XH-A1 HDV via firewire or HDMI??

S

Squiggles949

New member
Two questions for you all:

1. Does anyone know if there is any advantage in capturing my HDV tapes (shot on my XH-A1) through a deck (like the JVC BR-HD50U) into a Blackmagic Intensity card via the HDMI. I know there are more codec varieties, but do you think there is any more quality through the HDMI?

2. What do most people edit their HDV footage in? Native HDV, prores 422, apple intermediate? Is there any advantage to these or others?

Thanks for your help!
 
A BR-HD50U won't play XHA1 tapes at all. So the whole question is moot. If you want HDMI for Canon 24F footage, you'd have to use a camera like the HV20 to play the footage.

HDMI has advantages when bypassing tape, but if you're recording directly to HDV tape the "damage" to the footage (mpeg compression, 4:2:0 color sampling, etc) is already done. Capturing footage from tape, via HDMI, is not going to help things.
 
So when are "they", as in anyone, going to release a HDD recorder that will capture via HDMI rather than having to carry a laptop around with you everywhere?
 
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When hard disk transfer rates increase by tenfold.

You do realize that uncompressed HDMI video is on the order of 200 megabytes per second, right? This is no small task. The only way to capture that is either via a large RAID of hard disks, or via using compression. No alternatives exist in this particular universe. :)
 
Do I have to capture my footage as HDV first and then transcode to ProRes 422? I don't see any ProRes HDV capture options in FCP6. What will the advantages be with ProRes?
 
You have to capture as HDV first, but with one of the newer ultra-fast Macs you might be able to capture via HDMI straight to ProRes. (assuming you have the intensity card)

I'd recommend capturing to HDV and using Media Manager to transcode to ProRes--that way you can retain timecode info from the original HDV clips.
 
DivotDan said:
Jeez, thats a crap load of data......

I didn't realize, but I do now!
Click to expand...


It's not quite that high. Uncompressed 8bit HD 1080 is roughly 100 MBs to capture in FCP. For 10 bit I think it's around 130-140 MBs.

One cool alternative to uncompressed HD or ProRes is the Sheer codec. It's cross platform, HD data rate is about 45 MBs for true uncompressed quality (lossless codec) and does a wonderful job of converting YUV to RGB colorspace if needed. Works great the other way around too with no weird QT gamma issues either. You can render and re-render in this codec as much as you want without worrying about generational compression artifacts. www.bitjazz.com

Sheer is still my favorite intermediate codec to work with.
 
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