Shooting Uncompressed HD On The A1?

R

RawkThisFistRed

Member
Hey,

Okay. First time poster, but I've been searching the forums trying to find an answer to this question.

Now, I understand that the XH A1 doesn't have HD-SDI support in order to shoot to a FireStore, but my question is this.

Are there any methods besides tethering directly to a computer, to shoot uncompressed High Def?

Is it necessarily bad to have HD compressed with an MPEG2 codec if I plan on shooting a feature film that would be released in theaters?

I'm planning for the future and wondering how my camera can hold up in the competition.
 
RawkThisFistRed said:
Are there any methods besides tethering directly to a computer, to shoot uncompressed High Def?
Click to expand...

None that I know of.

Is it necessarily bad to have HD compressed with an MPEG2 codec if I plan on shooting a feature film that would be released in theaters?

I'm planning for the future and wondering how my camera can hold up in the competition.
Click to expand...

Well, they're filming Crank 2 with HDV compression and everything so...
 
RawkThisFistRed said:
Hey,

Now, I understand that the XH A1 doesn't have HD-SDI support in order to shoot to a FireStore, but my question is this.

Are there any methods besides tethering directly to a computer, to shoot uncompressed High Def?
Click to expand...

I think convergent design is working on a box that can hdmi or component to hd/sdi but it's not here yet.

If you care that much tethered isn't that bad, check out this thread in the H1 section, to learn about feature shot tethered with an XL H1. http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthread.php?t=109342

If you shot tied to a comp you'll need a blackmagic card or an AJA.


Is it necessarily bad to have HD compressed with an MPEG2 codec if I plan on shooting a feature film that would be released in theaters?

I'm planning for the future and wondering how my camera can hold up in the competition.
Click to expand...

No it's not, plenty of stuff has been shot in hdv from weaker cameras and the movie the signal(which is going to theaters) was shot with canon hdv.

I know I might get flamed for this by hvx purists, but at this point, for most things canon hdv has proved itself.

I'm going to shoot a feature with an XHA1 as well.
 
In all honesty, I own both, and due to the canon a1s apparent resolution superiority my hvx has been reduced to b cam status and for slowmotion. Keep in mind, I use the sg pro, so when still needing that organic film look with these adapters, the more detail and resolution you have, you get the best of both worlds. Also contrary to popular beliefs, the dynamic range on the a1 seems to be better because of the wide range of tweakability.

So in short, the canon a1 is a cross between the hvx and the sony ex1.
 
ecking said:
I think convergent design is working on a box that can hdmi or component to hd/sdi but it's not here yet.

If you shot tied to a comp you'll need a blackmagic card or an AJA.
Click to expand...

Good advice from ecking.

I've already worked this out and here's what I did to capture ProRes 4:2:2 in real time, avoiding HDV compression.

First, yes - Convergent Design has a card (about $700), named the "HD-Connect SI") which takes a Firewire HDV signal and converts into a HD-SDI stream. Works like a champ.

Now you need your Blackmagic card to accept the SDI signal into your computer. Again, works great.

But the computer has to have fast hard drives to capture this video stream. Your normal Mac Pro SATA drive is not fast enough. However, you don't need to upgrade to a multi-$$ huge RAID. If you install a couple of extra SATA drives, you can use the Apple OS raid configuration to create a 3-disk RAID which gives you about 170 MB/sec throughput. (Hard disk #4 is used as your system disk.) This is plenty fast enough to capture without loss of frames.

You can use your Blackmagic card to choose the final format. I chose Apple ProRes as the best balance between file size, resolution, and editing overhead.

One caveat - the CD box only outputs at 29.97 SDI. 24 frames is not supported (yet).
But overall, it works great!

Another issue - Firewire should only have a cable run of about 15 feet. If your computer is further away, you'll need to have the CD box placed near the camera, and then you can run a SDI cable 100' or more without problems or signal boosters.

Just wanted to share my four-month journey to get this all figured out!

Best,
Bert
 
All these methods you're discussing are ways of capturing footage without going through HDV compression, but they're not answering the OP's question which is: how do you capture UNCOMPRESSED HD?

Simple answer is: you don't. Not when it runs 166 megabytes per second.

Now, if you're talking about an HD-SDI camera like the XHG1 or XLH1, you can capture the raw signal to a Convergent Designs XDR, but that's going to compress the footage into MPEG-2 anyway. You can capture it to a computer using the Sheer codec, but that's going to compress it to Sheer. You can capture it to the Cineform Wafian, but that's going to compress it to Wafian.

You can capture uncompressed, but it's not a practical solution for anything other than very brief bursts of footage. When six seconds takes up a gigabyte, there's not much practicality to trying to work with uncompressed HD footage.
 
Barry_Green said:
All these methods you're discussing are ways of capturing footage without going through HDV compression, but they're not answering the OP's question which is: how do you capture UNCOMPRESSED HD?

Simple answer is: you don't. Not when it runs 166 megabytes per second.

Now, if you're talking about an HD-SDI camera like the XHG1 or XLH1, you can capture the raw signal to a Convergent Designs XDR, but that's going to compress the footage into MPEG-2 anyway. You can capture it to a computer using the Sheer codec, but that's going to compress it to Sheer. You can capture it to the Cineform Wafian, but that's going to compress it to Wafian.

You can capture uncompressed, but it's not a practical solution for anything other than very brief bursts of footage. When six seconds takes up a gigabyte, there's not much practicality to trying to work with uncompressed HD footage.
Click to expand...

Thanks. I guess I didn't formulate the question right.

Probably because my teacher taught us that the HVX > Canon XH A1 (My camera) because it can shoot uncompressed HD.

Then I come and read these forums and find out it's actually compressed, just with a different codec (correct?). Is the codec the HVX compresses with any worse/better?

I'm extremely eager to take my work to the next level. Everything I've done in school thus far is great amongst my school community, but **** when I step outside of that boundary. I want to step outside of that and I feel that this is the first necessary step; establishing a definitive workflow. So I'm trying to figure out wether or not I should buy a FireStore and if I could shoot to it. I've read other places that you can shoot directly to the FireStore via FireWire, which would be my weapon of choice.

I've admittedly been capturing via iMovie, because I only recently figured out how to get my Final Cut 6 to interface with my A1, let alone Log and Capture. I'm not sure what the compression on that is, but what I've shot for tests come out visually crisper than what I was doing before that.

So I guess I'm just a ball of questions, right now. Sorry.
 
What I was also wondering is, what kind of quality will I get by shooting directly to iMovie (which is possible through firewire) as opposed to shooting to HDV and capturing in Final Cut?

Are there any work-arounds to capturing in FCP? Like can I capture directly into FCP? I've tried but it only looks like it'll read a VTR.
 
RawkThisFistRed said:
Probably because my teacher taught us that the HVX > Canon XH A1 (My camera) because it can shoot uncompressed HD.
Click to expand...
The HVX is (IMO) better than the XHA1 for many reasons (and it had better be, because it costs 50% more). But neither of them shoot uncompressed HD. As a practical matter, no camera on the market shoots uncompressed HD.

Is the codec the HVX compresses with any worse/better?
Click to expand...
Much better. The codec the HVX uses is accepted by all networks for unrestricted acquisition, editing and mastering, but the codec the A1 uses isn't accepted by any networks for unrestricted acquisition, editing or mastering. As the formats go, you're talking about a medium/high level professional format, vs. a low-end consumer format.

But when it all comes down to it, they end up producing, at the end, largely comparable footage. So if you've got an A1, don't even sweat it -- go with what you've got, it's fine.

So I'm trying to figure out wether or not I should buy a FireStore and if I could shoot to it. I've read other places that you can shoot directly to the FireStore via FireWire, which would be my weapon of choice.
Click to expand...
Why?

I've admittedly been capturing via iMovie, because I only recently figured out how to get my Final Cut 6 to interface with my A1, let alone Log and Capture. I'm not sure what the compression on that is, but what I've shot for tests come out visually crisper than what I was doing before that.
Click to expand...
This doesn't make any sense. If you're capturing HDV through firewire, it's gonna be the same everywhere. Unless in iMovie you're forcing it to conform to AIC or something?
 
My understanding is that the HDV codec is a 4:2:0 colour space.
If the component-out is used, you can bypass the HDV codec if you capture with a Black Magic card.
My understanding is that this is the only way to get 4:2:2 colour space footage from the XHA1 - I'm not sure if it is full HD though through the component out method?
 
Wow. So I'm completely confused now.

I thought I was capturing something different. Now that you're telling me it's all the same, I'm kind of suprised. Visually, it looks just as good as something I could shoot on the HVX.

So let's say I shoot something on the A1 and I wanted to get it on Broadcast Television, what would I have to do? Have it formatted by a post house?

And I wanted to shoot to a FireStore because I figured that it would be at a lower compression (by lower, I mean better than MPEG2) than shooting to DV/HDV.

And what I'm shooting on the A1, can that be considered 1K, even though it's HDV? Is it still a heavily compressed 1k?
 
RawkThisFistRed said:
And I wanted to shoot to a FireStore because I figured that it would be at a lower compression (by lower, I mean better than MPEG2) than shooting to DV/HDV.
Click to expand...

False. Anything that goes out via firewire is just HDV. There's no way of getting around it.

RawkThisFistRed said:
And what I'm shooting on the A1, can that be considered 1K, even though it's HDV? Is it still a heavily compressed 1k?
Click to expand...

There's no 1k, there's 1080p. And yes, that is what the A1 is recording. It's a resolution standard that is independent from codec. HDV is HD.
 
RawkThisFistRed said:
Wow. So I'm completely confused now.

I thought I was capturing something different. Now that you're telling me it's all the same, I'm kind of suprised. Visually, it looks just as good as something I could shoot on the HVX.

So let's say I shoot something on the A1 and I wanted to get it on Broadcast Television, what would I have to do? Have it formatted by a post house?

And I wanted to shoot to a FireStore because I figured that it would be at a lower compression (by lower, I mean better than MPEG2) than shooting to DV/HDV.

And what I'm shooting on the A1, can that be considered 1K, even though it's HDV? Is it still a heavily compressed 1k?
Click to expand...


If you want to skip compression on an HD camera you need to record from
an HDMI or HD-SDI out on the cam. I do no think the XHA1 has HD-SDI (the xhg1 and xhl1s have it). It may have an HDMI out.

As for getting footage on broadcast television you'll need to contact the individual channels and ask them what they're policies are. Some are quite stringent, like Discovery HD which only allows 10-15% of the material in a given show to be originated on hdv.

davide
 
RawkThisFistRed said:
Is it necessarily bad to have HD compressed with an MPEG2 codec if I plan on shooting a feature film that would be released in theaters?
Click to expand...
Check out "The Signal", which is coming to Blu-Ray next month I believe. Shot on the Canon XL-H1 right to tape. Was picked up at Sundance for around $2 Million I believe. Also as mentioned, Crank 2 is apparently being shot with HDV.

RawkThisFistRed said:
I'm planning for the future and wondering how my camera can hold up in the competition.
Click to expand...
The XH-A1 will see superior cameras coming out at some point - it is inevitable. But while newer cameras might be better, it will never make the A1 "bad". The XH-A1 is up to the task of recording a feature film right now, today. And in 5 years, it will still be just as capable.

The affordable pro HD camcorders out today pretty much remove any technical excuses in regards to making a movie. If someone makes a movie with an HVX, XH-A1, EX1, etc.. and the end product isn't a wonderful looking and compelling film, it'll be 100% the filmmaker's fault :)
 
philnerd said:
The XH-A1 will see superior cameras coming out at some point - it is inevitable. But while newer cameras might be better, it will never make the A1 "bad". The XH-A1 is up to the task of recording a feature film right now, today. And in 5 years, it will still be just as capable.

The affordable pro HD camcorders out today pretty much remove any technical excuses in regards to making a movie. If someone makes a movie with an HVX, XH-A1, EX1, etc.. and the end product isn't a wonderful looking and compelling film, it'll be 100% the filmmaker's fault :)
Click to expand...
Amen.
 
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