HVX Post Workflow

[Chimpan-A]

What are people's thoughts on how the Post-production workflow will work with the HVX.

Will editing have to be done at full quality using the native DVCPRO HD codec? Or could we use an Offline/Online methodology. ie is there the possibility of working at a draft resolution and then relinking the final sequence to the full quality footage at the end? If someone is shooting a 1080 24p feature film on the HVX they may wish to not buy quite as fast and big a drive array as would be needed to have all the footage available at full rez. If we could bring the footage in at a ‘draft’ quality until all the creative ‘offline’ editing is done, and then only bring in the full quality footage that is needed in the final cut, then we would save on drive space etc. I’m thinking of a world where the shot footage is achieved on something like blu-ray disks, or cheap hardrives that are too slow for editing, which would mean its not instantly available to the NLE.

OK so imagine I am shooting a short film on the HVX that I plan to record out to film. Lets say I’m using the 1080 24p option on the camera, this is of course buried inside a 1080 60i signal. Is there a NLE on the market today that can reconstruct the 1080 24p picture from the 1080 60i DVCPRO-HD signal? Or will we have to cut in 60i?

OK now say I am editing in Avid Xpress Pro or FCP. Now if I plan to do VFX work in, say, After Effects, then what is the best way of getting just the footage used in each vfx shot from my cut into After Effects in an uncompressed format. Ie Can either FCP of Avid transcode the DVCPRO-HD footage into an uncompressed 1080x1920 10bit format?

Once I have done the VFX/colour correction at an uncompressed 1080x1920, obviously I don’t want to recompress back to DVCPRO-HD just to get it back into the FCP or Avid timeline. So how would we reconstruct the sequence in an uncompressed form in order to have it filmed out? If we had the budget, we could always cut the finished VFX shots back into the DVCPRO-HD footage in an HD Onlining machine like the quantel IQ or something. But are there cheaper workflows?

If anyone has any thoughts on this, and wants to point out all my false assumptions, I would be most appreciative

Cheers

Chimpan-A

 

[esperman]

HMM...well, dvcpro-hd will not generate HUGE files...so i say just take it in full rez off the P2 or firestore etc etc. Besides..drives are cheap to buy and rent.

Yes, FCP and Avid can both uprez shots to uncompressed for SFX (I assume Premier and Vegas could as well).

 

[Kenn_Christenson]

Once I have done the VFX/colour correction at an uncompressed 1080x1920, obviously I don’t want to recompress back to DVCPRO-HD just to get it back into the FCP or Avid timeline. So how would we reconstruct the sequence in an uncompressed form in order to have it filmed out? If we had the budget, we could always cut the finished VFX shots back into the DVCPRO-HD footage in an HD Onlining machine like the quantel IQ or something. But are there cheaper workflows?

Actually, you're not going to want to be doing a lot of pixel stretching from DVCProHD's 1280x1080, if you want to maintain the maximum resolution of the format.

I know it sounds like the most painful way to go, but keeping all your footage in its native size is going to give you the best results, especially if it's going to be seen on a large display or the big screen.

 

[Chimpan-A]

Transcoding to uncompressed

Transcoding to uncompressed

What other options are there for transcoding from DVCPRO-HD to uncompressed? I asume products like Media Cleaner do it. Could I also just open up the MXF file from the P2 card into Quicktime Pro and the save it as another codec?

Are there differences in quality between different transcoding products? Or do they all produce identical results?

And what transcoding option is the fastest?

It would be great to start collecting some info on these questions.

cheers

Chimpan-A

 

[makal]

I guess there's no need of converting all your vfx shots to uncompressed since you can export your whole timeline or just part of it to a mxf, aaf or mov with timeline references linking to the original mxfs. It may require some trial, but it should work.
I'm not sure about mxf parsing capabilities in After Effects, but the .mov option should work since all the work is done by the quicktime layer.
Then the QT or VfW DVCPRO codec will decompress frames on the fly to linear RGB for AE; besides, only if you plan to do heavy CC/vfx AND work in 16bit linear in AE it makes sense to export your finished timeline to 10bit log, otherwise you should perhaps consider letting the facility do the conversion.
For a short project you could even manage to bring the entire timeline in AE and export the whole thing, but at some point you'll need anyway to make intermediate files, prerenders, or just import vfx clips back in FCP or avid. Uncompressed 8 or worse 16bit linear rgb HD is gonna be huge, so you might consider some lossless codecs like QT sheervideo (also for the final 10bit log) or the free and superfast VfW huffyuv (which is limited to 8bit anyway).