Adventures in (AVC)HD

Another New AVCHD-based Camera

2011-03-23T13:34:00.001-05:00

Sony has released the new NEX FS 100, an AVCHD camera that seems to be aiming its sites on Panasonic's AF100 with its large sensor (S35), ability to interchange lenses, real video controls on camera like iris, gain and volume control as well as XLR audio inputs. There is already some varying opinion on how good or mediocre this camera might be.

Here is a clip from FSTOP Academy with their positive review:

And on the more negative size is this rather in-depth look from DVuser. This reviewer was definitely not blown away by the camera's feel, build, etc. But he does compliment the quality of the video.

The FS 100 features its LCD screen on top of the camera body which is a bit unusual, but depending on how you use it/shoot with it, it might be placed in the right spot. I'm used to the side LCD screen, so it might take some getting use to. And like the AF100, the FS100 only has 8-bit 4:2:2 out of the camera via HDMI. This at least allows you to bypass the AVCHD processing in-camera, but many will be yearning for 10-bit out. The FS100 also allows you to screw-on a hand grip with a built-in mic as well as a eyepiece viewfinder to make the camera have a more traditional video camera feel and form factor.

Here's more information from the ProVideo Coalition.

So here's another contender in the battle for "combine the DOF abilities of a DSLR but with the ergonomics and controls of a real video camera". It will be interesting to play with one of these at NAB.

Premiere CS5 and the New Apple Mackbook Pro

2011-03-17T09:18:00.000-05:00

The new Apple Macbook Pros seem really impressive to me with their quad core processors, 1 GB video cards, and the new Thunderbolt port, but one disappointing aspect for some is the fact that the video card is ATI and not Nvidia. So how does it play with Adobe Premiere CS5? Adobe seems to notice that the word on the street is you MUST have a CUDA-enabled card to get great performance. Adobe says this isn't true, and that their Mercury Playback Engine's software mode is more than capable, with the right machine, of great performance.

So thanks to some tweets I found the above clip showing off Premiere CS5 on a new 17" Macbook Pro. This makes these brand-new laptops even more intriguing.

To read more about this, follow this link to Adobe's Blog.

SmallHD

2011-03-15T19:30:00.000-05:00

One of my favorite vendor stops last year at NAB was SmallHD, the maker of - get this - small HD screens that are perfect for your DSLR rigs. One of their biggest strengths are resolution. Many similar LCD screens around this size don't offer 720p resolution, but SmallHD does. It also features a HDMI port, perfect for connecting to your DSLR, DVX, HMC, EX1r, etc.

Matt Jeppson over at FreshDV has a great write-up on using a SmallHD for a live music shoot he did in New York. It sounds like the monitor did a great job and could be counted on for an accurate representation of what the DSLR is capturing.

Read the article here.

New Final Cut Pro!

2011-02-24T18:23:00.000-06:00

There's a really good chance you already know this, but just in case you're that guy who's living under a rock in the GEICO commercial, a new version of Final Cut is apparently going to drop this Spring. NAB might just be all the more exciting this year if Apple has something to show (though early consensus seems to think that Apple won't show it on the floor, but perhaps at an event before NAB kicks off).

Larry Jordan, a Final Cut instructor and host of the Digital Production Buzz, was invited out to a "secret meeting" of "industry professionals" and shown the new software. Larry doesn't reveal much, but what he does say gets you excited (if you're an editor, that is).

Combine this news with Apple's unveiling of Thunderbolt (an odd name for Intel's Light Peak connection) and you have some really exciting possibilities with the new Macbook Pros unveiled today. Basically think of Thunderbolt as this extremely fast connection capable of connecting monitors, drives and other devices together. A number of manufacturers are announcing support for Thunderbolt, so you'll see I/O devices from Blackmagic and AJA in the near future. Also with the new Macbook Pros, for the first time, you have an Apple laptop with 1 gig of dedicated video RAM. Some are upset that Apple chose only ATI cards for this release, locking out those wanting Nvidia's CUDA technology for CS5 and Resolve, but for those who are firmly rooted in Final Cut and Avid the video card news is exciting. I also wonder if there'll be some sort of external PCI Express chasis that you can connect via Thunderbolt. If so you could load it up with Nvidia CUDA-based cards and your laptop will fly with Premiere CS5. Of course this is conjecture on my part, but there's a chance this can happen.

I assume Apple will add Thunderbolt to the Mac Pro, and the iMac as well. If so, you can then see Macbook Pros and iMacs being serious editing machines with the ability to connect to drives fast enough to support multi-streams of HD video. Granted you can do this now with FW800 drives, but we're talking significantly faster drives here (think beyond e-SATA speeds).

Suddenly there's something to be really excited about with Final Cut. Of course I could just be setting myself up for disappointment, but that's nothing new.

Gamma Differences

2011-02-15T16:44:00.005-06:00

Wow, so I've known for a while now that Quicktime X and 7 use different gamma settings when playing video. But until now the differences have been mostly minor. That is, until I compared something I shot the other day:

QT X on top, QT 7 on bottom

The video in Quicktime 7 (the lower one) most closely matches the way the footage was shot. Yes, it's a little too red (and we really needed to adjust our fill light!) but that's not the point. Color correction has yet to happen. Compare it to how QT X shows it. Amazing! I have to admit I haven't fully wrapped my head around this problem but it really makes me second guess things.

The bottom line is the way QT 7 plays back the clip matches the way it looks in Final Cut and the way it looks on my "broadcast" monitor. But how will the client view things? Scary...

Editblog's QuickTip of the Day

2011-02-14T16:44:00.000-06:00

The Editblog is doing a Final Cut Pro tip every day this month and today's looks like a good one. Ever wonder why Motion projects take FOREVER to render in Final Cut? Well today's tip might just speed things up. Check it out here.

An In Depth Look at the AF-100 In Action

2011-02-09T19:52:00.001-06:00

That's not how that brake light's suppose to look!

Stunning Good Looks over at the ProVideo Coalition has a nice fairly in-depth look at shooting with Panasonic's AF-100. The article covers the strengths of the camera and the limitations, including a tendency to clip the chroma values of the camera. As you can you see in the picture above, the brake lights of the car are suppose to be an orange red, not yellow.

The article points out the many strengths of the camera too, especially how the images benefit from the large sensor, but overall you can't help but feel a little disappointed about the limitations of the 8-bit AVCHD codec. Bottom line, if you can control the lighting, the camera shines. But under many real world conditions the camera presents some issues to work through.

Read the article here.

Canon T3i

2011-02-07T07:37:00.001-06:00

Canon's new T3i - picture from DP Review.

Canon has released an update to their Rebel line with the T3i (600D). Looks like essentially the T2i with a flip-out screen (plus some "photo filters" like fake tilt-shift). Most interesting is the digital zoom feature which seems to minimize quality loss as you zoom in. Gizmodo has a write-up with a sample video featuring the digital zoom. Check it out here.

Also check-out the always-great preview from DP Review.

Another Urban Exploration Video

2011-02-01T16:14:00.000-06:00

Here's another cool urban exploration video featuring Steve Duncan, the star of "Undercity". This one isn't quite as polished as Undercity, but it's still fascinating nonetheless.

Magic Lantern

2011-01-31T16:09:00.000-06:00

One feature I skipped over with the Magic Lantern "hack" for your Canon T2i is bit rate control. You can actually crank up the bit rate your camera records at and improve the quality. It appears that the T2i likes 60 mbit/sec the best. Likewise you can actually lower the bit rate and get longer record times (up to 30 minutes potentially). I have to try this out.

Check out this link for a few videos that show the various data rates possible.

The Best Video Card for Motion

2011-01-27T17:36:00.001-06:00

It's easy to get caught up in trying to make your system "Adobe CS5" ready, or "Resolve" ready. Both of those involve the purchase of a second video card from Nvidia that will cost you $1,000 or more. Premiere Pro CS5 and Blackmagic's Resolve both take advantage of Nvidia's CUDA technology. But what if you're sticking to Final Cut Pro and do most of your graphics builds in Motion? Eric St-Martin did some testing between ATI's 5870 and the Nvidia Quadro 4000 to see which comes out on top.

Who wins? The ATI card. It's not a surprising finding but it clearly creates two different camps for Mac Pro users and the video cards they stick inside. If you want the best performance for Apple products, you're probably best sticking with ATI cards and specifically the 5870. And hopefully, HOPEFULLY, down the road Final Cut will tap in to Apple's own OpenCL standard and the 5870 should scream even more. But if you want to get the best performance for CS5 or Resolve, you have to go Nvidia.

The only middle ground seems to be that Blackmagic has certified with 5870's little brother, the 5770, as a "GUI" video card (meaning it can only be used to power the CPU monitors and not as GPU acceleration). In some of the testing I've seen the ATI 5770 does a better job handling Motion than the Nvidia cards. It certainly beats the Nvidia GT120, another Blackmagic approved GUI card.

To read more about Eric's testing, check out his site here.

Some Links

2011-01-24T09:03:00.000-06:00

Some interesting links to peruse:

Is Panasonic's AF100 hackable (ala the GH1)? Maybe so, according to the original GH1's hacker.
Fairly recently Magic Lantern added the T2i to its list of hackable cameras. This isn't a magical bitrate booster but instead adds a lot of useful features to the camera such as zebra stripes, crop marks (16:9, 4:3, etc), manual audio gain and many more useful features. This of course carries a warning of USE AT YOUR OWN RISK. If you're daring, check it out.
Matt Jeppson is at it again with another great post about being careful what we wish for when it comes to the eternal quest for raw video.
And @EOSHD (a great source for DSLR links) has linked to a comparison video showing the GH2 in its native AVCHD mode vs. the 40fps burst modes in 1080 and 3.8K modes. So yes you can shoot near-4K video with a GH2! But for only 40 frames at a time (so not even quite 2 seconds if you edit in a 24p timeline). Not so useful at the moment, but maybe a hack in the future will take care of that?

Panasonic's AF100's Sensor Too Small?

2011-01-24T08:55:00.000-06:00

Matt Jeppson over at FreshDV has a nice article up about the sensor size of the AF100, the latest AVCHD codec based camera from Panasonic. The article covers just how much smaller the AF100's sensor is compared to the full-frame sensor found in the Canon 5D, but that it compares favorably to Super35 and the Red cameras. Most interesting is when you compare the AF100, a sub-$5,000 dollar camera, with the Sony EX1 (a camera that sells around $6K):

The AF100 clearly surpasses (at least in terms of sensor size) the EX1, which was to date really the only affordable large sensor camera you could get your hands on. And it does all this without forcing you to make the myriad workarounds and concessions required when shooting DSLR.

Read the full article here.

Christopher Nolan Screenplays

2011-01-18T15:28:00.000-06:00

This might be slightly off-topic for this blog but if you're in to shooting video, you're probably in to movies as well. I'm a big Christopher Nolan fan. I love the way many of this films are constructed in a non-linear fashion. If you haven't seen "Following", do yourself a favor and rent it. Anyway, the site nolanfans.com has posted all of Nolan's scripts in the PDF format. Definitely worth checking out if you're a fan of any (or all) of his films.

You can find the scripts here.

Final Cut Server Gone?

2011-01-17T11:49:00.005-06:00

Remember the only thing Apple seemed to talk about at 2009's NAB? Final Cut Server MIGHT be history. Hardmac (via 9to5mac.com) seems to think that Final Cut Server and Xsan, both apps utilized by many video professionals, might be the next to go in what seems to be Apple's purging of its server applications and hardware. I DO NOT think this signals or should add fuel to the rumors that Apple will eliminate Final Cut. We have Steve telling us how "awesome" the next release is going to be. But it is an indication that Apple is willing to give up on the server side of business and it will obviously impact post production companies down the road. Oh, and it goes without saying, take this with a grain of salt. But since Apple's already cut Xserve it's not totally out of the realm of possibility.

Should I Work For Free?

2011-01-15T16:51:00.002-06:00

Great chart by Jessica Hische on whether or not you should work for free. Something all of us freelancers have had to decide at one time or another.

I The Pro Res Maker

2011-01-14T11:31:00.000-06:00

I waited an entire day to watch this after seeing various links appearing on Twitter. I don't know why because it's funny and worth your time since you're in to this whole video thing:

5" Sony Monitor

2011-01-10T16:11:00.001-06:00

Sony's CLM-V55

Sony has introduced an affordable field monitor. The CLM-V55 is a 5" monitor that plugs in to your camera via HDMI. The price is expected to be around $399. The resolution of the monitor hasn't been reported as of yet, but for the price I can't imagine it's anywhere close to 720p. One of the most affordable full 720p HDMi monitors out there is the SmallHD DP6 which sells for $899. However I imagine the pixel count will be high enough to aid in focusing. We shall see.

For more information about Sony's CLM-V55, check out Pocket-lint's full write up here.

Undercity

2011-01-10T10:50:00.000-06:00

I'm utterly fascinated with photos and videos about abandoned and underground places. I love photos of ghost towns, abandoned hospitals and subterranean places like subways and tunnels. There's a great video about the exploration of New York City's underworld over on Vimeo called Undercity. If you haven't seen it yet, do yourself a favor and watch it now (even at its length it's more than worth it):

UNDERCITY from Andrew Wonder on Vimeo.

Reopening for Business

2011-01-10T10:35:00.001-06:00

I'm going to resume blogging again and have decided to return to my Blogspot site (which is the one you're reading now). More traffic still comes this way than my Squarespace page, so I might as well resume posting here. I have an upcoming post coming comparing Premiere CS5 and Final Cut Pro 7 with editing AVCHD material. And I'll try and provide some random links (most of which you'll probably have already come across) soon. There have been a few cameras released since I last updated, including Panasonic's AF100 which uses it's "AVCAM" variation of the AVCHD codec. So this codec is definitely still alive and doing well for the time being.

Also, I'm having difficulties importing in my Squarespace posts. One of their mantras is that you can go in and out of Squarespace easily. However they output to a "Movable Type" formatted TXT file that Blogger will not import for some reason. So if you're just coming upon this site, there's additional content here.

More to come, I promise.

Moving

2010-06-17T15:44:00.001-05:00

I want to redirect you to where this blog will now (rarely) get updated - please click here to continue reading the sporadic postings for me. I'm searching for a (working) way to auto redirect folks who come here. Thanks for stopping by and I hope to have more posts coming your way soon.

Lighting Tips

2010-05-03T19:14:00.002-05:00

Lowel, a manufacturer of lights, has a nice lighting resource site called LowelEDU. Here they break down the various components of interview lighting and give you examples of lighting techniques and placement through their interactive players. Check out LowelEDU here.

MPEG-LA

2010-05-03T19:07:00.003-05:00

Matthew Jeppson over at FreshDV has an interesting and potentially scary write-up on MPEG-LA, the organization which holds patents over MPEG and h.264. You know these two codecs which almost all of use in our cameras? Basically when you purchase a Canon, or Panasonic, Sony, etc., your camera only comes with a MPEG-LA license to use that camera in a non-professional way. Since most of us are buying these cameras for professional use, this is a real eye-opener. Read more about it here.

Using the MXO2 Mini

2010-04-27T16:29:00.012-05:00

One of my clients started the move towards HD and added 1080p LCD monitors and Matrox MXO2 Minis to their suites to output and view HD. I personally own the Blackmagic Intensity card but had considered purchasing the MXO2 Mini. One problem - it wasn't out yet at the time and somehow I had convinced myself I needed to get an HDMI out solution ASAP. I kind of wish I waited for the MXO2 Mini.

If you're not familiar with the Mini, check out this link. Essentially it's an external box that's available with both "desktop" and "laptop" options. The box has HDMI in/out, component, a convertor for S-Video and RCA audio outputs for audio monitoring. One of the big selling points of the MXO2 series is the monitor calibration tool that you'll find in the System Preferences tab:

Here you can tweak the brightness, contrast, hue and chroma of your outputted image. There is also a "Blue only" checkbox that helps you set up your monitor when used in conjunction with color bars. When you install the drivers for the Mini you'll now see several dozen output options in Final Cut Pro. It's a bit daunting to sift through, but every possible outputting format seems to be there. This is one real strength of the box - format support. You're extremely limited in your output options with the Intensity, but with the MXO2s you have just about every flavor of HD, SD and frame rates to choose from.

There are some bugs with the box. Audio seems to be shaky. Frequently audio will distort and sometimes cutout altogether in playback in Final Cut. Usually after a moment or two the audio would return, but on a couple of occasions I had to restart Final Cut to get the audio to come back. Also, lip sync seems hard to achieve when viewing A/V out of the HDMI. There are of course offset tweaks in FCP, but I can never seem to get it exactly right. That, and it seems to be a fluid situation with sync - sometimes it's on, other times it's off just a bit. Hopefully an eventual fix will come out for this.

Another quirk seems to be in the way it handles 720p video, especially if you have certain LCD monitors like the Vizio. At first, anytime I tried to output any flavor of 720p video, the resulting output would yield green and distorted video. Doing a Google search revealed others with the same problem and the fix seems to be to change the "Set main channel format to:" option to 1080. Doing this with the appropriate 720p output setting in FCP yielded noticeably sharper video. The TV is still receiving a 1080p image, but the Mini must be actively uprezzing the video to 1080p. Whatever voodoo magic that's taking place seems to be for the better.

Annoying Bug in FCP

2010-04-09T06:58:00.003-05:00

John Chappell talks about an annoying bug in Final Cut that still has yet to be fixed involving the browser window. There are a number of bugs like these that seem to be overlooked by Apple's Pro Apps team. Maybe it'll be fixed in the magical 64-bit ground-up rewrite they'll announce at NAB next week, right???

Lack of Posts

2010-03-12T15:34:00.002-06:00

To be honest, I don't have a whole lot to report on the world of AVCHD. The last few months have brought more freelance editing gigs away from my own stuff. I did get a chance to edit with some Red and Canon 5D footage, but other than a few small things here and there I haven't really edited any material that originated in AVCHD since last year.

I've decided to expand the focus of this blog a bit to include all things in the world of video. I'm going to be going to NAB next month so I hope to have some posts about things that I saw there. And I can always muster up some rants about Final Cut, but I'm still on FCS 2.0 right now so my rants might have been solved in the latest version. I'm refusing to upgrade for the time being and seeing this has only confirmed that decision. Compressor is a finicky beast and right now it's tamed on my system. I always seem to have something cooking in there and the last thing I want to do is install a new version that slows it down. Hopefully a future update will solve this. Or, better yet, we'll hear some news at NAB. But who knows if Apple will even whisper anything about Final Cut.

FW800 vs. eSATA

2010-01-26T15:49:00.004-06:00

It's an established fact that SATA is faster than FW800. I know a lot of editors who own external drives like G-RAIDs but never use the e-SATA connection, sticking to FW800 instead. I recently purchased a SATA card for my Mac Pro and connected my G-RAID up via eSATA. Here are the speed differences:

G-RAID via FW800

Via eSATA:

A $40 or so internal card and a different cable and you get a pretty decent speed increase. So if you own a G-RAID or another external drive that includes an e-SATA port, you should definitely consider getting the most out the drive as you can.

Another music video

2010-01-26T07:53:00.005-06:00

I've been busy, mostly editing, but I have still been doing some work with the HMC150. I've shot another music video with it. It was for The Nobility and they wanted a similar look to their first video which I posted a few months past. It's another one-take and it was shot with a Blackbird Stabilizer. I barely knew how to use the thing so it's not as steady as I would have liked, but it could the job done. A lot of people talk about their arm hurting after using these, but for me it was my right hand. The song is less than 3 minutes but multiple takes add up and my hand was absolutely killing me by the end of the night.

I normally use my own customized setting but this time around I used the Spark setting. The end result was a general crushing of the blacks to minimize the appearance of the black curtain behind the actors. I was going for the look that they were performing in front of a black void and for the most part it appears that way. The actors did a great job not busting too many takes even though they were in semi-absurd scenes.

Click on the video for an HD version:

Mr. Danby/Mr. Blackman from The Nobility on Vimeo.

Backing Up

2010-01-01T13:33:00.003-06:00

I've mentioned it in this blog, but it's worth discussing again - we MUST back up. Since we're shooting in a tapeless format we don't automatically have a "back-up" of our footage. That was one major advantage of shooting on tape. Once you digitized your footage you now technically had two copies: your newly created Quicktime file and your tape. Maybe your plan is to buy new cards for every project, but this can get expensive. Spending $45 or so for a 16GB SDHC card can get pretty expensive when you're comparing it to a sub-$100 SATA drive that can hold a lot of backups. So eventually you'll be reusing those cards, deleting the camera original and existing, at least temporarily of course, in a world where there's only one copy of your footage.

I found out earlier that we can simply back up our cards to a drive and as long as we retain the file structure, and keep the Final Cut project file, we can resurrect that project via File and Transfer. Having to only back up the original AVCHD file structure means we can back up significantly more footage to drives compared to the Final Cut created Prores 422 files.

My back up procedure is finally in place. After I've backed up my cards to my internal SATA drive, I'll make a second back up copy. I'm buying fairly cheap Western Digital internal SATA drives and I'm plugging them in to an external SATA dock. The SATA dock plugs in to your computer either by an ESATA connection or USB2 (here's the one I own and it's worked great). The drive will appear on your desktop like any other external drive. Once the drive's full I'll eject the drive, put it in an anti-static bag and store it. It's important to note that most hard drive experts say you have to spin a drive at least once a year to avoid data loss, so if you have a To-Do list or use iCal, schedule yourself a reminder about 6 months from now to take out that particular drive and fire it up.

Now this gives me a couple of back ups of my material. It's also important to back up any other files you might have used like music, photos, graphics, and titles. If you want to be really paranoid about protecting your data, then you're probably going to have to go to the next step - offsite backups. What good is a back up if it's in your office and something happens to your office? You could potentially lose not only what's on your computer but also on the back up drive.

There are a number of options. You could simply double up your internal SATA orders, duplicate each drive and keep one in your office and one in off-site storage. I imagine you could also invest in a number of DVD-DLs, or buy a blu-ray burner and discs, and back up this way and keep that offsite somewhere. Or you could look at a service like Carbonite which with a fully paid subscription you can back up an unlimited amount of data. The back up process will take a long time, especially if you start with a pretty big legacy of material, but having your data backed up offsite can really add to some peace of mind.

Archiving

2009-10-26T20:36:00.003-05:00

When you're in the world of tapeless post production, there are no tapes to have for archiving purposes. So you must back up your data on some sort of storage media. As I mentioned in a previous post, if you use Final Cut Pro to transcode to ProRes, you'll discover that your file sizes might not always correspond to the quality your camera recorded it at (i.e. the lowest quality 1440x1080 clips in AVCHD world become significantly larger than the highest quality 720p files). So if you back you your ProRes files you'll need a significant amount of storage space. But what about just backing up your AVCHD files?

This process is actually easy. What I'm doing is creating a folder on my storage RAID that is called AVCHD Card Back Ups. Within this folder I create a folder for each project. If I only used one card for that project, I'll simply copy the PRIVATE folder from the card to this project's folder. If there were multiple cards used, I'll create a set of folders with the simple name Card 1, 2, 3, etc. Copy each card's PRIVATE folder to their respective folders and that's it.

Be sure to keep a copy of your Final Cut project and one day, when the client asks for changes, you fire up that project, open up Log and Transfer, point it to appropriate PRIVATE folder(s) and re-transcode back to ProRes. The file naming scheme should remain the same. Obviously it's important to keep your original ProRes files named exactly how Final Cut named them, so when you re-transcode you can reconnect to the right files.

The end result is you back-up the significantly smaller AVCHD files and blow away the much larger ProRes ones. You'll be able to back up a lot more projects to the same disk as a result.

PS - I won't even get in to the idea that if you archive your files to a standard hard drive you'll need to be sure to power it up and let the platters spin periodically to prevent data loss. Do a google search and you'll see a lot of discussion about this fact.

Not HMC150 Related...

2009-10-13T19:11:00.005-05:00

But I recently completed editing some spots for Martina McBride's upcoming "Shine All Night Tour". They've set up a channel over at You Tube to show off the spots and here's one of them (for some reason this doesn't really appear to be in "You Tube HD" even though I know they had the source files. Oh well, still looks okay):

Prores 422 ignores HMC150 record modes

2009-10-03T10:30:00.002-05:00

You probably already know that the HMC150 records its 1080p and 720p PH clips at a maximum of 21Mbps. So technically these clips have the same data rate, or close to it. But if you use Final Cut to transcode these clips you'll discover they no longer remain at the same data rate. Final Cut's Prores essentially ignores the data rate of the camera original and only pays attention to the resolution. So that 720p clip's data rate at 24p becomes roughly 7.1 MB/sec and that 1080p 24p clip swells to 13.8 MB/sec.

Even worse, at least to me, is what Prores does to the camera's lowest quality setting, HE. These files are recorded to SD card at a tiny 6Mbps, but because the resolution of the clip is 1440x1080 and 29.97, the transcoded Prores clip swells to over 15MB/sec! That's right, a clip that is more than a third smaller than the highest quality 720p clip becomes twice as big as it after transcode.

The HE mode is perfect for long recording times, especially when the subject is a human who's giving a very long speech. You can squeeze many more hours of footage on your SD card and not have to worry about stopping to change out cards. But all of that space savings is thrown out the window once you transcode. I'll leave you with an example:

Clip - recorded using HE mode

Length is 1 hour and 13 minutes

AVCHD file size - 2.97 GB

Prores 422 file size - 65.92 GB!

The Bible

2009-09-28T13:49:00.004-05:00

Barry Green over at DVXUser has finally released his book on the HMC150. It's pricey, but it sounds like it's worth it. The book seems to explore exactly how to get the best images out of this camera and how to deal with the various conditions we face when we shoot video. Maybe the book will explain exactly what is Detail Coring. My copy is on the way and I'll weigh in a review in time. People that own his other books all rave about it, so I think it's worth checking out.

If you'd like to order, hit this link.

Canon 7D

2009-09-13T13:00:00.003-05:00

Canon recently announced the Canon EOS 7D which can shoot 1080p 24p HD video, as well as 720p (including 60p for overcranking). The format of choice for Canon is AVCHD. The camera is intriguing because I'm already considering going the route of getting a 35mm adapter for my HMC150, but I do not currently own any professional lenses. We're also wanting to get a "real" DSLR camera, so why not combine the desire for shooting HD video with the ability for nice DoF videography and a nice DSLR?

There are a few videos that have popped up featuring footage from this DSLR shot by some of the best in the business. Here are a few of the links:

FreshDV @ the Provideo Coalition has a link to the short Perya. Beautiful!
Philip Bloom's "Random Dublin"
Another Bloom short called "Dublin's People: Canon 7d 24p"

What's clear by these samples are that the 7d seems to remain relatively stationary, shot almost as if they were taking stills. I love these kinds of shots where the action exists within the shot (as opposed to whip pans and intentional "shakycam"). Because this camera uses CMOS sensors, there's the risk of "jello" or rolling shutter, so it appears the filmmakers were careful and played to the camera's strengths. I have yet to see evidence that there is rolling shutters with the 7D but I'm sure it's possible.

Gentle Giant

2009-08-18T09:20:00.003-05:00

I recently helped direct and shoot a music video for a great band called The Nobility. The video was shot using my Panasonic HMC150 at 720p 24p. In post we added some looks in Magic Bullet Looks and further dirtied up the video a bit using Nattress Film Effects. All of this to hopefully capture the look of an old filmstrip PSA. I'm pleased the results and the camera performed well.

Here is the video for your viewing pleasure:

"Gentle Giant" video from The Nobility on Vimeo.

Scary Thought...

2009-08-03T15:31:00.003-05:00

Here's a scary thought... you've been shooting footage for 30-40 minutes on your SDHC card and suddenly you get a CHECK CARD warning. You check the card, it records again just fine and you assume it was a temporary blip. But what if, when you're ingesting that footage in to your system, you discover the clip is unreadable or completely missing? The HMC150 does not have a redundant system for recording media - you have one card slot and thus one card that can record media at any given point. Of course many cameras are this way, and if you're still recording tape there's always a risk of the tape breaking, but with tapeless media it just seems all the more scary.

There's a long and eye-opening thread about a handful of people who are seeing these kinds of problems with one particular brand of cards - Transcend. There seem to be twice that many that have replied to say they own the same brand and size of card and have had zero problems. It's worth checking out.

HMC150 Mac support, finally

2009-08-03T15:20:00.003-05:00

Panasonic has finally acknowledged that people who own the HMC150 also might own a Mac. So now you can finally update the camera's firmware. Here's the link for instructions on how to do that.

ProRes Conversion Times

2009-07-15T09:52:00.003-05:00

I've noted before that I'm getting better than 50% realtime performance with my Mac Pro Quad Core 3.0 when converting to ProRes. But this is using a SD card reader plugged in to a USB 2 port. With the Canon HG-20, we were using the internal HDD and because of this we had to plug the camera directly in to the computer with the provided USB cable. The resulting transcode times nearly doubled. We shot about 3 hours of material with this camera and it took a little under 3 hours to transcode. So basically you trade the convenience of having an internal storage option with the Canon with much slower transcoding times.

Note: The Canon HG-20 does accept SD cards, so you can bypass recording to the internal drive you if you so choose.

Another Wedding Down...

2009-07-14T08:16:00.003-05:00

We just shot a wedding over the weekend and the results from the HMC150 were impressive. Very little noise and great looking images overall. The only real noise begins to appears at the reception that evening which was indoors. I had to bump up the gain which naturally introduces noise.

I needed to get a second camera, one that was easy for my wife to operate, so we purchased the Canon Vixia HG-20. I wanted to go with a small Panasonic thinking there might be some similarities between my HMC150 and it. However you couldn't buy a Panasonic camcorder with a mic input and a headphone jack for under $1000. With Canon you could, so I settled on the HG-20. It shoots at the full data rate the AVCHD spec offers and it has the combo of an internal drive and can shoot on SD cards. I've looked a lot of the footage so far from the camera and I'm impressed. If you need a second camera, Canon offers a number of options for under $1000 and they include headphone jacks. I mean, seriously, why does Panasonic leave this out?

Neo Scene

2009-06-18T11:03:00.002-05:00

I've been trying to give Cineform's Neo Scene a shot this morning. I had originally downloaded the trial a few months ago but got incredibly busy. I fired up the app anyway and attempted to do a test for the speed and it crawled to render one frame. I was then reminded that Cineform only provides a 7 (7 days, really??) trial of the software. So, okay, the performance had to be the results of an expired trial, right? I deleted the files and downloaded a new version and I still see the same speed results.

I want to assume there's some little file somewhere that tells Neo Scene to not function properly because I'm trying to get use out of it beyond it's trial. I'm hoping this is not a clue as to the speed of the app. I guess I screwed up and should have fully tested it when I initially downloaded it, but it's hard for me to want to take a risk on buying the app if I can't gauge the speed.

A commenter on here said he's found that NeoHD is a lot faster than Final Cut, but what about Neo Scene? It's quite a bit cheaper, but I was hoping that was from the source file limitations and not because of speed. If anybody has an opinion on what I might be experiencing (i.e. - the software is crippled OR that's just how slow it is) please let me know.

The next Final Cut Pro

2009-06-14T14:09:00.004-05:00

A number of people have been posting/tweeting rumors about when the next version of Apple's Final Cut Studio will come out, but there's been little talk about what will actually be in it. Will it be a major upgrade or just enough of a change to warrant a whole new version number?

Scott Simmons wrote up some of the things he'd like to see addressed, and a couple of them are my major hopes. Simply FCP should NOT open the previous project, at least not in a multi-user, multi-edit suite environment like a post house. If Apple truly thinks its product is making major penetration in to post houses across this country, and is NOT simply being used by one editor/producer on one long project, then they need to get serious about the way its software handles projects and users settings.

A Project and User Prompt

Yeah, like Avid, but who cares? There should be two modes you could put FCP in to and this can be asked when you install the product for the first time. You could edit in the traditional FCP way which would be to always load the previously opened project and the previously used user settings. However, we should have the option of a "post house" style with a window prompt asking us which project we want to open and which user settings. I have clients where one machine might have two editors working on it on the same day. And three different projects might be worked on. It would be nice to know from the start which project you're opening and who's settings are going to be loaded. And about the user settings - they should be consolidated under one global user setting name. Give us more things to tweak and all of those things that are listed under the User Preferences menu item? That's absolutely silly to call it that if one user can change something deep down inside that menu structure and it affects EVERY user who comes after him. Make those settings customizable to a particular user's name. So when I select my project and my name at the beginning, then I'll record EVERY keyframe when I ride the audio mixers. You might not want to do that, so you change that under your user setting name and you'll know from the start what FCP's behavior will be.

Capture/Render Scratch Settings

Another pet peeve of mine that FCP does is how it treats capture scratch settings (where you digitize and render to) as a global setting and not something that's a project-level setting. I think it should be the latter. Apple gives us editors a lot of rope to hang ourselves, especially in multi-user and/or multi-project environments. For example: have you ever worked on multiple projects in one day? Do each of those projects live on separate drives? So do you remember to change the capture scratch EVERY time you open a different project? Or when you take a seat for the first time in a few days at a busy edit suite, do you always remember to check the capture scratch settings before you proceed? If you do, you're awesome. I bet most of us forget every now and then and sometimes this can be a critical mistake. Like what if the producer wants to view a project you've been working on in another room. They load that partition, open the project and there's media and/or render files missing. D'oh!

Apple could cure us of some of these ills by simply making the capture scratch a setting for that project. So when you open that project, FCP will automatically make the appropriate partition set as the capture scratch. If for some reason that partition is not mounted on the desktop, you'll get a warning prompt to do so. Easy right? Maybe there's an obvious reason why Apple shouldn't do this, but it seems to make sense to me.

I can think of further things that would help with media management, like having the ability to import music/graphic files/photos from within FCP, and FCP knowing what to do with the files. For example: you load a music CD, import some tracks and FCP automatically saves it to a MUSIC folder on the appropriate scratch disk, imports the music to the drive as 48K AIFF AND imports those tracks in to your project.

We'll see what the next version holds, but I'm hoping it's something like the above.

NOISE!

2009-06-11T13:39:00.006-05:00

So there have been a few posts on boards about potential noise issues with the HMC150. I honestly hadn't seen it myself, and I wrote off most of those reports as user error. Indeed many of those threads ended with a resolution that saw some combination of resetting the camera and using different scene files.

I also never had a way to monitor my footage outside of my computer until recently. So when I finally sat down to look at the footage I shot from a wedding this past weekend, I was shocked. There was noise, everywhere... in shadows, which wouldn't be all too surprising, but also in highlights and in perfectly lit scenes. I went back and checked some of my previous footage. I saw a little bit of noise, especially in the shadows, but the footage looked good otherwise. So something happened to my camera just before this wedding shoot.

Here's a sample still from this shoot: noisy mess

So the last couple of days whenever I had some downtime I've been tweaking and testing. I reset the camera, which I'm not 100% sure actually truly reset the camera as much as at least rest the scene files and menu (see this thread for more information) and then searched through the HMC150 board at DVX User and found Barry Green's scene file recommendations. The results were noticeably better and returned my level of satisfaction with this camera.

I noted that the camera looked the best shooting 720p 60, even though the "native" shooting rate of this camera is suppose to be 24p. I noticed just a tiny bit more noise in 24 vs. the 60p footage. Here's a 60p still post-camera reset and using new Scene File settings: much better. There is still some noise present here, but (at least to me) it's much softer and not the hideous distortion you see in the other still.

Ultimately I'm not really sure what happened to my camera. And if you find yourself shooting with yours and you have noise, everywhere, it's not suppose to be this way. I think we have to accept the fact that we're going to have some noise/compression, seeing as how this is not full blown uncompressed HD we're shooting here, but the footage should look relatively clean and beautiful. I'm going to continue to do more testing but I'm definitely going to be much more on guard with what is happening with my camera and you better believe I'll do some last minute testing prior to a big shoot to make sure the camera hasn't gone wonky again.

Note: The Scene File setting tweaks were as follows:

Detail: +2

VDetail: +2

Detail Coring: +1

Chroma +2 (I think this should probably be returned to 0 as the resulting image becomes just a little too saturated, but you might prefer this)

Master Ped: -20

Cine-Like V

More Conversion Time Data

2009-06-09T15:25:00.002-05:00

I just shot a wedding with the HMC150 this past weekend. As far as I can tell the camera performed beautifully and as it had to put up with its operator's weaknesses. I'll obviously know a lot more as I get in to the editing process and see how the footage looks, especially in the extremely bright, overly lit-by-the-sun scenes and in the evening, when the light was starting to wain. I also used a Litepanels LP-Micro, so I'm looking forward to seeing how that looks.

One note, which actually surpassed my expectations, was how long it took to convert one of the AVCHD clips to ProRes. I assumed with my Mac Pro 3.0 DP it was about a 50% realtime process. I just processed my longest clip to date - 15 minutes - and it took 5:18 to convert this, thus greater than 50% realtime (or even faster). It's good to know that maybe there's a bump in speed the longer your clip is.

AVCCAM Road Show

2009-05-21T16:52:00.003-05:00

Panasonic is doing a roadshow to show off their AVCCAM products, including the HMC150. Click here to see if it's coming to a town near you. If this presentation is anything like the one they showed at their NAB booth it's extremely impressive, including close up comparisons between HDV and AVCCAM. Hint - AVCCAM wins, hands down.

Final Cut Pro Instability

2009-05-18T11:03:00.005-05:00

I know I cannot speak for anybody else when I write this, but FCP is extremely unstable once your project reaches a certain size. I've seen this on multiple machines for several different clients. I've seen my own extremely stable machine because a constant crashfest when the project's size tips the scale north of 50 MB or so.

For a while now I have been editing three documentaries for the PBR (Professional Bullriders) to be distributed on DVD by MTV. The shortest one is about 52 minutes long, the longest just shy of 60 minutes. I have gone from having one big giant project with everything in it (this was a mistake, clearly, and this was months ago when it was a LOT smaller than the three are today) to multiple projects for graphics, music, and cuts. The cuts project itself had grown to over 260 MB and it was simply comprised of the three sequences. So now I'm gone to a "final cut" sequence for each DVD. And yet even with this final step FCP still crashes just as frequently. One example bound to produce a crash is when I copy and paste something as simple as a Title 3D. The file size for each DVD final cut is about 55 MB. Again, north of 50 MB, the theoretical limit I've selected for when FCP becomes unwieldy.

During this long term edit I've had numerous smaller projects come and go, all without major problems. Sure, I occasionally had a crash or two, but nothing like what I'm experiencing with the DVDs. I know another production company that's editing a 1/2 hour series for Speed Channel and they have constant crashes with their larger projects. They have been trying to find creative ways of limiting their file sizes.

I would hope the next version of Final Cut brings about more stability with this app. There are more features I'd love to see as well, but I would just love the app to work the same it does with a small project verses a large. We want to pretend like Final Cut is perfectly acceptable for large projects, but sometimes you have to wonder if it really is. Or maybe it's just me...

Blackmagic Intensity Pro Arrives

2009-04-29T17:04:00.003-05:00

My Blackmagic Intensity Pro card has arrived and the install was a breeze. I need to try to find a way to calibrate my LCD screen as best as possible. I know there's only so much I'm going to get out of this "cheap" HD monitoring solution, I'm not relying on this for broadcast critical work, but getting a decent calibration is going to be key to at least get a close representation of how my stuff looks.

I'll be sure to post my thoughts on the card soon.

HMC 150 used for a music video

2009-04-29T14:38:00.002-05:00

Here's a nice looking music video that was shot on the HMC150 with a Letus Extreme. I'm definitely intrigued with the 35mm adapters.

HMC150 at NAB

2009-04-25T16:43:00.002-05:00

I wish I took some pictures of this, but it's worth pointing out that Panasonic was really promoting the HMC150 and the AVCHD codec in general. They had dedicated almost twice the floor space to these cameras versus the P2s. They also constantly ran a reel showcasing the codec in action.

Blackmagic Intensity Pro

2009-04-24T16:43:00.002-05:00

One thing that should generate more posting out of me is the fact that I just purchased the Blackmagic Intensity Pro card. Blackmagic Designs announced at NAB that they were dropping the price to $199. B&H Photo Video has the card for a little bit less than that. My main use of the card will be for HDMI monitor to a 24" LCD HD display.

The quality of the video should be good, but the LCD screen I will be using certainly is not reliable enough for broadcast mission critical color. But I don't find myself doing that type of work at home. For corporate, web and wedding videos it should provide you a decent reference of what your video looks like.

The card also features the ability to digitize video from HD camcorders with HDMI out, like the HMC150. So I'm going to be interested to see the quality of the image. From what I understand, when you digitize directly from the HDMI port of the HMC150 you're getting the full resolution of the camera BEFORE any AVCHD compression is added.

1080 vs. 720

2009-03-16T12:16:00.004-05:00

Apparently 24mpbs is the maximum data rate available for the AVCHD codec. At this data rate you get incredible images. If you intercut with the HPX170, it's extremely difficult to tell which was shot with which. What's intriguing is that you get this maximum of 24 mbps in BOTH 720p and 1080p. So immediately you can see why most people say that the sweet spot for this camera is 720p. You get all of that extra data to pour in to 1280x720. So it's case closed, right? Apparently not.

Barry Green, one of the gurus over at DVXUser, and writer of several books on the DVX and HVX cams, has been doing a lot of digging around with the HMC150 to see just what you can do with it. He thankfully surmized that AVCHD was superior to HDV, and he also assumed through his testing that 720p on this camera was indeed the way to go to the maximum bang for the buck. However one thing kept nagging at him - color sampling:

"With the HMC150's AVCHD format, the frame gets resized and then the color gets cut to 1/4 the resolution (using 4:2:0 color sampling, like HDV or XDCAM-EX or XDCAM-HD). Which means that on a 720p frame, you get 1280x720 of brightness, and 640x360 of color. Whereas with 1080p mode, youll have a 1920x1080 frame, which may only have 1440x810 worth of detail, sure, but -- the chroma sampling will be at 1/4 the res of the full frame, meaning 960x540 of chroma. Well, that's a big difference, right? 640x360 = 230,400 chroma samples, vs. 960x540 = 518,400 chroma samples, or about 2.25x as much chroma...

The question then becomes: would you gain much by shooting in 1080 mode and downconverting to 720? You wouldn't gain much of anything in terms of overall image resolution, but you'd more than double your chroma res... So, does it make a difference? Um, well, yeah."

Check out the thread for more thoughts and observations from Barry. I would think that if you transcode to ProRes you should see identical file sizes in either 720 or 1080 since the camera uses the same data rate for both, but I'm going to test this for myself and see. So assuming nobody debunks this theory, I guess I'm going to start shooting in 1080p now instead of 720p. Might as well get every bit (literally) you can out of this camera!

ATT&T U-verse

2009-03-16T11:53:00.004-05:00

A slight departure from the purpose of this blog, but I wanted to give a mini-review of AT&T's U-verse product. We recently switched from Comcast and we were glad to do it. Price wise you’re looking at more bang for the buck - more channels in general and more of them in HD compared to Comcast at similar price points. We're also getting the full 18 mbps internet that they offer, which is substantially faster than what Comcast currently offers in Nashville. So for roughly the same price we're going from having Comcast's basic digital TV package and 6 mpbs internet to having over 200 channels and 18 mpbs net. Not bad.

Internet

Now with Comcast you get their "burst" which skews speed tests and accelerates the first few minutes of your downloads, but with U-verse we're getting consistent download speeds that are more than 3 times faster than the sustained speeds from Comcast. Now all of this will change when Comcast unveils their faster internet products (some markets are already seeing these speeds), but since I live in Nashville - and we rarely EVER get something sooner than later here - I think U-verse will remain the fastest internet offering for now. There are rumors that AT&T will double their maximum download speed sometime in the near future, but that will probably require a price increase. So for now I’m very satisfied with the speeds I have.

Negatives

There are a few negatives, namely that the HD quality seems to vary. Some channels are great, others show artifacts and strobing effects. AT&T is apparently using a different compression scheme than what Comcast uses, and that they periodically improve the feeds as the technology improves. So hopefully the HD channels that are lagging now will improve in time. Also, if Verizon FIOS is what you’re after, you’re not going to get a fully suitable replacement here with AT&T. Unless you’re in a brand new neighborhood, you’re probably only going to have fiber to within 3,000 feet or so of your house. From there it’s over traditional phone lines. The install process took 4-5 hours, including them having to run a new twisted pair line from the pole to our house. AT&T will definitely spend the full day with you, if necessary, to get their product up and running. But in the end it seems like FIOS delivers substantially faster internet to their customers. But with the costs they incur to full wire a town, it’s no wonder that FIOS is offered in limited markets.

Finally what really puts U-verse over the top for me is some of the features they offer, namely the ability to watch DVR recorded material on any box in the house, being able to watch and/or record 2 streams of HD and 2 streams of SD at the same time, the ability to schedule programs on the net, and a better looking interface. The latter is pure aesthetics, but hey it counts. U-verse’s DVR interface is no TiVo, but it’s close.

I'm a bad blogger

2009-03-12T18:44:00.002-05:00

My apologies for the lack of posts, but as an editor by trade my free time to experiment and play with this camera can come and go. Right now it's "go". But next week I'll have some time, thankfully, and I'm looking forward to it.

I'm interested in exploring my options of HD to SD. I know I can transcode to Proress 422 and then convert via Compressor to SD, but the results seem to produce flickery results. Lines at angles become jaggy. I'll have to post an example, but what motivates me to type this is right now I'm watching the SEC Tournament via AT&T Uverse. I have an SD TV still in the office and I wanted to see if I could watch the HD channel instead of the SD one. The answer is yes, I can. It's letterboxed and in general it looks great, but it produces similar results as Compressor. Lines are jagged, lots of shimmers. My assumption is the Uverse box is doing the conversion for me and it's hardware, so I'm wondering if this is the kind of results I should expect either using software or hardware down converting options? But I swear I've used an AJA Kona card before with perfect results, but sadly it's out of my price range right now.

Cineform

2009-03-01T17:08:00.004-06:00

A commenter posted about Cineform coming out with a Mac version of their Neo Scene app that'll convert AVCHD to either a Cineform .MOV clip or ProRes 422. I haven't used it yet, but they have a free trial download so I'm going to give this a try this week and report back my findings. I'm very interested to see the file size differences between Cineform .mov clips and ProRes.

Here's the link if you want to try it out yourself: Neo Scene.

Slow Motion via Cinema Tools

2009-03-01T08:14:00.005-06:00

So I have a link below that shows the results of using a 60p clip in FCP and dropping it in to a
29.97 timeline and applying a 50% slow mo. I'm now giving Cinema Tools a try and the results are pretty outstanding. It's an incredibly simple process. You simply open the clip you want to conform with Cinema Tools, select Conform and it'll ask you what data rate you want to change the clip to. I simply selected 29.97 and not even a second later it was done. I'm not sure if my Mac Pro Quad 3.0 had something to do with this speed, but if it does I can only imagine an octocore would be done before you even started.

Here are the results. I'm going to get a lot of use out of these ducks. They don't require model releases.

WARNING - When you select a clip and drop it in to Cinema Tools and you conform it - it rewrites that clip! So unless that's what you want to happen, make a copy of the files you intend to conform first, then proceed with Cinema Tools.

Drive Failures

2009-02-26T19:44:00.002-06:00

I had some bad luck the past couple of days. I'm losing the drive in my Macbook Pro (I can mount it via Firewire target mode and copy data for 10 minutes before it starts clicking and freezing up the operating system) and my external back up drive will no longer mount (I can hear it spinning, but it is not recognized by Disk Utility). So between an edit session this week and copying data over in the evenings, I haven't had much of a chance to do much with my camera.

I'm afraid to be around my Mac Pro because I might kill the RAID I just installed on it. If you want to avoid losing a drive, stay away from me for a while!

More Coming Soon, Promise

2009-02-24T09:35:00.002-06:00

I'm currently in an edit that's taking a lot of time away from experimenting with my HMC150. It's sad to think I'd rather be tinkering with this camera when I'm actually being paid to sit here and edit. So, sadly, I'll make some money for a few more days then I'll get back to this camera.

I have some questions still about the workflow with this camera. For now I'm sticking with ProRes 422 and it's several times larger file size. But I know I'm going to use this camera for clients who will ultimately only want to edit in SD in the short term. So how am I going to transfer, with TC, from AVCHD to DVCAM? For now the only solution seems to be to take my ProRes 422 clips and drop them in to Compressor, drop a DVCAM droplet on there and let it go to town.

But secretly I'm hoping there's another solution - like going directly from AVCHD to DVCAM. And the kicker is to keep and maintain TC. So Toast seems out for that. And digitizing via the HDMI in to a Blackmagic Intensity card seems out as well since TC is not passed along the HDMI cable. We'll see.

Mac Marginalization

2009-02-22T09:22:00.004-06:00

Panasonic just released a firmware update for the HMC150. The firmware doesn't look critical, but it would be nice to be able to upgrade. Why can't I? Because in order to install the firmware you must have a Windows machine. Apparently this has been a standard practice for a while with Panasonic (with the HVX cameras you must have a Windows machine to update as well).

There's a thread over at DVXuser.come about this. I know there are answers like Boot Camp or virtualization, but that's asking Mac users to drop some coin on Windows for something as simple as firmware updates. But actually it's not just the updates - Panasonic offers other software, like a handy AVCHD to DVCPRO HD utility but it's only for Windows users as well. I have no idea what the percentage breakdown of Windows to Mac users is for Panasonic, but it has to look more Mac friendly than the general population. I can't think of a production company that I've either worked at, or know people who've worked at, that used a Panasonic camera and then edited on a Windows machine. It has always been Final Cut Pro or Avid (on the Mac). That's just my perspective. I know there are plenty of Windows users that edit this stuff. But the Mac numbers have to be high enough to justify writing firmware updates for us, right?

AV Sync Problems with Toast?

2009-02-20T07:58:00.004-06:00

Over on the DVX Users board there is a poster who's having problems with his audio going out of sync with AVCHD clips he's transcoding with Toast 10. Since the clips I've been testing with Toast are not sound critical, I have not seen this problem. However Roxio has acknowledged there's a problem:

"As stated previously, this is a known issue as far as audio/video sync when using AVCHD files. We are currently researching a solution and ask that you periodically check for software updates. Thank you."

Here's the link to the thread. So it seems there's even more reason to just stay inside FCP and use Log and Transfer for the time being. If you have plenty of space, Pro Res 422 seems to be the way to go.

Slow Motion (60P to 29.97)

2009-02-18T11:37:00.006-06:00

So the HMC150 can shoot 60p (frames per second). When you play this back at 100% it looks almost hyper-real. But if you drop it in to a standard HD 29.97 timeline and reduce the speed 50% you can get some incredible slow-mo. I have read that some people first properly conform their 60p footage to 29.97 or 24p (using Cinema Tools), but clearly the quality is good enough to get away with merely using FCP to do the slow motion for you.

In time I'll do a proper Cinema Tools test, but for now, here's a quick and dirty 50% slow mo using FCP: slow mo clip. I'm just getting down how to make these HD clips "web friendly", so the quality probably isn't quite as high as I'd like. But you should get the point.

Back from Charleston

2009-02-18T06:53:00.002-06:00

I just returned from a quick trip to Charleston where I shot some more footage. I didn't log the camera around nearly as much as I thought I would, but honestly it's been a long time since I've had to shoot for hours each day. I found myself using my iPhone more thanks to a great app called Toy Camera that turns your photos in to Holga-like photos. You can check those photos out at my Flickr page.

I promise I'll have more updates soon and some sample footage, so please check back.

No Timecode?

2009-02-16T08:14:00.003-06:00

So a quirk if you decide you want to use Toast to convert your AVCHD to DVCPRO HD - you lose your timecode. All clips that were converted using Toast started at the TC mark of 0:00. Thankfully clips brought in via FCP's Log and Transfer retain their original TC.

Transcoding Fun

2009-02-10T13:41:00.010-06:00

I just installed Toast 10 and tested to see how long it takes to convert AVCHD to DVCPRO HD. The answer is about real time, or a little over 8 minutes for 8 minutes of footage. The file size was surprising - a :17 clip was 148.9 MB in ProRes, while the same clip in DVCPRO HD ballooned to over 236.2 mb.

At first glance in Quicktime Pro, there was substantial difference in color between the two as well:

In this screen grab you'll see the same frame with the QT window in the background being ProRes and the foreground being DVCPRO HD. There is noticeably less color in the DVCPRO HD. But when you export still frames from each of these clips, something surprising (to me) occurs:

The JPEG above shows the two clips merged together. On the left is DVCPRO HD, and on the right is ProRes. There's no noticeable difference to me other than the frame size diffence which shows the most in the lower center of the image where the trustle's support structure doesn't quite line up. In Final Cut Pro you also do not see a noticeable difference. The scopes do reflect a minor change when you toggle between them.

So I'm puzzled as to why these codecs look so different in QuickTime and yet look almost identical when used inside FCP. Ignoring the file size difference for a moment, DVCPRO HD seems like a possible winner. My assumption is it would be less tasking on my system than ProRes 422, however I cannot ignore the file size difference. For whatever reason DVCPRO HD comes out as the bigger file when using Toast 10 to export.

Perhaps I'm missing something here?

ProRes 422

2009-02-09T16:58:00.004-06:00

So you have two options when you transcode AVCHD in Final Cut Pro's Log and Transfer - convert it to AIC (Apple Intermediate) or ProRes 422 (and not of the HQ variety). I chose ProRes. So how big do the files get after transcode? About 5 times as big! So it looks like for every 16 GB card you shoot, you're looking at close to 80 GB in ProRes QTs on your drives. Ouch. Thankfully my system - a Mac Pro Quad 3 - can chunk through these files in about 50% realtime (i.e. - 8 minutes of footage takes about 4 minutes to transcode. That beats digitizing!)

I want to experiment with transcoding to DVCPRO HD next. It looks like I'll have to use Toast to do this. Thankfully Toast 10 came from Amazon today!

A HMC150 Link

2009-02-09T16:43:00.000-06:00

FYI: Here’s Panasonic’s page on the HMC150: linky

An introduction

2009-02-09T16:37:00.000-06:00

I just recently decided to start shooting again, and instead of purchasing a DVCPRO HD camera (a format I have a lot of experience with), I decided on the Panasonic HMC150 which shoots AVCHD (a format I’ve never used). I love Panasonic cameras. I love the “mojo” as some people call it… the look they produce. The price was right for me and the fact that these cameras shoot to cheap SDHC cards really won me over. However I was hesitant with the new (to me) codec and how it would play with Final Cut Pro. So this blog will be my attempt at documenting my experiences with the camera, both in the field and in editing.

I’ll post some samples soon, so please check back.