference is stiking and more obvious with rolling video.

1173284755.jpg
 
Raylight uses video system RGB to better preserve the detail in the picture. For example, in the highlights of the lady's shirt you can see pinkwhere the DVRack version is blown out white. also in the black jacket the blacks look crushed in the dvrack version because they go all the way down to zero. A colorist perfers to see slightly below zero to make sure you are not cutting anything off at the low end.
If you record both versions back to the camera (using P2 Maker) and look there on an HD monitor, the raylight version shold have more accurate results.
 
yeah - I think at this point I'm just struck by how different they are... not that one's better than the other... though I'm coming around to raylight.

Thanks for your comments.
 
I am considering a similar set up on PC with DVRack and Raylight. Why do you need to use square pixels with the Raylight codec?
 
You don't *have* to use square pixels with Raylight. It gives you the option.

Also, check out the grid pattern running all through the DV Rack file... that's odd.
 
I think the DVRack codec is causing me some headaches as well. I noticed a green line along the edge of all DVRack footage, and there is a weird choppiness to some shots that is NOT there with the MXFs via Raylight...but then again, I have not upgraded because I cannot get the damned activation key to work and get no response from that crappy company. So maybe it's fixed in the newer version...
 
I should've used better video in the examples... in this shot I cropped the out of focus part, as it had more color and showed the differences better.

Regarding the DV Rack activation issues, I can assure that they are NOT resolved. It was working for me (installed off disc) until I used the update function... now I have the same hassles as everyone else. I'm emailing with softwrap :(
 
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