Some SundanceFest H1 24F SDI to DVCPROHD clips

Elton

Elton

Veteran
Hey guys,

For those interested...

Here are some random clips from Sundance Film Festival filmed with the
XLH1. The H1 was adjusted away from its normal flat look. The H1 image can
be pushed much farther out then even this with it's menu controls in all directions if desired...

XLH1 Settings for these shots were:

-4 master ped
+2 color sat
Cine-Gamma 2
Gain -3db

All this was recorded to HDV tape. Transfered via SDI to Kona card into
Panasonic DVCproHD 1080i. Reversed telecine to 23.98. "" No Re-compression ""
The h.264 version has excellent quality, yet the footage is hit with another pass of compression. First HDV, second DVCproHD, third .h264...... These clips will only be up be for 48hrs...

BTW, these are Raw DVCproHD files....

Link to clips:
http://www.pbase.com/arrfilms
 
Oh hells yeah.

Thanks, Elton!!!

I was just commenting about workflows for the XLH1.

Can you like me to a sort of breakdown of your workflow? The Kona card and such? Costly?

Can't wait to view!
 
Man wtf that footage is freaking AWESOME looking.

Full screen on CinemaHD 23 was SO freaking nice.

Crap. Moving it to 30 inch, will do noise report.

Thanks alot Elton.
 
Kholi said:
Can you like me to a sort of breakdown of your workflow? The Kona card and such? Costly?
Click to expand...

It's a pretty simple setup:


--G5 Dual 2.7

--XL-H1 SDI (had to play out the HDV tape into Kona SDI, Firestore's could make it tapeless output)

--FCP 5/Kona LH card

--Kona DVCPROHD 1080i capture preset

--Real-time conversion into DV100

--Audio piped in analog XLR into Kona LH...sync is perfect. Quality was fine

--Cinema Tools reverse telecine to 23.98 DVCPROHD clips (SDI output is 1080i). This was the part that was a little tricky. It took a few different passes on the footage to figure out which inverse pulldown worked.

--Edit and finish in whatever format you wish.

I'm pretty sure eventually there will be native 24F support, and even with this workflow you could reconform the clips to HDV...but the conversion to DVCPROHD almost seems better.

At this point I'm not even considering HDV for post. DV100 is a good editing codec, and if I need to do something higher end, I can capture and render in uncompressed, if desired.

This setup, of course, isn't dirt cheap, but with any of these HD formats you certainly need a fast computer, and the Kona card w/SDI is worth it's weight in gold, IMHO.
I believe you can get a Kona LH for around $1,700. If that is too much, there's always the Blackmagic Decklink HD for $595. The only problem with it is there's no HD analog monitoring, and no audio input. The H1 SDI is strictly video signal only, so you need to jump though a few hoops for it all to work properly.

If you're on the PC side, there's always the excellent Cineform in Adobe Premiere, and I believe Vegas 6 works natively with 24F HDV. I'm not too fond of HDV for any grading or motion graphics though.

Hope that helped a little.

Barlow
 
That's quite a bit of info, but that's what I was looking for.

I'm not worried about editing at all. We're working on very good systems, better than what you've posted.

I checked out two different files of yours, and I'm about to check out two more.

Comparing Diego in the Snow and the Sundance2 footage first off:

There's noise, there's no doubt about it. But there's a difference in the two clips (don't know if you shot those both with he same settings.)

Diego in the Snow is quite noisey on the coats. Though it wasn't AS noisey on the 23" CinemaHD, it was noticeable when sitting at the 30". Not as bad as other clips I've seen coming from HD cameras, but there's noise.

The Sundance2 clip held up better in my opinion. The light source was a LOT lower and I even went back to catch camera flashes to see how the sudden blow outs were handled; it looks fine to me.

I'm also getting staggered playback. What's going on with that? The G5 I just played it on has 16gigs of DDR plugged in and working. I thought it was the other G5, but I moved it to the beefier one and still got staggered play back. Is it the compression? Or is that straight from camera. It's kind of nasty.

Thanks again, Elton.

Update not relevant to thread but relevant to footage quality--

Getting the same staggered playback with the Sisters24h.264.mov.

This has to be quicktime or the codec. That camera can't be producing that. Should I try to play this in FCP instead?
 
Hey pappas! Can't see nothing! Pop ups something as "application/octet-stream", must to do "save target as" and...a save a strange file on the desktop with nothing into!...Ah reading more careful english...they're not uploaded yet, right?
 
I've tried to open the link from Quicktime but nothing...only an error message! I can only save the file on the desktop from the link, and it's few kilobytes with a unknow format! Please help!
The page of the link still doesn't open...only save target function, with a little file of unknow format...
Same problem with Internet Explorer and Mozilla browser too...
 
Danilo Del Tufo said:
I've tried to open the link from Quicktime but nothing...only an error message! I can only save the file on the desktop from the link, and it's few kilobytes with a unknow format! Please help!
The page of the link still doesn't open...only save target function, with a little file of unknow format...
Same problem with Internet Explorer and Mozilla browser too...
Click to expand...

It appear the link is to a Mac only download link, so they will need to fix the link.
 
Hey Elton. I'll try the present option instead.

I did notice, when I shrank down the image size for the sisters it played smoothly. Gotta say... I like the footage coming from the Canon, regardless of the fact that its being put out directly through SDI.

That just sounds like tapeless is going to rock with the Canon as well as the HVX.

hmm
 
That's where I downloaded them from. O_o;

Didn't know WHAT the hell the other people were talking about.
 
All I can say is wow ... this footage looks great considering it went through HDV compression to DVCPROHD. I noticed the files are downsized too, but I blew it up to full screen playback on my 30" Apple Cinema Display and it still looks incredibly good ... I can only imagine the raw full sized file. This Canon just keeps looking better and better ...
 
mgalvan,

Those monitors tell the naked truth about all these cameras. However, my old Trinitron CRT @ 1600x1200 is quite pleasing altogether. The nice thing about the progressive extraction is that these clips look great at any size you play them back at.

I would like to see more HVX raw 1080p as you guys get your cameras. I'm very interested to see how well these cameras might intercut.

Truth be told , I'd really love to have an HVX too.
 
mgalvan said:
All I can say is wow ... this footage looks great considering it went through HDV compression to DVCPROHD.
Click to expand...


I have a rather esoteric theory about this:

I believe it's actually better to capture H1 HDV to this format than it is to capture m2t's directly from the tape. There is something about the fact that the camera spits out SDI at a ridiculous bit rate (1.45 Gbps) from the hyper-compressed HDV that almost makes it better than the original. I know it sounds stupid, but I really like what I've acquired into DV100, and I certainly appreciate working in an i-frame format on the timeline.

I've seen lots of (mostly minor) problems with saturated reds from capturing DV, DV50 and DVCPROHD via firewire. I've heard that you get a better DV50 from an SDX900 from SDI than through firewire acquisition, and DV too. Of course, I think this has something to do with Apple's DVCPROHD codec still having some color filtering issues (optimized for multiple generations instead of smoothing the chroma) and the like.

All I know is that the issues I've had with DV all the way up to DV100 just aren't there with SDI acquisition...even from HDV source.
It's strange, but I think there's something to it.
 
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