DV for Teachers

TidBITS, the long-running Mac newsletter, today gives us A Personal Shopper for HD Video Editing Gear. Below is an extended quote so you’ll know you need to click through, read the entire thing, and follow their links to Mike Curtis’s recommended systems.

Mike Curtis lives and breathes HD. His Web site, HD for Indies, is geared toward independent filmmakers who are focused more on getting great footage and creating a movie than on the ins and outs of pushing HD video through a system.

If you’re looking to edit your own indie feature or starting a business editing video for others, Mike has taken on the role of personal shopper and put together three recommended Mac-based editing systems. In addition to the computer (all Mac Pro machines, but not necessarily the most powerful ones), Mike’s picks include LCDs and video monitors, RAM, graphics cards, HD capture devices, and multiple storage options. The bundles range in price from $9,000 for an entry-level system capable of editing uncompressed HD footage to $23,000 for a well-equipped system.

He’s worked out a deal with Silverado Systems (and he gets a cut of the order), but all the information is there, with notes and explanation, if you prefer an alternate vendor.

I’ve followed Mike’s site for a while, and even though I don’t shoot HD video, it’s always an entertaining and insightful read.

I’ve followed Mike’s site off and on for a few years now, and though I don’t have any HD equipment yet, I know it’s coming. Mike’s experience and insight will prove invaluable when the time comes.

I still shoot Standard Definition: MiniDV, 720×480, 29.97 fps, 4:2:2 compression, etc. etc. But HDV is coming to education. It will be a while before schools and colleges have the funds to upgrade their TVs and display systems to show HDV, but those of us who produce and teach video in education need to know about this format. From Consumer Electronics.net.

A Beginners Guide to High Definition Video.

How did I miss this one? Busy doing other things and reading other places on the web, I suppose. I just found DV Guru, and it’s full of tips, workflow ideas, links to new products, and industry assessments. Another site to check every day, and worth it. For one example, they link to FilmSite.org, Tim Dirks’ huge site with historical timelines, synopses of classic films, and much more. It’s been around for ten years! An excellent augmentation for any film studies class. Beware the pop-up ads, though. Tsk.

Here’s another example: a post about the importance of integrating your audio with your video edits. For some of us, it’s a no-brainer, but not everyone picks that up. DV Guru offers good info for experienced editors and newbies too, and a busy comments section to boot.

ConsumerElectronics.net reports:

The age of Hi Def home movies for the average person has arrived. Barely a week after announcing a pair of new professional HD camcorders, Canon dropped the other shoe by unveiling the HV10, a palm-sized camcorder that shoots true 1080 HDV video.

There have been HD edit systems for over a year now, but not too many places to watch HD. With this inexpensive camera for making HD, it’s one less barrier to adoption of this new standard. I think it’s still too soon for most educators to consider switching to producing HD, though. How soon will you have HD-ready video monitors in your classrooms? Not too soon, I’d guess.

Dave Nagel on MacBook Pro Benchmarks: Final Cut Studio 5.1

When I set off to benchmark the MacBook Pro, the question I wanted answered was how close the MacBook Pro could come to matching the performance of a common G5 tower. That it matched or exceeded the performance of the G5 in the vast majority of tests was quite surprising to me. Even though the MacBook is rated slightly higher in GHz than the G5, it does use a mobile chip, which you wouldn’t expect to match the chip in a desktop system.

Oh boy. These Mac-on-Intel laptops really fly on everything, he says, except the HD and H.264 encoding, and this is just the first release of the Final Cut suite for Intel. Oh boy.

Larry Jordan is an experienced and respected Final Cut Pro editor and trainer. I subscribe to and keep his newsletters every month. They’re valuable reference materials for some of the editing situations I get into, and good refreshers when I return to editing after having been involved in other activities here in the ITC. His latest newsletter includes many tips and workflow examples, responses to reader questions, and explanations regarding working with other applications – motion graphics, audio, and more. Very highly recommended.

[Note: If you want to keep a copy, download it now; he doesn’t archive them on the site, he incorporates the contents into the articles there.] Here’s an extended excerpt about HDV’s strengths and limitations and his suggestions for getting the best results with this very much in-flux format.

Article: What I’ve learned about HDV

During my recent seminar tour, I had a chance to show many of you how to capture, edit, conform, and output HDV within Final Cut Pro.

However, as frequently happens, teaching goes both ways – I learned a great deal from your questions and comments. Now that the seminar is over, I wanted to share some of my conclusions about working with HDV.

First, HDV can create some very cool pictures—especially when you need to shoot HD video on an extremely low budget. However, HDV also has significant limitations that may, for some, outweigh it’s cost savings.

HDV Strengths

For a relatively small amount of money, you can shoot an HD picture. You also have a variety of frame rates to select from, including 23.98, 25, and 29.97. Some cameras offer additional rates beyond these three. And, the default aspect ratio for HDV is 16:9.

In brief, HDV’s strength is its low-cost, HD images.

HDV Weaknesses

However, on the negative side, the weaknesses of HDV are:

• The HDV image is 1440×1080, which does not precisely match either the 720p or 1080i format.
• HDV is enormously compressed, creating the possibility of significant motion artifacts when the camera is moved, or zoomed, quickly. HDV uses MPEG-2 compression, the same as a DVD.
• This compression groups several pictures into a “group of pictures,” called a GOP, rather than each picture being it’s own entity. 1080i HD groups 15 images into one GOP. 720p groups 6 images into one GOP.
• This GOP method of compression means that HDV is not accurate for timecode or frames when capturing or outputting. (Editing HDV inside FCP is frame-accurate, however.)
• HDV uses extreme color sampling, resulting in very, very poor color keying, color correction, or compositing results. (HDV uses 4:2:0 color sampling, the same as a DVD. Here’s an article that explains it in more detail.)
• HDV renders take about six times longer than DV. This is actually a result of rendering the larger HD image, versus an SD image; still, this will take longer than you expect.
• HDV needs to be conformed, or rebuilt, into a consistent GOP structure before it can be output to tape or exported to a file. This conforming can take an exceedingly long time. (For instance, conforming a 30 second sequence consisting of five shots, took over 10 minutes on my PowerBook. Conforming a complex hour-long sequence could take several hours on a G-5.)
• HDV can only use Print to Tape, not Edit to Tape, due to the timecode inaccuracies of HDV.

  For these reasons, I am no longer the fan of HDV that I used to be. What I’ve discovered is that we need to separate how we CAPTURE the image from how we EDIT the image.

Adam Wiltcompares 4 HD Cams at DV.com. If you don’t have a login and password, remember bugmenot.com can help you out.

Fromt the Creative Cow Newlsetter:Recapturing HDV, Can it be done?
CreativeCOW.net contributing editor and leader, David Battistella, explores the question of recapturing HDV. He’d seen so many posts, so much talk about HDV format and the problems incurred, so David has taken the time to test a couple of workflows.

I don’t work in HD yet, but I know I’ll need this as a reference sooner or later.

Though I don’t work in HD yet, Chris guides you through several of the issues involved: frame rates, motion blur differences between HD and SD, and many more:

“Many motion graphics artists are tackling their first high-definition jobs. In some respects, HD is just like SD, only larger. However, HD also comes with a number of issues that can throw some major curves at you. As with all problems-in-waiting, it’s best to solve them before you start the job, rather than when you think you’re almost finished. Here are questions you need to ask your clients before your next HD job, and what the implications are- technical and artistic-of the answers you may get.”

From the valuable DV.com, with their not-so-valuable must-register-to-read site.

Steve Mullen at Video Systems: The State of Editing HDV –
As you made your away around the nonlinear editor booths at NAB, it’s very likely you were presented with marketing messages that promoted each company’s ideal way of editing HDV.

The four techniques include draft, proxy, native, and digital intermediate. Let’s work our way through all these options. The use of FireWire and MiniDV tape makes it easy for folks to think of HDV as simply high-definition DV. There are, however, significant differences that make HDV editing very different from DV editing. There are three crucial differences. First, HDV uses inter-frame compression, while DV does not. Second, HDV audio is MPEG-1 Layer 2, not PCM. And third, the number of pixels is either 2.7X (1280×720) or 4.5X (1440×1080) the number of pixels employed by DV.

This reminds me of 7 years ago or so, trying to figure out what it would take to edit DV without dropped frames and system crashes. Once again there’s a lot to learn, and a lot to buy so we can focus our attention on editing in HD formats without worrying about the system’s capacity to handle it. Sigh.——-